Academic Achievement

THE newest international comparisons on the math proficiency of eighth-graders contained no great revelations. American 13-year-olds lag behind their peers in virtually all other industrialized nations. Some states -- Iowa, North Dakota, Minnesota -- are doing well in the international comparison, and some, such as Mississippi and the District of Columbia, are doing very badly.Most of those numbers confirm a string of other international surveys, which generally show American students lagging behind in math, science and other fields even while they and their parents think they're doing well.

A federally mandated tutoring program targeting thousands of students who attend Baltimore City's worst performing schools is shelling out millions of dollars annually to organizations that are operating in the district with little oversight and virtually no academic accountability measures, according to a report released Tuesday by the Abell Foundation. In the report, titled "Sending out an S.O.S. for the SES (Supplemental Educational Services)," researcher Joan Jacobson - whose complaints against her son's special education tutoring service resulted in the provider facing fraud charges and jail time - found that Baltimore is a burgeoning marketplace for the tutoring companies because it holds the bulk of the state's underperforming schools and low-income populations.

Last week's community report on Howard County's middle schools struck a raw nerve.The report said that middle schools had gone overboard in stressing self-esteem at the expense of academic achievement -- a common complaint among many parents for years."

Kansas State University's Collin Klein has been named recipient of t he 2012 Johnny Unitas Golden Arm Award.  The award is presented annually to a top college football quarterback who best combines on-the-field and academic achievement.  Candidates for the award must be completing their college eligibility or be a fourth-year junior, on schedule to graduate with his class. “Collin is not just a tremendous athlete and leader on the field, but an MVP off the field as well, who repeatedly has been recognized for his numerous contributions to the community and to the spirit of sportsmanship,” said John C. Unitas, Jr., President of The Johnny Unitas Golden Arm Educational Foundation, which along with Transamerica presents the award.

MY GREAT-grandfather John Wesley Staples (1865-1940) was vain about writing and scribbled even grocery lists theatrically, gesturing grandly with the pencil and pausing between words to lick its point.A fuss over a shopping list seems ridiculous -- until you consider that he was born in the slaveholding South, where educating black people was illegal until after the Civil War, and where aggressively literate blacks were seen as subversive and even dangerous well into this century.Modern writing on the role of race in academic achievement generally discounts this history.

Robert Dashiell, Baltimore County school board member, looks at a report about the pathetic state of black student academic achievement there and fingers white racism as the cause.Gregory Kane, speaking to a group of black students at a county middle school this past February, comes away concluding that African-American students perform badly because some of them are convinced that academic achievement is strictly for nerds, geeks and dweebs -- a white thing.Shows how two people can look at the same thing and come to completely different conclusions, doesn't it?

Howard County's middle schools need to stop worrying about the self-esteem of students and start focusing on academic accountability to better prepare them for high school, a community evaluation of middle schools concluded yesterday.Saying that the county's current philosophy "seems to have sacrificed academic standards in an effort to help students develop self-esteem," the 18-month study recommended that Howard middle schools set objective standards to determine whether students have mastered required skills and use those standards to determine whether students should advance to the next grade.

To push more black male students toward success, Maryland should turn to academic solutions such as single-sex classrooms and street-level fixes such as pairing ex-convicts with young men in the neighborhood, a panel of education experts told the state school board yesterday. A task force of 45 educators, business leaders and union officials met for two years to prepare a report intended to address a persistent problem in academic achievement for black males in the state. "There is a crushing sense of urgency that permeates this report," said Dunbar Brooks, co-chairman of the task force and vice president of the Maryland State Board of Education.

Though it's been five months since a hard-hitting evaluation of Howard County middle schools suggested widespread reforms, the changes made so far are mostly symbolic.Honor rolls are being posted in schools where they were once thought to be banned, and a middle school philosophy criticized for its emphasis on self-esteem has been thrown away.But county educators promise that substantive reforms in the way sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders are taught aren't far off.School officials continue to study dozens more reforms -- in everything from class scheduling and discipline to homework and grouping students by ability -- suggested by the reports.

PARENTS CAN'T take it anymore. Nationwide they are rising up in rebellion. Against what? Homework. In their popular new book, "The End of Homework," Etta Kralovek and John Buell argue that homework is interfering with, "unstructured leisure time" (like watching TV?), family interaction, religious instruction and "just being a kid." Never mind that the authors acknowledge that there is "some evidence" of a relationship between time spent on homework and academic achievement (especially in older children)