Friday News Roundup

It’s Friday. Time for the News Roundup.

Generation Meh: Students Give Schools Middling Marks, Gallup Poll Finds (The 74)

What’s that old saying? “The customers never wrong?” Well, if that is true, then the American public education system is nothing more than mediocre to a majority of students inside schools right now.

According to The 74 online,

“In a new Gallup poll, middle and high schoolers handed out just-okay marks to their own schools, assigning them a B-minus for average performance. About two-thirds of those surveyed granted their local school a grade of A (22 percent) or B (44 percent), while 34 percent rated them a C, D, or F as the 2022-23 school year came to a close.”

“It’s a report card that offers unmistakable bright spots, but also lots of areas for concern as school systems pull further away from the once-in-a-lifetime tumult imposed by COVID-19 and prolonged exposure to online learning. While schools received middling grades across 11 categories related to academics and school climate – the highest grade was a B, the lowest a C-plus – the poll showed that engagement and enthusiasm in school is lagging. Certain sub-groups, including older students and African-Americans, were also relatively less sanguine about their own experiences in school.”

Michigan Teens, Schooled in an Old Museum Without Classrooms, Eclipse Status Quo (The 74)

This week The 74 online reported that,

“Eleventh grader Genesis Villafane has two words to describe her Michigan high school: ‘harmonious pandemonium.’”

“At the Grand Rapids Public Museum School in the Grand Rapids Public Schools district, Genesis and her peers experience a constant juxtaposition of creativity and commotion because of their school’s non-traditional approach of embedding students – literally – in the community and injecting the community into learning.”

Why haven’t more districts partnered with community resources, like museums, to create learning organizations for young learners? I know why. It’s because school districts don’t like to share. They like to own.

How I Made ChatGPT a Learning Partner for My Students (EducationWeek)

You’ve read about stories of teachers, schools, and districts banning ChatGPT, seeing it as a threat to the way things have always been done in our classrooms.

EducationWeek online reported this week a story about Ronak Shah, a 7^th grade science teacher from Indianapolis. Shah writes,

“Even though ChatGPT brings with it a host of potential problems, most of us in schools are beginning to accept that artificial intelligence tools are coming, and we are weighing the best ways to respond. ‘What will stop kids from plagiarizing?’ ‘How do we deal with misinformation?’ ‘How will we know what students actually know?’

“I’ve taught middle school science for 11 years and lately I’ve heard a lot of teachers express fears about this new technology. It’s hard for most of us to understand what’s under the hood of AI. Maybe that’s part of why some education leaders have responded defensively, with schools and district blocking access to OpenAI’s chatbot from the schools’ networks and devices – though New York City schools dropped its ban last month.”

“I can understand the rationale for blocking: by shielding our classrooms from generative AI, we can keep teaching as we always have. But I prefer a different approach. When my students encounter something new, I task them to play, experiment and generally learn what the new thing is and how to use it. Educators can do a lot with generative AI, even if we aren’t experts in it. Our classrooms can help set students up for success in an ever-evolving technological world.”

Now that’s the spirit that might save public education, but how many classroom teachers are like Ronak Shah?

In This School District’s ‘Test Kitchen,’ Teens Go Beyond the Classroom to Build Drones, Research Cancer, and Try Out Careers (The 74)

This week The 74 online reported on a Kansas high school that encourages young learners to dip their toes in adult professions like engineering, medicine, and entrepreneurship. Reporter Greg Toppo writes,

“Across America most mornings, it’s a safe bet that the typical high school student is sitting in a classroom, listening to a teacher talk.”

“But on a recent Tuesday, [senior] Cara Mitchell was on her feet, running a class herself. Actually, she was managing a project, taking a small group of classmates through the paces of making a 3-D printed desk name plate.”

“Not exactly a glamorous assignment, she’ll admit. But the key was to give students practice with digital tools they’ll need to build much larger projects down the line, including an airplane-like drone that takes off and lands vertically.”

Here my question: Why aren’t most high schools offering these types of learning experiences for their students? It’s perplexing.

Instead, high schools in this country are practicing what they practiced 50 years ago, for the most part.

Disappointing.

After Historic Declines in Math Scores, Schools Look to Bolster Summer Programs to Help Kids Catch Up (The 74)

This week The 74 online reported a story that focused on schools districts and their summer offerings designed to help students catch up on their mathematical abilities. The story reads,

“School districts around the country, reeling from dramatic drops in fourth- and eighth-grade math scores on the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress, hope to recoup at least some of what’s been lost through summer programs.”

“Flush with federal dollars, new and robust offerings have been open to a wide swath of students starting in the summer of 2021 and will continue in many districts this year. But the trend could stop as that pandemic relief money runs out.”

This is a vicious cycle of public school system dysfunction that hurts kids. First, test scores go down. Second, kids are assigned summer school in order to “catch up.” Third, money runs out. Fourth, the intervention offered is stopped. And kids suffer.

This happens over and over again in our public schools.

Instead, why don’t we adopt a anytime, anywhere learning model, where everyone is learning all the time – and no one knows the difference between summer school and the rest of the year?

Have a great weekend. SVB