Jim Liebelt's Youth Culture Watch

UK Mandates Sex Ed for All 15-Year-Olds

Well, this is one way to handle the issue... Should be interesting to see how UK parents and faith groups respond.

Sex education is to be made compulsory for all pupils, prompting fury from faith groups which said that the move would contravene the right for children to be educated in accordance with their parents’ beliefs.

All 15-year-olds must receive at least one year of sex and relationship lessons, Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, said yesterday. Those whose religious or moral values prevent them from attending will be classed as truants and may be punished by the school. Until now parents could opt out of lessons about contraception, sexually transmitted diseases and homosexuality until their children were 19.

Roman Catholic and Muslim groups said they would strongly oppose the move. Shahid Akmal, chairman of the Muslim Council of Britain’s education board, said he would challenge the laws, which he called an imposition. “It is always better for the parents to talk to children about sex rather than the school over which the parents have no control,” he said.

The Catholic Education Service for England and Wales said it was “disappointed” that the “blanket right to withdrawal” had been removed.

The move is central to the Government’s attempts to lower the teenage pregnancy rate, which rose for the first time since 2002, according to the latest figures. There were 41.9 conceptions per 1,000 15 to 17-year-olds in 2007, up from 40.9 the year before. England has the highest rates of teenage mothers in Western Europe.

Source: TimesOnline
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article6905543.ece

Is Texting Good For Teens? The Jury Is Out, But Does It Matter?

Rounding up the bits and pieces running through my brain this morning regarding texting...

• Nielsen reported in June that in the first quarter of '09, teens on average send/receive 2,900 texts a month, up from 2,272 in the fourth quarter of '08. That's a 28% increase in texting in just 3 months.

• I've seen articles that have warned that the advent of texting, with it's abbreviations (OMG) and word substitutions (gr8), is the harbinger of the end of the English language as we've known it.

• Now, some educators are saying that texting can be good for teens in terms of language development. Initial research indicated that when it comes to informal essays, kids who use some text-speak outperform kids who don't. When it comes to formal essays, (perhaps obviously) texting can hurt performance.

• I'm thinking the jury is still out on whether texting will end up being good or bad for teens, and that we won't know the ultimate answer for a very long time.

• My question is, does it really matter one way or the other?

• Language changes. We don't speak the King's English anymore, although there are some who still cling to the King James Bible. I've heard my share of KJV-laced prayers in church ("We beseech thee, oh Lord") but not nearly as much these days.

• There will be plenty of English purists who stand watch and will be sure to warn along the way. Even so, will it matter?

• I'm confident kids will still be learning proper English in schools for the immediate future.

• I won't be surprised, however, if things change over time. Look at how learning the skill of handwriting has disappeared in school curriculum over the years.

• Today's teenagers are going to text. You might not like that fact, but if it's a button-pusher for you, you're going to have to get over it. Texting won't be going away anytime soon. There might be something else beyond texting as technologies continue to develop, but for now texting is a primary mode of communication.

• Back when my generation was moving through adolescence, I don't remember that writing notes to friends (other than when we were in a class) was popular. We primarily communicated in person or by phone. Were the adults of that time concerned because we had lost the art of note or letter writing? Perhaps there were some. Were adults concerned about our casual verbal communication when they overheard our conversations? Has it made a difference in our lives today? Were we negatively impacted by the lack of writing as a form of communication to our peers? Can anyone now provide a qualitative answer? Does anyone care? (I don't lose any sleep over this.)

• So now, kids are writing to communicate with their peers and adults at an impressively increasing rate. For language purists, it might be not be writing in the mode they would desire, but does it matter?

• When teens text they have to think about language. They have to express their thoughts. That cannot be all bad.

• If today's teens are still texting well into their adult years, the English language might just look different than it does today. But, at least they'll know the language and I'm thinking that they'll be able to communicate successfully.

Verily verily, I say unto thee.

Study Links GPA to Attractiveness

In a recent study published in the journal Labour Economics, University of Miami professors Michael French, Philip Robins, Jenny Homer and Lauren Tapsell showed that high school students’ grades may not be completely merit-based.

“What was found in the labor market [is that] those who are more attractive than average made wage premium and those below average made wage penalty, and we wanted to see if that relationship held up in grades for high school students,” French said in an interview.

The researchers found what they expected, as French and his colleagues discovered that female students who have good personalities tend to have higher GPAs, as do male students who are well groomed.

Twenty thousand different seventh to 12th graders were surveyed in the course of the study.

Source: The Tufts Daily
http://www.tuftsdaily.com/flash-a-smile-score-an-a-study-links-gpa-to-attractiveness-1.1868904

High School Put-Downs Make It Hard For Students To Learn

High-school put-downs are such a staple of teen culture that many educators don't take them seriously. However, a University of Illinois study suggests that classroom disruptions and psychologically hostile school environments can contribute to a climate in which good students have difficulty learning and students who are behind have trouble catching up.

"We need to get away from the idea that bullying is always physical. Bullying can also include verbal harassment, which can be just as damaging and detrimental to student learning," said Christy Lleras, a U of I assistant professor of human and community development.

The study used data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study and included 10,060 African American, Latino, and white tenth graders in 659 U.S. high schools. It is one of the first to look at the national incidence of verbal harassment in public and private high schools, she said.

"In looking at whether students felt safe at school, students' fear for their physical safety was actually pretty low. But 70 percent of the students said they were bothered by disruptions in their classroom, and one in five students said that they were often put down by their peers in school," she said.

Source: EurekAlert!
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-09/uoia-hpm090109.php

2009 SAT Scores Vary by Race, Gender, Family Income

Average national SAT scores for the high school class of 2009 dropped two points compared with last year, a report out recently says. And while the population of test takers was the most diverse ever, average scores vary widely by race and ethnicity.

On one end, students who identified themselves as Asian, Asian-American or Pacific Islander posted a 13-point gain. On the other end, students who identified themselves as Puerto Rican posted a 9-point drop in average scores.

Average scores dropped 5 points for females and 2 points for males. While females represent more than half (53.5%) of test takers, their total average score (1496) is 27 points below the average score for males (1523).

The highest average score of all (1702, up 26 points) was posted by students who said their families earned more than $200,000 a year. Students who reported family incomes of less than $20,000 a year averaged 1321, up 1 point.

AVERAGE SCORES, BY SUBJECT
Top score is 800 in each SAT section:

Critical reading
• Average score: 501
• Females: 498
• Males: 503

Math:
• Average score: 515
• Females: 499
• Males: 534

Writing:
• Average score: 493
• Females: 499
• Males: 486

Source: USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2009-08-25-SAT-scores_N.htm

New Product Alert for Parents

Schmoop - iPhone applications - send your kids to school online.

Think electronic "Cliff Notes."

Shmoop, an online learning tool designed for high-school students, has unveiled several new categories and a whopping 115 iPhone apps.

The site now features study guides on poetry, bestselling books, civics, and biography. It already offered in-depth information on U.S. history and literature.

The timing on Shmoop's announcement is certainly appropriate. School is about to be back in session. Students will be needing Shmoop's online offerings to help them get through class.

But just how they use Shmoop's features is up for debate.

Shmoop does provide a nice resource for kids who have already read a book for literature class, it also provides a fine resource for kids who decide they don't want to read the book and would rather use Shmoop to learn all about it.

Each book listed on Shmoop's site includes a basic summary, in-depth analysis, themes, and other information that practically every teacher is referencing when they ask students to write essays on those topics. Similar to CliffsNotes, Shmoop can be used as a free alternative to actually reading the book. It's an intrinsic issue with Shmoop that I just don't see the company fixing. It's a necessary cost of doing business for a site like this.

Source: CNET News
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10320218-2.html

Study Finds Online Education Beats the Classroom

I'll go out on a limb and predict that online education will be the wave of the future in K-12 settings. My guess is that online learning will largely take place within school classrooms, but that the nature of the education will expand the classroom bringing it to the home, library, and other off campus settings thus enabling kids to go beyond typical homework assignments, progressing through course material at their own pace. If further studies continue to indicate the value of online education, it might well become the predominant model of education in the decades ahead.

A recent report on online education reached an intriguing conclusion: “On average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.”

The report examined the comparative research on online versus traditional classroom teaching from 1996 to 2008. Some of it was in K-12 settings, but most of the comparative studies were done in colleges and adult continuing-education programs of various kinds, from medical training to the military.

Over the 12-year span, the report found 99 studies in which there were quantitative comparisons of online and classroom performance for the same courses. The analysis for the Department of Education found that, on average, students doing some or all of the course online would rank in the 59th percentile in tested performance, compared with the average classroom student scoring in the 50th percentile. That is a modest but statistically meaningful difference.

“The study’s major significance lies in demonstrating that online learning today is not just better than nothing — it actually tends to be better than conventional instruction,” said Barbara Means, the study’s lead author and an educational psychologist at SRI International.

This hardly means that we’ll be saying good-bye to classrooms. But the report does suggest that online education could be set to expand sharply over the next few years, as evidence mounts of its value.

Source: New York Times
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/19/study-finds-that-online-education-beats-the-classroom/

The Death of Handwriting

There's an interesting feature in Time Magazine this week on the death of cursive handwriting. Today's kids are spending little if any time being taught to write in cursive. The question is, does it matter?

People born after 1980 tend to have a distinctive style of handwriting: a little bit sloppy, a little bit childish and almost never in cursive. The knee-jerk explanation is that computers are responsible for our increasingly illegible scrawl, but Steve Graham, a special-education and literacy professor at Vanderbilt University, says that's not the case. The simple fact is that kids haven't learned to write neatly because no one has forced them to. "Writing is just not part of the national agenda anymore," he says.

Today schoolchildren typically learn print in kindergarten, cursive in third grade. But they don't master either one. Over the decades, daily handwriting lessons have decreased from an average of 30 minutes to 15.

Zaner-Bloser, the nation's largest supplier of handwriting manuals, offers coursework through the eighth grade but admits that these days, schools rarely purchase materials beyond the third grade.

Is that such a bad thing? Except for physicians — whose illegible handwriting on charts and prescription pads causes thousands of deaths a year — penmanship has almost no bearing on job performance. And aside from the occasional grocery list or Post-it note, most adults write very little by hand. The Emily Post Institute recommends sending a handwritten thank-you but says it doesn't matter whether the note is in cursive or print, as long as it looks tidy. But with the declining emphasis in schools, neatness is becoming a rarity.

Source: Time
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1912419-2,00.html

New Budget Cuts Funds For Abstinence-Only Sex Education

President Obama's new budget would eliminate most money for abstinence-only sex education and shift it to teen pregnancy prevention — a U-turn in what has been more than a decade of sex education policy in the USA.

The proposed budget, sent to Congress last Thursday, "reflects the research," says Melody Barnes, director of the team that coordinates White House domestic policy.

"In any area where Americans want to confront a problem, they want solutions they know will work, as opposed to programming they know hasn't proven to be successful. Given where we've been in recent years, I think this is a very important moment," she says.

Abstinence-only sex education programs, which emphasize a no-sex-until-marriage message, received almost $1.3 billion in federal dollars from fiscal years 2001-2009, according to the Office of Management and Budget. At the same time, studies of abstinence-only programs have shown little success; the most often-cited study, released in 2007, was congressionally mandated and federally funded and found that abstinence-only programs don't prevent or delay teen sex.

Obama's budget proposes almost $178 million for teen pregnancy prevention, including $110 million for community-based programs. About 75% of that is for programs proven to have delayed sex and increased contraceptive use or reduced teen pregnancy. The other 25% could be for "innovative" programs.

Obama "is open to innovation, and that could include abstinence-only if there is some indication it would work," Barnes says.

Source: USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-05-11-abstinence-only_N.htm

Schools Consider Four-Day Weeks

Facing deep funding cuts during the economic downturn, increasing numbers of school districts nationwide are contemplating trimming the traditional school week to four days to save money.

A four-day week has long been confined to a few small rural districts looking to save on fuel costs. Indeed, many of the districts thinking of shaving a day off their weekly calendar have small enrollments -- such as the 940-student district in Bisbee, Ariz.

But some districts contemplating the move serve suburban or urban areas. The idea is being floated in South Florida's Broward County, the nation's fifth-largest school system.

A recent University of Washington study found that states are cutting 18% of their education spending over the next three years, eliminating as many as 574,000 jobs.

"When everything's lean and states have no money and are cutting budgets to schools, it's an easy way to save money without cutting staff," said Gary Spiker, superintendent of the tiny Ash Fork School District in northern Arizona, which has had a four-day week since the 1980s.

Typically, districts that hold classes four days a week extend school hours 60 to 90 minutes per day. Education experts say there are no definitive data showing whether a four-day week benefits or harms students.

The most common concern is voiced by parents who may have to scramble for an extra full day of child care. "For parents, the issue is if Johnny's not in school on Monday or Friday, where is he going to be?" said Marc Egan of the National School Boards Assn.

Source: Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-four-day4-2009may04,0,5367225.story