Spring!

Well, almost. The forsythia hedge blooms early, and usually I can get a couple of photos with snow on the blossoms, so we can have some cold weather yet.

I cut the forsythia to the ground every second year so that it grows long wands and does not get too dense or acquire dead stems. It is in it's second year, so some of the wands are 15 feet or longer. More photos on the Flickr page!

International Women's Day

In 1987 when Congress passed the National Women's History Month Resolution naming March as Women's History Month, I was working in a resource center for women, and part of my work was keeping up with women's issues. That center closed in summer of 1992 due to lack of funding, and I moved on to other employment. I would never have known that Wednesday was International Women's Day if my friend Julia hadn't sent around the message! Here are the significant links she shared, starting with the ever-popular QUIZ, which I have to say I flunked:

• International Women’s Day quiz that I didn't do so well on.
• National Women's History Project
• facts on women's issues
• history of many current reproductive rights debates
• information and statistics on sexual and reproductive health nation-wide and state by state
  This site has volumes of information, including this note on Medicaid:

  Medicaid plays a critical role for women in general, and for reproductive-age women in particular. In 2003, 7.1 million women of reproductive age (15 to 44), 11.5% of that group, looked to Medicaid for their care, including family planning. For poor women, the proportion is even higher: 36.6% of women of reproductive age in families with incomes below the federal poverty line ($15,260 for a family of three) were enrolled in Medicaid in 2003 (see Figure 1).3 Women are more likely to qualify for Medicaid than men because women tend to be poorer and tend to meet the program’s strict eligibility criteria; seven in 10 Medicaid beneficiaries older than age 14 are women.

• read the works of feminist authors and artists
• Women’s Division of the United Methodist Church Follow the link for the Anti-Hate Program (links on the left of the splash page) and find the link "Where do hate crimes occur?" That click will bring you to a U.S. map which is again clickable by state. The map leads to a collection of hate crime reports in that state, gathered infomally by women:

  Since 1998, United Methodist Women have been tracking hate crimes in their state by sending in newspaper clippings to the Women's Division.

  Within the 311 total articles received, 152 separate hate incidents were identified. 137 of these incidents have been categorized as alleged hate crimes by the media or law enforcement. The other cases, entitled suspected hate crimes, deal with incidents where the nature of the crime is not reported by the media and/or law enforcement to be a hate crime though the possibility remains. For example, the Kokomo case that should be classified as a hate crime, but is classified as a suicide by law enforcement and the mainstream media is thus found in the suspected hate crimes category.

I am glad there is a day designated to remind us of the realities of women's lives and the work that women do, and of course someone to remind us when that day comes around...

Telling us what we already knew

A story in Education Guardian Weekly on February 28 titled It's official: class matters tells about a study that measured academic success of students based upon the socio-economic status of their parents:

This unprecedented project has revealed that a child's social background is the crucial factor in academic performance, and that a school's success is based not on its teachers, the way it is run, or what type of school it is, but, overwhelmingly, on the class background of its pupils.

The study looked at large numbers of students at two age/grade levels:

The study looked at 476,000 11-year olds and 482,000 15-year-olds. The data was analysed through Mosaic, a programme devised by the information company Experian, which divides the UK population by postcode into 11 main groups and 61 types, providing detailed insight into the socio-demographics, lifestyles, culture and behaviour of UK citizens. It is being used in key policy areas, such as health and crime, but this is the first time it has been used to assess the link between education performance and social class.

For Americans reading this article, it is important to understand the UK reference to social class. Middle class families are those in which parents are professional people "whose homes are in high-status neighbourhoods." The schools are composed of two classes, middle class and working class. This is somewhat different from the American terminology. In the United States our aristocracy is corporate. Below the corporate owners and CEO's we have professional people and managers who are upper class or upper middle class (belong to a country club). Then there are people who earn above the median hourly wage who are sometimes called upper middle but more often middle class. People who can afford medical insurance but not vacations are called middle or lower middle class. Then we have lower class, which is composed of wage earners who can't afford medical insurance. Class is a thing Americans don't deal with well, so we keep it fuzzy, with a little garnish of denial.

Anyway, the story:

The findings come at a pivotal time in education with the government determined to push through its education reforms in a new schools bill, expected to be published today. If it is successful, all primary and secondary schools will be encouraged to become independent trusts with control over their own admissions. But many critics have argued that the government should be introducing more rigorous controls over admissions - to ensure as many schools as possible have a balanced intake of middle- and working-class children.

The study found that, whatever their background, children do better the more "middle-class" the school they attend, and also that more than 50% of a school's performance is accounted for by the social make-up of its pupils.

This whole article is worth the reading time, especially for those interested in how schools are rated. The study has generated a weighted method of measuring school success which takes into account the class of student received into the school, and, while the top affluent schools still do well in this ranking, the largest effect seems to be that some schools that were ranked very low on the unweighted scale were actually having a high degree of success within the context of the economic class of the students in the school. This recognition is inspiring to hard-working teachers and administrators in poor schools, and will, if carefully observed, perhaps result in an understanding of best practices for schools in deprived areas.

This study as reported in The Guardian underscores what a few of us have been saying for a long time. We are spending our money unwisely in education. We are assessing our schools to death with more tests than they have time to give and distracting them with more initiatives and requirements for teacher quality than can be readily accommodated. To raise the level of educational achievement across the board, we need to raise the standard of living for the American working family. We could, for example, take that bucket of money we are dumping on useless assessments and raise the minimum wage. We could lower the cost of health insurance. We could help people live better, and the success of children in schools would follow.