Online Art School

I got an email this week from a California mother who was happy that her child would be a attending St. Mary’s College of Maryland, a wonderful public liberal arts college, in the fall.

Her husband, however, remained skeptical. He worried that his daughter would be jeopardizing her chances of going to graduate school if she went to an obscure liberal arts school. He thought shed have a better shot at attending graduate school if she earned her bachelors degree from a large state university in California or elsewhere.

Here’s my answer to that:  Nonsense.

Students who attend liberal arts colleges enjoy many advantages that students at large public institutions often dont.

At liberal arts colleges, there is a much greater chance for undergraduate research. Classes are routinely small. Instead of 200 or 300 in Calculus II, you may have 15 or 20 students. Students have more opportunity to develop bonds with professors because the learning is in small settings and not lecture halls. And remember, its the professors who are writing those graduate school recommendations. My son, who is a sophomore who intends to major in math and minor in physics at Beloit College, is certainly experiencing the benefits of connecting with his professors.

Okay, you might be wondering, but where are your facts to back up your claims?

To answer the email from the mom, I tracked down a report produced by the National Science Foundation that examined where scientists and engineers, who had earned PhD’s, had obtained their undergraduate degrees. The majority of schools in the top 50 list of PhD-producing schools were liberal arts colleges.

When the NSF  looked at what schools were producing the most PhD’s, per 100 undergraduate degrees granted, only three public institutions made the list – University of California-Berkeley, William and Mary College and New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.

Without further ado, here are the top 50 schools where graduates ultimately received a PhD in science or engineering:

1. Cal Tech
2. Harvey Mudd College
3. MIT
4. Reed College
5. Swarthmore College
6. Carleton College
7. University of Chicago
8. Grinnell College
9. Rice University
10. Princeton University
11. Harvard  University
12. Bryn Mawr College
13. Haverford College
14. Pomona College
15. New Mexico Institute of Mining & Technology
16. Williams College
17. Yale Univeristy
18. Oberlin College
19. Stanford University
20. Johns Hopkins University
21. Kalamazoo College
22. Cornell University
23. Case Western Reserve
24. Washington College
25. Brown University
26. Wesleyan University
27. Carnegie Mellon University
28. Macalester College
29. Amherst College
30. Duke University
31. Beloit College (My sons school.)
32. Bowdoin Collge
33. Wellesley College
34. Ressenlaer Polytechnic Institute
35. Earlham College
36. Franklin and Marshall College
37. Lawrence University
38. University of Rochester
39. University of California-Berkeley
40. Dartmouth College
41. Occidental College
42. Hendrix College
43. Vassar College
44. Trinity University
45. College of William and Mary
46. St. John College
47. Bates College
48. Whitman College
49. Brandeis University
50. Hampshire College

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National Parental Involvement Day seems kind of like Mothers Day.  I mean, we should show Mom we love her everyday, right?  But, Im not complaining that weve set aside a day to recognize the importance  - of both.

It is no secret that parental involvement plays a large role in the academic success of our children.  According to the vast amount of research out there, in the early years, parental involvement has a significant impact on children’s cognitive development and literacy and number skills.  Furthermore, parental involvement in a child’s schooling for a child between the ages of 7 and 16 is a more powerful force than family background, size of family and level of parental education.

Some school districts are recognizing how important the role of the parent is, and are even including parental involvement in their metrics to measure school effectiveness.  For example, New York City schools will soon be rated based on how well they work with parents.  This was  announced a few weeks ago as NYC schools embark upon an overhaul of how they engage with families.

As a former teacher, I can tell you first hand that parental involvement is not only important but it is essential to student success.  Its more than showing up for conferences and plays and helping with homework.  Its more about demonstrating to our children that learning is not confined to the classroom.  Its about supporting the learning that happens in the classroom in real and relevant ways.  Most teachers will agree with that statement.  I believe that the vast majority of parents truly want to help their kids.  However ,there are a many real reasons why some arent as connected to the school as they should be (i.e., time, language barriers, job constraints, etc.).  Overcoming the obstacles is a two-way street.  Parents need to reach out to teachers, and teachers need to make sure that parents have the resources they need to be involved.  Just as one size does not fit all with our students, the same applies to parents.  With National Parental Involvement Day on the horizon (November 17), maybe it is a good time for all of us to find one thing that we can do to improve parental involvement within our educational organization.  Maybe, if everyone does one thing to make a difference, we will.  What do we have to lose.  well, except the academic success of our kids?

If parental involvement is a priority at your school or organization, tell us how youre addressing it.  Wed love to hear from you.

Schoodoodle.com carries a wide selection of resources designed to help parents support the learning process at home.  Browse our Parental Involvementresources, as well as resources for home school kids, early childhood learning materials, and learning games for kids.

This is a doozy of a critique of Teach for America, and I suspect that it will generate a lot of debate about the elite teacher recruitment program.

Former TFA teacher and recruiter Gary Rubinstein writes about losing his respect for the movement that he joined 20 years to work in schools that desperately needed teachers. His long posting is not easily distilled, so try to read the full piece before commenting.

Rubinstein is writing about more than TFA. He is writing about a willingness to put untrained teachers whether TFA or not   in the neediest schools with the neediest students. He writes about the role of TFA alums in a new school reform movement that emphasizes threats of school closings and teacher firings.  These leaders celebrate school closings rather than see them as their own failures to help them.  These leaders deny any proof that their reforms are failing and instead continue to use P.R. to inflate their own claims of success.

Here is an excerpt of his blog posting, but again, read it all before commenting:

When I joined TFA twenty years ago, I did it because I believed that poor kids deserved to have someone like me helping battle education inequity in this country. At the time, there were massive teacher shortages in high need areas. The 1990 corps had 500 members and the 1991 corps had 750 members, with a third of us going to Houston. I was one of those Houston corps members, the first group to ever go to Houston. At the time, we knew that we weren’t going to be great teachers. It was unrealistic to believe otherwise. But we also knew that the jobs we were taking were jobs that nobody else wanted.  The motto for TFA back then could have been ‘Hey, we’re better than nothing.’

And we got out butts kicked. As tough as this was, we partly expected it. That was what we signed up for.

Most of the people I knew left after their second year. They went to law school or other graduate programs. Even if they had a bad first year and a much better second year, they could feel they did their part in the fight to help kids. If many of those kids really were going to have rotating subs, we could be sure that we were doing less damage than good.

I’m glad I ‘did’ TFA. Twenty years ago they filled a need.

Over the next twenty years, TFA did a lot of growing, but not a lot of evolving. They replicated their institutes and increased their regions. The 2011 corps is nearly 6,000, twelve times as big as the cohorts from the early 90s. Unfortunately, the landscape in education has changed a lot in the past twenty years. Instead of facing teacher shortages, we have teacher surpluses. There are regions where experienced teachers are being laid off to make room for incoming TFA corps members because the district has signed a contract with TFA, promising to hire their new people. In situations like this, it is hard to say with confidence that these under trained new teachers are really doing less harm than good.

Even through most of this, up until about three years ago, I still supported TFA and encouraged people to apply to it. But right now, I don’t.

Twenty years ago TFA was, to steal an expression from the late great Douglas Adams — mostly harmless. Then about ten years ago they became potentially harmful.  Now, in my opinion, they have become mostly harmful.

Glencoe High School’s Crimson Times’ staff won’t take no for an answer.

Last year, with two journalism classes on the chopping block because of low turnout, the staff went to English classes, encouraging students to enroll in journalism. About 40 students signed up for the elective class, and the newspaper doubled its staff. Then, when the school cut the paper’s budget, the staff opted to publish The Times online.

Then, at the end of the school year, the students learned of yet another cut. The Hillsboro School Board approved budget reductions that eliminated the paper’s adviser’s $5,000 stipend. The adviser, Juanita Reiter, spends time after school and during lunch to help the students produce the paper. 

They’ve been working with the superintendent to reinstate part of the stipend. And in less than four weeks, students have sold more $2,300 in ads.

“That is $600 more than we had, in our wildest dreams planned to raise, $1,900 more than we have ever raised in one cycle before and about one-third of what we need to pay off (Reiter’s) stipend,” said Nicole Kulick, the paper’s news editor and marketing manager. “When we calculated how much we’d made, our entire leadership team went running down the halls to tell every one of the teachers and staff members who had helped us make all that money.”

Today, using money they raised themselves, they released their first issue of the year. Now, it’s back to the mat. They have nearly $3,000 more to raise.

For the past 10 years, Kim England has sent her “Geography of Cities” class of 150 students to the Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI), located right past Husky Stadium and across the Montlake Bridge — just blocks away from campus.

The museum, England said, tells a “people’s history,” combining art, technology, industry and commerce with the personal narratives of those in Seattle’s past.

In the class, which studies the historical development of cities, MOHAI has provided an ideal visual history to accompany the concepts she teaches.

But beginning next year, England’s students will have to travel just a bit farther to make the visit: In November 2012, MOHAI will relocate to a new location in South Lake Union. The move is the first ever for the museum in its 59-year history; its current building in Montlake is being demolished for SR520 road expansion.

“It’s a bit of a bummer from the perspective of sending the students across the bridge [to visit], but it’s not like it’s moving to Canada,” England said.

In the spirit of the move, an exhibit titled “MOHAI Moves History” is currently featured at the museum, which tells the six-decade story of the museum’s past and includes information about the new location.

“It recounts the history of the building and the institutions that use it — like the King County Historical Society and Seattle Historical Society — as they move out of that building,” MOHAI art historian Paul Dorpat said.

Dorpat is one of the art historians of another currently featured exhibit titled “Now & Then,” which is one of the last exhibits in the Montlake building.

This exhibit uses “repeat photography” to compare the same point of view of historical images with contemporary photos and visually illustrates changes in Seattle’s past.

Despite the inevitable move, Dorpat said those at MOHAI are optimistic about the potential for more foot traffic at its new location.

“I think [those at the museum] are happy about moving to a new location which is more centrally located,” he said. “I think maybe they think they’ll get more people coming to the museum at the south end of the lake.”

Some popular attractions of the museum include the pink “Toe Truck,” a Rainier Brewery commercial beer-man suit, and the Alki Landing Diorama, depicting settlers from 1851 first arriving at Alki.

But its resources extend well beyond the typical collections of photographs and historical artifacts — MOHAI also features off-site summer walking tours and short video segments called “MOHAI Minutes” that cover local spots like the Admiral Theatre in West Seattle and Schmitz Park near Alki. “MOHAI Minutes” even has its own YouTube channel.

The museum also shows movies in the basement and has regular speakers, like bestselling author Steve Berry, who is scheduled to lead a writer’s workshop August 6.

“Those are things that will sustain them,” England said.

As a student in England’s class last year, Junior Tiffany Oh visited MOHAI for the very first time. Before her visit, Oh said that she was somewhat unfamiliar with the museum.

Yet on that visit she particularly remembers being wowed by the “Boomtown” exhibit, a town of buildings displaying facets of Seattle’s history beginning from the end of the 19th century. She also retained some interesting tidbits about Seattle’s history, like learning the names of the first African American and Chinese American who lived in Seattle.

“There are a lot of things in Seattle’s past that I didn’t know about before,” she said. “It’s an important history museum, stuff you don’t get to see at [places like] the Pacific Science Center and the EMP.”

Experiences like Oh’s are what England hopes for when she assigns her students field assignments for the course, like visiting MOHAI.

“I want them to come away thinking that the city is not something in terms of a built environment, … the city is not something that is neutral,” England said. “Most of the time, there are reasons why some things in the city look the way they do, why some buildings look the way they do. By having them go do this they get a sense of how it looked previously. I’m trying to give them different ways of thinking about a city.”

Senior Taylor Youtsler also visited MOHAI as a part of England’s class and, to his surprise, found the museum enlightening.

“I thought I knew most of the history of Washington and Seattle, but when I went in there it was kind of amazing the fact that I didn’t even know half of what I should have and I was living here the whole time,” he said. “Everyone [who visits] is going to learn a whole lot, that’s a given. Just by going in there, it’s a good experience.”