HeadFirst Colorado: Education on the Edge fosters public discussion and debate leading to the development of local and state level policies designed to improve the performance of Colorado's public schools and the academic achievement of all students. http://ednewscolorado.org Thu, 20 Nov 2008 18:37:02 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.2 http://ednewscolorado.org/images/M_images/headfirst_rss.png http://ednewscolorado.org HeadFirst Colorado: Education on the Edge fosters public discussion and debate leading to the development of local and state level policies designed to improve the performance of Colorado's public schools and the academic achievement of all students. http://ednewscolorado.org/june-2008/headfirst-colorado-june-2008.html Here are the articles you will find in the current issue of HeadFirst Colorado: Breaking the case one student at a time (http://ednewscolorado.org/june-2008/-breaking-the-case-one-student-at-a-time.html): Manual math teacher David Singer reflects on the challenges and triumphs of Manual's year. The principal's perspective (http://ednewscolorado.org/june-2008/manual-version-2.0-year-one-principal%92s-perspective.html): Q A with Manual Principal Rob Stein. Some of his observations may surprise you. Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:34:59 +0100 http://ednewscolorado.org/june-2008/manual-version-2.0-year-one-principal%92s-perspective.html Manual High School Principal Rob Stein HeadFirst Colorado editor Alan Gottlieb sat down recently with Manual High School Principal Rob Stein to get his take on the newly reopened school’s first year. What follows is a liberally edited transcript of their conversation over lunch at M D’s Barbecue. Q: In answering questions about their freshman year at Manual, a startling number of kids said that until this year, they never had a teacher who cared about them. Stein: We’ve definitely reached kids this year who feel like they would already have dropped out otherwise. We looked at kids’ past grades. And they would be all Ds and Fs. There is this one kid, M, who has never passed a class, I don’t think. And (math teacher) David Singer talks about how M has never seen any modicum of academic success. David talked to him and said, what do you expect from school? And M said, “I expect to fail. I don’t pass school.” In his mind, that’s who he is. And he actually started to see some growth in the second half of the year, passing some classes, doing satisfactory work on some assignments. I think of it as trying to change a trajectory, and what if that intervention had happened sooner to change M’s trajectory – in sixth grade instead of ninth? Tue, 10 Jun 2008 13:55:09 +0100 http://ednewscolorado.org/june-2008/for-many-students-manual-made-a-difference.html Manual High School social studies teacher Nicole Frazier asked the ninth grade students in her advisory class to answer some questions I had posed as the school’s inaugural year drew to a close: 1) How has your experience at Manual this year been different from your experience at other schools? Please give some specific examples. 2) How has your experience at Manual this year changed your attitude about school – for better or worse? Why? Here are some of their answers, edited for clarity and conciseness: Breeanna Herrera: My experience at Manual has been a very good one from my other ones. For example, I haven’t gotten in huge trouble with the students or teachers. And my mom hasn’t come up here which is very good… The experience here at Manual changed my whole attitude about coming to school, and I’m very glad…My dad graduated from high school, and my bigger brother finished it in jail, and I was always put down about how smart I was, either by my siblings (except for my bigger brother and little sister) and my mom. I guess it had changed it for the good, because my attendance. I haven’t missed one day and my behavior is on the positive side. Last year in 8th grade I only went to school for language arts, and my friends and I barely did any work, but I passed the class. Now I wake up happy to go to school, and happy to be here at Manual. Tue, 10 Jun 2008 12:08:17 +0100 http://ednewscolorado.org/june-2008/-breaking-the-case-one-student-at-a-time.html Manual math teacher David Singer The other day I was listening to a group of students argue about a problem I had presented them with during Discourse Time, an assessment strategy used in our class where students engage in mathematical debate. The problem itself was fairly simple, though deriving a solution certainly was not. Asking if the population of Mexico could one day surpass that of the United States, the students were provided with sets of data for both countries. If you graph the data from 1900 to present it appears, in fact, possible that if the two data sets follow their patterns there could be a shift in who has the greater population. As the students continued to argue I watched Ta’lor sit quietly and listen. She seemed completely disengaged from the conversation. “Look at it guys…come on! How can it not pass the U.S…it’s growing at a way faster rate!” raved Mahkena. “Are you kidding me? How can a linear trend possibly pass something that’s exponential,” chimed in Laken. “That doesn’t make any sense.” “Look at my equations (pointing to a paper filled with messy mathematical computations),” interrupted Saul…”can’t you see that my predictions with the models show that it’s not possible…the numbers don’t lie…” Using data modeling, extrapolating, graphing, and general knowledge, the students were engaged in an amazing conversation around a real problem. While I was witnessing such great engagement, I couldn’t help but feel as though I had failed one of my students. Tue, 10 Jun 2008 11:57:11 +0100 http://ednewscolorado.org/june-2008/the-new-manual-hail-mary-pass-or-work-in-progress.html Manual Principal Rob Stein jokes with a student during the last week of school Mike Feinberg, co-founder of the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) network of schools, has a favorite simile he uses to describe his program’s reason for starting its middle schools for low-income kids with fifth grade:“Our idea of fifth grade is like the fourth quarter – the two-minute warning, we're down by a touchdown – that's how we view fifth grade,” he told the PBS program “making Schools Work” in a 2005 interview. “You can still win the game but now every second counts; there's a tremendous sense of urgency and there's no more margin for error.” Recently, Feinberg was in Denver to give a luncheon talk to a group educators and school reformers. During the question and answer session, Rob Stein, principal of the newly-reopened Manual High School, asked Feinberg how, then, he would describe a reform effort for kids far below grade level that began with ninth grade instead of fifth. Feinberg, tall and a bit manic, scratched his shaved dome ashe paced the room. Well, he said, that would be like being down by a touchdown with no timeouts left and time about to expire. “It’s a Hail Mary pass into the end zone,” he said. Tue, 10 Jun 2008 11:49:08 +0100 http://ednewscolorado.org/june-2008/view-from-the-edge.html Earlier in the 2007-08 school year, Manual High School was a high profile place. The school had been shuttered for a year by Denver Public Schools Supt. Michael Bennet because of its abysmal and declining performance over several years. Closing the school, undoubtedly the correct decision(however unartfully handled), created a great deal of community backlash, which generated wall-to-wall press coverage. Eventually the fracas, and Bennet’s pedigree, attracted The New Yorker magazine, who sent the formidable Kate Boo to Denver to write a lengthy piece. So when the school reopened in the fall, national TV crews showed up, volunteers flooded the place, and spirits ran high. Eventually,though, the spotlight turned elsewhere (Brittney, Barack, Bush, baseball…) and the Manual community settled down to the daunting task ahead. What follows in this issue of HeadFirst Colorado is a look at Manual’s first year through the eyes of a teacher, the principal, some students, and an outside (though not necessarily objective) observer. There’s no sugar-coating here, nor should there be. Transforming an urban high school is a challenge so widely recognized as monumental that Bill Gates dedicated a sizable chunk of his fortune to an unsuccessful attempt to find an answer. Perhaps some day we’ll locate the golden key to fixing high schools. But doing so probably will require asking some deep questions about societal priorities. Tue, 10 Jun 2008 11:33:58 +0100