QUOTE OF THE MONTH

Florida State Senator Stephen Wise, Chairman of the
Senate Appropriations Committee for K–12Education

LESS IS MORE—THE NEW MATH IN FLORIDA

Florida is changing its approach to math instruction, covering fewer skills with greater depth and reinforcement. Math instruction will center on three “big ideas” each year through eighth grade. For example, one of the big ideas for seventh graders is “to develop an understanding of and use formulas to determine surface areas and volumes of three-dimensional shapes.” Publishers are scrambling to customize their textbooks to meet these new standards.

COMMON-CORE STANDARDS WATCH

The Core Knowledge Foundation, which criticized an early version of common-core standards for putting too much emphasis on academic skills and too little on content, has decided to align its central curricular sequence to the revised standards—and make it available for free. Core Knowledge’s move appears to be the first of what observers anticipate will be many bids by a variety of groups and businesses to adapt or distribute curriculum materials for the common-core academic standards that 48 states have agreed to support.

Beginning in the 2010–2011 school year, Kentucky students in grades K–12 will be instructed in the new common-core standards for reading and math. Kentucky is the first state to activate its commitment to the national standards.

NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND—LEFT BEHIND?

The No Child Left Behind Act was signed into law eight years ago. The Obama Administration is now poised to leave much of the law behind—proposing to shift from an emphasis on testing to an emphasis on career or college preparation. The new goal is to raise academic standards across the country by requiring states to certify that their benchmarks for reading and mathematics put students on track for college or a career. A state could show that its benchmarks meet the criterion in two ways: by adopting the common-core national standards or by certifying, in a process to be developed with universities, that their existing standards are high enough. Only those states demonstrating their compliance with these requisites would be eligible for the $14 billion Title 1 funding for impoverished students.

STIMULUS MONEY AT WORK

According to reports that states and school districts filed with the U.S. Department of Education in the last quarter of 2009, the education portion of the federal economic stimulus program paid for 3,329,551 school-related jobs, such as teachers, librarians, and counselors. Not surprisingly, the greatest number of education jobs were created or saved in the most populous states: California, Florida, and New York.

LAUNCHING INTO THE iPAD

Publishers Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Kaplan Publishing, McGraw-Hill Education, and Pearson have signed deals to be among the first to port their textbooks over to Apple’s new tablet.

Heading to the iPad, as well as the iPhone and the iPod Touch, will be textbooks, study guides, and test-prep materials. The agreements were made with ScrollMotion, a company that works with publishers to digitize their books for the mobile market.

FROM THE FIELD

In a pilot program announced at FETC 2010, twelve schools in the Indianapolis Public Schools will replace traditional social studies textbooks with digital content from Discovery Education.

A similar initiative is being undertaken in Charleston, West Virginia, where high school students will be piloting online social studies textbooks.

AU REVOIR, MES ENFANTS

Thousands of public schools have stopped teaching foreign languages such as French, German, Italian, and Russian. While Spanish is still popular, there is a growing trend in all parts of the U.S. to offer Chinese language instruction to American students. The Chinese government is supporting this trend by sending teachers from China to schools all over the world—and paying part of their salaries. Rough estimates from the Center for Applied Linguistics suggest that 1,600 American public schools are now teaching Chinese, up from 300 or so a decade ago. And the number is growing exponentially.