In 17 States, More than Half the School Kids Are Poor

Think that's astonishing? Check out the map below.  It's amazing. All but a handful of states have  more than 40% of students living in households with incomes below 185% of the poverty level.  That's the official definition of what is considered poor in this country.  It's shameful, and so much of it is due to political neglect.  In Europe, almost no kids in school are considered poor. 

I was shocked but not surprised when I saw the report below.

__________________

In 17 U.S. states, the majority of public school students are low-income. But the poverty isn’t distributed evenly across the country, according to a new report from Southern Education Foundation. Thirteen of the states are in the South, and the other four are in the West.

The situation is dire. Researchers measure the landscape by the numbers of students who qualify for free or reduced lunch, a rough proxy for gauging poverty. Students are eligible for free or reduced meals if their family household income is 185 percent beneath the poverty threshold. In 2011, a student from a single-parent home with an annual income of $26,956 or less would qualify for free or reduced lunch. In Mississippi, 71 percent of public school students qualify for free and reduced lunch. In New Mexico it’s 68 percent; in California 54; in Texas it’s 50 percent.
The recession that began in 2008 certainly exacerbated trends, but childhood poverty is a problem much older than the recession. Between 2001 and 2011, the numbers of children in public schools who classified as low-income grew 32 percent, or by some 5.7 million kids. As a result, by 2011 low-income students made up nearly half of all public school students.
While 30 percent of white students attend schools where the majority of students are low-income, 68 percent of Latino students attend schools classified as such. And 72 percent of black public school students go to schools where the majority of students are low-income.

The situation has serious implications for the educational futures of the nation’s youth, especially as budget-crisis-stricken cities and states are cutting first and deepest from their public schools.

From colorlines.com
Reporter - Julie Anne Hing

Here is a link to the full report...   http://www.southerneducation.org/Programs/P-12-Program/Early-Ed/NewMajority.aspx

WTF Americans

Telling it like it is....

 

 

 

 

 

Malala

In October 2012,  in Pakistan while on her way home from school, 14 year old Malala Yusafzai was shot in the head at point blank range by Taliban assassins, who intended to send a message warning girl children not to seek an education.  Malala survived the attempt on her life. After months in hospital, she has recovered remarkably, and has become a worldwide symbol for the rights of girls to dignity and access to education.

 

 

This past week, Malala's 16th birthday was celebrated at the United Nations, where she spoke powerfully about her right and determination to complete her education..  Her courage and articulate representation of the causes she symbolizes is very inspiring.



 

It also seems that Malala was destined to play a role on the world stage.  Her courage, poise, and charisma would be remarkable for any person, let alone a young girl raised in a backwater town in a country like Pakistan. This is a girl whose culture discriminates massively against women and traditionally denies girls access to education. 

Here is what Malala says about the cowardly Taliban assassins who attacked her.  "They thought the bullets would silence us, but they failed.... We realized the importance of pens and books when we saw the guns. The extremists are afraid of books and pens.... We cannot all succeed when half of us are held back."

 

 

 

 

I admire this child, and very much hope that she is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Such recognition would only elevate her voice further. That would surely be a very good thing.

 

Here is a link to Malala's incredibly impressive speech at the United Nations....http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtprX8i2k-Q

 

 

 

 

 

Big History - An Introduction to Everything

Developed by Australian University Professor, David Christian, the Big History Project is designed to give students a clear perspective on how life evolved for humans, beginning with the big bang, 13.7 billion years ago.

Professor Christian says that the human advancement part of this process was and continues to be driven by the unique ability humans have for collective learning.   No other species has the ability to accumulate  knowledge and pass it on to future generations.  We humans make mistakes, but we are capable of extraordinarily complex learning. 


Here is a link to Professor Christians' very compelling TED presentation...  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqc9zX04DXs


Here is a link to the Big History Project webpage ...  http://www.bighistoryproject.com/Home

What Happens When You Give Uneducated Ethiopian Kids a Tablet PC?

The short answer: remarkable things.   

The following piece tells the story.  Imagine a child of five who's never seen a written word or operated a switch suddenly coming into possession of a tablet PC designed to  teach and inspire illiterate kids.  It's a beautiful story in so many ways, and it really happened recently in Ethiopia, an African nation riven with poverty and illiteracy.

I pulled the following piece off the Dvice page on the internet.  www.dvice.com

______________________

Ethiopian kids hack OLPCs in 5 months with zero instruction


by Evan Ackerman,  10/30/2012

What happens if you give a thousand Motorola Zoom tablet PCs to Ethiopian kids who have never even seen a printed word? Within five months, they'll start teaching themselves English while circumventing the security on your OS to customize settings and activate disabled hardware. Whoa.
The One Laptop Per Child Project started as a way of delivering technology and resources to schools in countries with little or no education infrastructure, using inexpensive computers to improve traditional curricula. What the OLPC Project has realized over the last five or six years, though, is that teaching kids stuff is really not that valuable. Yes, knowing all your state capitols how to spell "neighborhood" properly and whatnot isn't a bad thing, but memorizing facts and procedures isn't going to inspire kids to go out and learn by teaching themselves, which is the key to a good education. Instead, OLPC is trying to figure out a way to teach kids to learn, which is what this experiment is all about.
Rather than give out laptops (they're actually Motorola Zoom tablets plus solar chargers running custom software) to kids in schools with teachers, the OLPC Project decided to try something completely different: it delivered some boxes of tablets to two villages in Ethiopia, taped shut, with no instructions whatsoever. Just like, "hey kids, here's this box, you can open it if you want, see ya!"
Just to give you a sense of what these villages in Ethiopia are like, the kids (and most of the adults) there have never seen a word. No books, no newspapers, no street signs, no labels on packaged foods or goods. Nothing. And these villages aren't unique in that respect; there are many of them in Africa where the literacy rate is close to zero. So you might think that if you're going to give out fancy tablet computers, it would be helpful to have someone along to show these people how to use them, right?

 

 

But that's not what OLPC did. They just left the boxes there, sealed up, containing one tablet for every kid in each of the villages (nearly a thousand tablets in total), pre-loaded with a custom English-language operating system and SD cards with tracking software on them to record how the tablets were used. Here's how it went down, as related by OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte at MIT Technology Review's EmTech conference last week:

"We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He'd never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android."

This experiment began earlier this year, and what OLPC really want to see is whether these kids can learn to read and write in English. Around the world, there are something like 100,000,000 kids who don't even make it to first grade, simply because there are not only no schools, but very few literate adults, and if it turns out that for the cost of a tablet all of these kids can simply teach themselves, it has huge implications for education. And it goes beyond the kids, too, since previous OLPC studies have shown that kids will use their computers to teach their parents to read and write as well, which is incredibly amazing and awesome.
If this all reminds you of a certain science fiction book by a certain well-known author, it's not a coincidence: Nell's Primer in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age was a direct inspiration for much of the OLPC teaching software, which itself is named Nell. Here's an example of how Nell uses an evolving, personalized narrative to help kids learn to learn without beating them over the head with standardized lessons and traditional teaching methods:

Miles from the nearest school, a young Ethiopian girl named Rahel turns on her new tablet computer. The solar powered machine speaks to her: "Hello! Would you like to hear a story?"
She nods and listens to a story about a princess. Later, when the girl has learned a little more, she will tell the machine that the princess is named "Rahel" like she is and that she likes to wear blue--but for now the green book draws pictures of the unnamed Princess for her and asks her to trace shapes on the screen. "R is for Run. Can you trace the R?" As she traces the R, it comes to life and gallops across the screen. "Run starts with R. Roger the R runs across the Red Rug. Roger has a dog named Rover." Rover barks: "Ruff! Ruff!" The Princess asks, "Can you find something Red?" and Rahel uses the camera to photograph a berry on a nearby bush. "Good work! I see a little red here. Can you find something big and red?"
As Rahel grows, the book asks her to trace not just letters, but whole words. The book's responses are written on the screen as it speaks them, and eventually she doesn't need to leave the sound on all the time. Soon Rahel can write complete sentences in her special book, and sometimes the Princess will respond to them. New stories teach her about music (she unlocks a dungeon door by playing certain tunes) and programming with blocks (Princess Rahel helps a not very-bright turtle to draw different shapes).
Rahel writes her own stories about the Princess, which she shares with her friends. The book tells her that she is very good at music, and her lessons begin to encourage her to invent silly songs about what she's learning. An older Rahel learns that the block language she used to talk with the turtle is also used to write all the software running inside her special book. Rahel uses the blocks to write a new sort of rhythm game. Her younger brother has just received his own green book, and Rahel writes him a story which uses her rhythm game to help him learn to count.

Read more about Nell in this paper, and if you haven't read The Diamond Age, do so at once.
Via MIT

For the latest tech stories, follow DVICE on Twitter
at @dvice or find us on Facebook

Here is a link to the One Laptop Per Child Project     http://one.laptop.org/

 

 

 

 

 

The New Face of Education

I spent twelve years in public schools, then another seven years in university.  I am a product of an educational system that worked for generations.   All those years, I sat in classrooms, absorbing knowledge delivered by a teacher.  That was the only option. Not anymore.

Much has changed about the education process.   Now you can buy interactive learning apps for your smart phone on a wide variety of subjects. Interactive learning allows students to absorb knowledge at their own pace with learning interfaces that can be incredibly engaging and fun.

Sal Khan

Sal Khan started recording byte sized 'You Tube' learning modules to help his kids with their homework.  He took that idea and, with the help of the Gates Foundation, has turned it into the Khan Academy, a website with thousands of free, byte sized learning modules.

My niece, Lindsey, is getting her masters in education at Harvard.  She's also working part time at a company that develops interactive learning systems.  This is clearly a growth industry, and not just for those of us fortunate to live in a deveoped nation. There are tens of millions of children in the world's poorest places that have no little or access to education.  Girls especially find roadblocks to learning in many cultures.  Cheap laptop and tablet computers tuned to interactive learning have the potential to change that in a very profound way. 

Education is essential to building a future that is sustainable.  I think of the children in the Eastern part of the Congo in Africa, an area that is plagued by lawless genocidal violence.  How much better off they would be if they could learn to read and write, and about how nature works, and about how they fit into the whole scheme of life.  

The emergence of interactive learning is the foundation of a revolutionary new era in eucation.  Young people these days face challenges that did not exist during my formative years.   The best thing I can say about that is they also have direct and often free access, through their computers and cell phones, to  knowledge and understanding that required a much more formal education process for previous generations. 

My Niece, the Harvard Girl

Lindsey Dunn, my niece, is a lovely girl. She's also now a Harvard girl.  She is starting work on a Masters Degree in Education at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  Lindsey's husband, Chris Dunn, at the same time, is beginning work on his Masters in International Business at Tufts University, just down the road from Harvard.

Chris and Lindsey

Lindsey and Chris are good souls and it's good to see them headed in such positive directions.  I wish them all the best.

Educating Solutionaries

Just read a splendid interview on the Forbes magazine webpage. Zoe Weil is an educator, and the co-founder of the Institute for Humane Education, IHE.

The focus of  IHE is educating educators about how to teach caring and compassion.  Here is how Ms. Weil puts it...

 Humane education has four elements that are keys to its power and success, and these include: 1) providing accurate information about the pressing issues of our time so people have the knowledge they need to address global challenges; 2) fostering the 3 Cs of curiosity, creativity, and critical thinking so people have the skills they need to address challenges; 3) instilling the 3 Rs of reverence, respect, and responsibility, so people have the will to address challenges, and 4) providing positive choices and the tools for problem-solving, so people can solve challenges. 

The quote above was taken from an interview conducted by Forbes contributor, Michael Tobias. The link to the Forbes piece on Zoe Weil is...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltobias/2012/04/25/the-heart-of-education-a-discussion-with-zoe-weil/

The term 'solitionary'  goes with the concept of humane education and reflects the hope of what a humanely educated child will become.  It's a noble idea that is very much needed to prepare kids for the unpprecidented social, economic, and environmental challenges they will have to deal with as adults.  

Alexandra Paul

There was a TV series in the nineties that for some time was the number one television show in the entire world. One of the stars of that series was an actress named Alexandra Paul. I first crossed paths with Alexandra at about that time, but our meeting and subsequent collaboration had no connection with the world of fame and celebrity. Alexandra Paul became a much valued friend as a consequence of our common activist concern about human overpopulation. We both wanted desperately to make a difference; to make a dent in the public's general indifference to the fact that human numbers on Earth have exploded. There are now more than seven billion of us; nearly three times the number there were when I emerged from the womb. Humans are consuming the planet's resources at an unprecidented scale, and shredding the fabric of the biosphere in the process.

Alexandra Paul, and I, along with our friends, Gregory Molina and Michael Tobias, made an educational video titled Jam Packed in 1997. Later, we were joined by Mark and Michelle Griffith on a follow-up video titled, The Cost of Cool. These films were two of the earliest efforts to deliver a wake-up call on overpopulation and consumption to a school age audience.

Here is a link to The Cost of Cool...

http://www.videoproject.com/cos-722-v.html

These days, Alexandra Paul is at least as famous for her activisim as she is for her acting. She is a passionate champion for clean energy. She was one of the first celebrities to drive around in an electric car. Currently, her preferred transportation is a Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid. She and her husband, a very good man named Ian Murray, are also committed advocates for animal rights. They recently helped rescue dozens of Beagles who had been enslaved from birth, caged and caught up in ugly cycles of canine laboratory testing.

Alexandra Paul is an exceptional human being. She is making a very worthy contribution to evolving a world that is sustainable and secure for future generations. She also gives great hugs.

Here is a link to Alexandra's webpage

http://www.alexandrapaul.com/