New OSU research (from the School of Communication) finds evidence that the use of
jargon is a turn-off.
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"Given the long, tortuous history on this issue, we might pause to ask whether some articles and meetings are really going to get at the core problem. And we might ask whether we even have the core problem correctly defined. Our reading problem and how we approach it is broadly illustrative of a confusion that often pervades education reform efforts: We conflate problems of education politics with problems of educational craft."
-Andrew Rotherham, in an
op-ed
arguing that “the problem isn’t that we don’t know how to teach reading – it's politics”
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The number of students in Ohio receiving free or reduced-price
school lunches
. That comes out to 717,740 children, which is around 2,400 more children served than last year, according to Ohio Department of Education data.
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Children’s services
. The Ohio Department of Job and Family Services will invest $1 million in emergency funds for struggling county children’s services agencies, many of whom have asked for help due to increasing caseloads and staff turnover. The number of children in the custody of county agencies on a given day has risen by 30% in a decade. Cleveland.com
offers
other staggering, important-to-be-aware-of figures.
New childhood coalition/campaign
. This week, Groundwork Ohio announced a new campaign (“Ready, Set, Soar”) bringing together partners across the state to raise awareness about the importance of the early years. You can read more about the coalition’s priorities
here
.
School start times.
Ohio Sen. Sandra Williams proposed a
bill
last fall that would prohibit any public school from starting before 8:30 a.m. The bill was recently discussed by the Senate Education Committee and while it probably faces long odds of passing, it offers a good example of the various factors influencing the policy making process. Take this excerpt (from Gongwer) as a starting point: “Chair
Sen. Peggy Lehner
(R-Kettering) said the study cited by the sponsor in support of the bill is well known but questioned how ‘robust’ research on the topic has been.
Sen. Williams said multiple studies point to benefits from starting school later, adding that she would provide additional research to the committee for review.” First, kudos to the senators for discussing the robustness of research. However, just as prominent in the discussion were topics including: local control, logistics for transportation planning, and outsized impact on particular regions of the state (farming areas). Research
can
make an impact on influencing policy, but it is typically far from sufficient. (Here’s a similar - albeit depressing -
read
about the politics of reading programs.)
School lunches.
NPR
explains how the Trump administration’s pending rule changes to SNAP could impact school lunch eligibility. 717,740 children in
Ohio
currently rely on taxpayer-funded free or reduced-price school lunches.
Ohio school funding.
Columnist Thomas Suddes
outlines
Ohio’s two-decades-long school funding battle, stating that Ohio’s governors and legislators haven’t been very good at reforming K-12 school funding. (To be fair – many states
struggle
to figure this out.) But he’s right that the current voucher legislative argument is a symptom of a much larger funding issue. Ohio has historically funded private school vouchers and public charter schools via a deduction/pass through from public school districts – a method that pits these groups against one another and treats every child as a monetary “loss” to the district’s bottom line. Most folks would agree that schools should be funded directly, even if there is much disagreement about vouchers or charters as policy mechanisms themselves.
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Here’s an interesting
read
on home visits as a central tenet of the Head Start program. Home visits are shown to have positive effects, but not all teachers feel comfortable doing them.
The CEO of the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) pens an
excellent post
on her organization’s efforts to spotlight early childhood educators’ wages and to gauge public opinion on this issue – and what it will take to drive progress. Hint: perception isn’t the problem. Voters “value their role at the same level they value other everyday heroes such as nurses and firefighters. They reject the notion that early childhood educators are babysitters or that they have easy jobs, and they understand the relationship between well-educated, well-paid early childhood educators and the quality of an early childhood learning environment.”
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An important lesson
here
from Idaho: Just because you
build
it, doesn’t mean they will necessarily
come
. Two years ago, the state launched a free app aimed at pre-kindergarten children to help prepare them for school, but fewer than a tenth of preschoolers are using the program (and those who are, aren’t using it very often). It’s also a good reminder of the importance of: publicity, marketing, data collection, and evaluation of how an initiative is working. Offering a program is only one piece of the puzzle.
Seattle Public Schools
has established
a department focused on the reading achievement of black boys; increasing the number of Black teachers is part of the district’s plan.
Every so often, a story or headline stops a person in her tracks with the interjecting thought - “the world really should not be this way.” This is one of those. A group of California students
just won a lawsuit
after suing the state because schools failed to teach them how to read. $53 million
will be awarded
to the state’s lowest performing schools to provide more resources.
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A new
study
from the School of Music, published in
Substance Use and Misuse,
found that
physical abuse of children (especially as toddlers or teens) in high-risk homes dramatically increases the odds that adolescent experimentation with cigarettes will lead to a heavy smoking habit as adults. Lead author
Susan Yoon
said, “the results suggest efforts to prevent smoking by teens at risk of maltreatment – and especially children experiencing physical abuse and neglect – should start before age 12.” Yoon also added that substance abuse research often doesn't take cigarette smoking into consideration despite the damaging health outcomes.
A new study from CALDER (the national Center for the Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research) - covered
here
by
Education Week
– finds that a child’s achievement in third grade is larger predictive of later schooling success. This discouraging – albeit not surprising - conclusion adds urgency to what takes place in the early grades (and the early years of a child’s life).
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This edition written by: Jamie Davies O'Leary, Associate Director of Policy and Caitlin Lennon, Special Projects Assistant
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Follow us on Twitter @CraneCenterOSU
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