The Art Of Going To The Movies
What do you get when you cross teenage angst with an elite Manhattan private school? Answer: The Art of Getting By.
The movie starring Emma Roberts, Julias less illustrious though still beautiful niece, hasnt exactly received rave reviews. But the reviews havent been all bad either. The New York Times gives it a firm ehh, OK. In other words, it has its moments, but dont write home about it.
The movies been out just long enough to have audiences talking about it, but theyre not exactly giving it great reviews either. If theyre talking, thats good.
The exciting thing about The Art Of Getting By is that it actually is set in New York and features main characters who are relatable teens. They arent extraordinary people, by any means, but what teenager is? The story has some believable moments even if the characters dont exactly say or do anything extraordinarily witty.
You can classify it as a dramedy, or a somewhat-geeky-romantic-comedy. However, dont expect Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan performances.
Still, you have to have some respect for a teenage boy who reads Camus (do most teenage boys even know who mid-20th century existentialist was?).
The Art Of Getting By is rated PG-13 for language and sexual situations (after all, we are talking about teenagers). Your high school sons and daughters may like it, and could possibly relate to the characters. But I wont make that promise for you.
Why Hate TFA?
I like Teach for America (TFA). I like the concept. I like the TFA alumni I’ve met. Why would someone object to this nation’s brightest college graduates working 70+ hours a week for a minimum of two years teaching in some of the worst schools in the country?
According to the education establishment, you’d think that TFA was akin to suggesting that Larry the Cable Guy be allowed to perform brain surgery at the Mayo Clinic.
Give me a break.
The Columbus Dispatch features an op-ed from another member of the education establishment who decries letting these untrained charlatans into the classroom.
Imagine that Gov. John Kasich and Ohio legislators take on a real problem: the difficulty Medicare patients have in finding physicians who will treat them. To fix it, they pass and Kasich signs the Ohio Medicare Fair Practice Act, after pro forma hearings and over the objections of the medical schools and professional associations. This new law allows college graduates to obtain a special license to practice medicine following completion of a five-week course. These bright young people, full of energy and idealism, will practice only a few years before migrating to less-onerous and more-lucrative careers.
Think this is far-fetched? Well, the Republican-controlled Ohio Senate, with the help of 10 Democrats, passed a bill requiring the Ohio Department of Education to issue a resident-educator license based solely on a bachelor’s degree and five weeks of training. This license will be available to a very select few: those recruited by the much-hyped Teach for America program, another ill-conceived hope for saving inner-city public-school students.
Teach for America, founded in 1989, has a noble mission. It tries to address the educational inequalities of children in low-income schools by recruiting high-achieving college students, who aren’t prepared professionally as classroom teachers. But after only five weeks of summer training, they qualify. They must agree to teach for a minimum of two years in urban schools, sort of like Peace Corps’ volunteers in Third World countries. But in this case, Ohio is considered the destitute land.
But all is not well with this approach. Kevin R. Kelly, dean of the School Of Education and Allied Professions at the University of Dayton, reviewed the research that purports to support the superiority of TFA teachers. And in February, he testified before the Ohio House Education Committee.
Kelly told the committee that TFA teachers are as challenged during their first two years in the classroom as are regularly prepared teachers and that the wunderkinds’ students overall had worse test results than did those of the professionally certified teachers. After two years, TFA teachers’ students lagged in reading achievement but did better on math. But most significantly, he found that by their third year, 80 percent of TFA teachers left their schools.
Classroom teaching is not for amateurs; it’s not an easy adjustment even for pros and certainly not for those who aren’t well prepared professionally. Altruistic motivation is good but it isn’t enough, as those TFA teachers who fled their classrooms can testify, because the reality of managing groups of challenged students can be overpowering.
Our children deserve and need professionally prepared teachers who are committed for the long haul, who view teaching as a career and who are willing to meet all standards of their profession.
For those who see Teach For America as an economic bargain, Kelly cautions that it isn’t -about 33 percent of their costs are paid with federal, state and local funds and the rest by tax-subsidized foundations.
Teach for America, like other “solutions” before it, will run its course, leaving our elected officials with the same problems they sought to solve. This won’t change until lawmakers, governors – all of us – view public schools not as factories that are expected to produce students who test well and meet artificially contrived standards, but as places where future citizens are taught well despite the limitations of their life circumstances. And that requires teachers who are both professionally prepared and committed.
A few thoughts:
- I haven’t heard anyone say that TFA is the solution to repair our under-performing education system. It is one tool in the tool box. Apparently it’s a tool that scares the daylights out of our schools of education.
- I could care less how long someone decides to teach. I just want to ensure that while they’re in a classroom they do a good job. (Even though TFA requests a two year commitment, many participants stay beyond the initial two years and still others move into other education jobs at the conclusion of their two-year stint.)
- This may sound harsh, but I don’t think we can make a fair comparison between doctors and teachers. Entrance standards, training, and performance expectations (the life and death thing) are very different.
- It occurs to me that while most of us agree that the United States has the finest universities in the world, college instructors and professors are permitted to teach without ever taking a single education course. How could that be? How could we permit such amateurs into university classrooms? And perhaps even more important, how could we permit these amateurs to teach future teachers?
- Parts of Ohio are a destitute educational wasteland. We have the evidence to prove it. Even our so-called excellent schools still fall short of international standards. Pretending otherwise is not only irresponsible, it’s just plain foolish.
- We often hear about the brain drain and how our “best and brightest” students make a hasty exit from our state first chance they get. It seems to me that TFA participants are just the sort of young adults we’d like to see settle and stay in Ohio.
Here are the facts: TFA will probably have approximately 120 participants or less if they come to Ohio next year. No district is required to hire a TFA teacher. Those districts that do accept TFA participants will see these teachers placed in some of the worst performing schools in the poorest urban and rural school districts. TFA teachers will be required to participate in their district’s resident teacher program and TFA induction and training program. TFA teachers will be subject to the requirements and expectations as any new teachers.
Let’s stop the posturing and pontificating and welcome TFA.
Just a Reminder: Not All Charters Are Equal
The headline reads: Despite successes, charter school takeovers draw protests. The first two story highlights, taken directly from CNN.com (where the story was posted):
- Mastery Charter School’s Shoemaker Campus has seen big rise in students’ test scores
- Some students, parents don’t want their schools taken over by charter school operators
Neither is false. But are they related? No.
Mastery’s success – which is undeniable – has no predictive value on whether other charter school operators will have similar success. In fact, as we know from the often-cited CREDO study, the vast majority of charter schools perform no better than their neighborhood schools – and 37% perform worse. Yet in this article (as in countless others), while the author may acknowledge briefly, deep in the article, that not every charter school is successful, she certainly does not draw attention to that fact – or any specifics on charter school movement as a whole.
Instead, under the aforementioned headline and after showcasing the success of Mastery, this article tells the story of Audenried High School in South Philadelphia, which has been identified to be turned into a charter operated by Universal Companies (i.e., not Mastery).
According to the article, Audenried just reopened in 2008 after closing in 2005 because of its failing status, with students taking state standardized tests for the first time since the reopening this year. The results are not in, but the district’s predictive assessment shows 37% of students proficient or advanced in math and 38% proficient or advanced in English. Not great, to be sure, but many in the school community think that it was making great strides and that it is too soon to give up on the school as is. Frustrated students staged a walkout. Teachers and community activists have complained.
Of course, there are two issues here. The first is whether the school was given a fair shot before being identified for drastic action – which certainly seems debatable. The second is whether going charter makes sense. And in talking about that issue, we shouldn’t look at one successful charter and assume others will be like it.
As one Audenried student put it, “Just because it turns into a charter school doesn’t mean it’s going to be a good school.”
It is heartening that students understand this. It is frustrating that a reporter would suggest in an article like this, even if (offering the benefit of doubt) unwittingly, that it would be.
College of Business professor to serve as program chair for international conference
Dr. James Cochran, Bank of Ruston Endowed Research Professor and associate professor of quantitative analysis at Louisiana Tech University, will serve as the program chair for the International Conference for Health Statistics in the Pacific Islands (ICHSPI), July 5-8 in Suva, Fiji.
The conference will bring together statistical experts from around the world, local statisticians from the Pacific Islands, and local health workers who are seeking to advance their knowledge of statistics to support their work in other health disciplines. Sessions will focus heavily on statistical training and discussions by researchers about health projects in which they are currently involved and the role statistics is playing in these projects.
Cochran, who received his Ph.D. in statistics from the University of Cincinnati in 1997, joined the Louisiana Tech College of Business in 2000. He is considered a leading authority in the areas of sample based and Bayesian optimization, statistical methods, computational statistics, and statistical learning.
In addition to serving as program chair, Cochran will also work with Conference Chair Mark Griffin of the University of Queensland to organize the conference, and will present workshops on integer and nonlinear optimization, effective communication with students, and the state of health statistics initiatives in developing countries.
Conference partners include the American Statistical Association’s Friends of Australia and Health Policy Statistics Section, Statistics Without Borders, the Statistical Society of Australia, the International Chinese Statistical Association, and the Korean International Statistical Society.
ICHSPI was established in order to provide much-needed training in the field of statistics to health workers in the Pacific Islands nations and territories of Fiji, American Samoa, Cook Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, French Polynesia, Baker Island, Guam, Kiribati, Midway Islands, New Caledonia, Niue, Norfolk Island, Vanuatu, Nauru, Pitcairn Islands, Tokelau, Tonga, Tuvalu, Wake Island, Samoa, Solomon Island, Northern Mariana Island, Coral sea Islands, French Southern and Antarctic Lands, Howland Island, Clipperton Island, Johnston Atoll, Kingman Reef, Christmas Island, Palmyra Atoll, Marshall Islands, and Wallis and Futuna.
For more information, please contact Debbie Van De Velde 318-257-3741 or .
Ousted Ridgeway Middle principal, assistant shifted to other schools
Last winter, Memphis City Schools ordered an internal audit of possible wrongdoing at Ridgeway Middle School and suspended the principal and assistant principal.
While both employees were reassigned late this spring to other schools, the results of the audit have not been released.
“They have talent; they have skill. We are going to try to use them in the system however we can,” said Supt. Kriner Cash.
“People make mistakes,” Cash said, adding that he believes in “second chances.”
When pressed Wednesday, Cash said he expected to release the audit findings “probably in a week” after he finishes his review and shares it with the school board.
“Audits can take up to a half a year, easily,” he said. “That was a comprehensive audit.”
In early February, Cash said he expected the audit would be complete in several weeks.
Parent Detric Stigall withdrew his child from Ridgeway Middle because he says administrators “gave up” on the school.
“They did not communicate anything to us. I voiced my concern. I am an administrator myself for the City of Memphis. I felt they were handicapping those teachers because they weren’t sharing any information with us,” he said.
Principal Lisa Henry and assistant principal Antonio Ryan were suspended with pay in late January after a series of missteps, including glaring scheduling problems.
The district filled Henry’s job with retired administrator Lukey Williams, who served as interim principal until the position could be permanently filled.
“You can’t come in as retired principal and move a school forward,” Stigall says.
“I believe the administration gave up by not putting leadership over the school.”
When Chickasaw Middle principal Corey Williams was named Ridgeway principal this spring, he split his time between Chickasaw and Ridgeway, which also angered Stigall.
“We stayed until the end of the year, then I transferred my daughter, and let everyone know we were not coming back.”
Meanwhile, Henry has been demoted and assigned the assistant principal’s job at Treadwell Elementary.
Ryan is now assistant principal at Cypress Middle.
“If the audit had had criminal offenses, I would have taken much harsher approaches to their careers,” Cash said.
“There is nothing criminal, not in what I am reviewing.”
Focus On St. Francis Of Assisi School – Brooklyn
Queens and the Bronx are not the only boroughs in New York with a school by the name of St. Francis Of Assisi. Brooklyn, too, has a school named for the famous Catholic saint.
St. Francis of Assisi School in Brooklyn offers curricula for pre-kindergarten through eighth grade. The school opened its doors in 1909 staffed by the Sisters of Saint Joseph. It is operated by the Catholic parish by the same name and is located in the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn.
The St. Francis of Assisi School is dedicated to teaching Catholic values while instilling a lifelong love of learning in pursuit of academic excellence.
Students receive daily classes on religion so that they can learn the values and principles of the Catholic faith. Students also prepare for the sacraments in the third grade. In the seventh grade, students are invited to prepare for confirmation.
Core academic subjects make up each grades curriculum as well. In kindergarten, students begin to receive instruction on religion, math, English Language Arts, science, social studies, music, computer, art, and physical education. Spanish is taught in grades five through eight. All grades receive instruction in the core subjects.
St. Francis of Assisi also has a thriving after school program that includes homework help. Special programs include peer mediation, advisory groups, science fair, and an oratory contest. Clubs and activities available to students include dance, choir, ecology, and pal basketball.