Here's what the editors of Schools of Thought are reading today:

AJC: Judge: Fulton Schools owes special-needs student in abuse case a free education
A judge ruled that a Georgia school district failed to provide a special needs student with a "free and appropriate public education." The 19-year-old student will be allowed to have a private education for the next five years – and the district has to pay for it.

TBO.com: School rankings show tie between poverty, performance
The state of Florida ranked all of its schools based on standardized test scores. In one large school district, the rankings reflected the percentage of students on free and reduced lunch.

CBSPhilly.com: Councilwoman says ads on school buses can help close budget gap
A Philadelphia City councilwoman will present a controversial proposal to help boost revenues of the city’s school district. How? By displaying ads on the district's yellow school buses.

U.S. News: President Obama to Hold White House Science Fair
The White House has announced that it will hold a science fair next week that will include students from nationally held science competitions.

Miami Herald: Senate approves school prayer bill
The Florida state senate approved a measure that would allow student-led school prayer. Some lawmakers say the bill as written is unconstitutional and could subject the state to lawsuits.

by Donna Krache, CNN

(CNN) Penmanship. To grown-ups, the word conjures up memories of coarse sheets of paper with solid and dotted lines - and a pencil so big that you had to practically balance it on your shoulder to practice writing your letters.

For some of today’s elementary school kids, there won’t be any memories of penmanship class.  With classroom time at a premium and the common use of the keyboard, some school districts are abandoning handwriting as part of the curriculum.

But Dr. Laura Dinehart says not so fast.

Dinehart, an assistant professor at the Florida International University School of Education, was examining data collected on 1,000 second-graders and comparing it with information collected when they were in pre-kindergarten.  She and her research team expected to find that early number skills might predict math achievement and that early language skills might predict who would be better readers in second grade.  But they were surprised to find that a 4-year-old’s fine motor writing skill - the ability to form letters, numbers and shapes - was an indicator of stronger academic achievement later on.

What’s just as surprising, says Dinehart, is that the academic achievement by those with better penmanship is seen in both reading and math, and it’s reflected in both teachers’ grades and standardized test scores.  Students who received good handwriting grades in pre-K had an overall “B” average in second grade.  Their standardized tests scored above average in both math and reading.  By contrast, pre-kindergarten students who did poorly on fine motor writing tasks had an overall “C” average and below-average test scores in second grade.
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by Matt Walton, Special to CNN

Editor’s note: Matt Walton a technology and engineering education teacher at Glen Allen High School in Henrico County, Virginia. He has a master’s degree in education and a bachelor of science degree in technology education from North   Carolina State University. 

You might have noticed a recent TV commercial from Chevron Corp. showing a Chevron professional next to an eighth-grade student with a robot. The student describes the remote control robot, and the young Chevron professional talks about how a high school science teacher made him what he is today (a geologist for Chevron). The next part of the commercial caught my attention, because in bold letters the words “Science Rules” flashed on the screen. While I agree that “science rules,” so does technology and engineering.

What the ad is demonstrating is not science education, but rather the middle two letters of STEM - or science, technology, engineering and math - education. Often technology and engineering education is overlooked when people talk about STEM education or when governments make decisions about education policy.
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by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Special to CNN

Editor’s Note: Kathleen Fitzpatrick is director of scholarly communication at the Modern Language Association.  She is the author of "Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy" and author of the blog Planned Obsolescence.

"U kno wat i mean?"

You might think that text messaging with a young person today would be enough to make an English professor scream - and particularly an English professor who now works for the Modern Language Association, that keeper of the rules of English style. The kids today can't write, you've surely heard it said, and new technologies are to blame.

I've got nearly 20 years of experience in the classroom, though, and I'm the director of scholarly communication at the Modern Language Association, and I don't agree with that popular wisdom for two reasons. First, the English language has never been a stable, fixed thing. English has been in a constant state of change over the course of centuries, and new communication technologies have always inspired playful inventiveness in their users.

And second, there isn't anything new in today's anxiety about the effects that new media forms will have on us. Plato reported in 360 B.C., for instance, that Socrates was concerned about the "forgetfulness" that the technology of writing would produce in the souls of those who learned it, and numerous scholars in the 15th and 16th centuries expressed worries about the changes that would result from the wide dissemination of texts made possible by print.
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By Schools of Thought Editors, CNN

(CNN) In the early 20th century, there were almost no mentions of the contributions of African-Americans in U.S. history textbooks. That is what inspired historian and educator Dr. Carter G. Woodson to start “Negro History Week” in 1926. Woodson choose the month of February for this focus because it was the birth month of two leaders who fought to end slavery: Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.

In 1976, President Gerald Ford officially recognized the expanded observance as “Black History Month”, calling upon Americans to “seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.”

Each year, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the organization started by Woodson in 1915, designates the theme for Black History Month. This year’s theme is “Black Women in American Culture and History”. The theme was chosen, because, as it states on the ASALH website, “To gain an understanding of the history of African American women is to broaden our understanding of a people and the American nation.”

Resources
CNN Student News will feature special show segments focusing on Black History throughout the month. The following is a partial list of Black History Web resources for teachers and parents. Click on the title to go to that site.

CNN Student News Black History Month: Learning Activities

Library of Congress: African American History Month

Smithsonian Education: Black History Month

National Park Service: African American History

National Endowment for the Humanities: Black History Month

National Archives: Black History resources

U.S. Census Bureau: Black History Month 2012

Association for the Study of African American Life and History

Morehouse College: Martin Luther King, Jr. Collection

Here's what the editors of Schools of Thought are reading today:

Los Angeles Times: Op-Ed – An L.A. teacher reviews her review
When Los Angeles teacher Coleen Bondy opened her evaluation, she found that the district considers her a below average teacher. Bondy argues that her evaluation was unfair because it only measured the outcomes from her least motivated students. She also believes that test scores by themselves are a poor method of evaluating teachers.

MySA.com: Textbooks tied to tests
The Texas State Board of Education ruled that annual standardized tests won't be rewritten until state lawmakers provide funding for districts to buy new textbooks. The board said a disconnect between information found in textbooks and testing materials based on the new curriculum wouldn't be fair to students.

KCTV 5 News: Student develops free tutoring program to those in need
A Kansas City college student quit his job as a tutor to start a non-profit that offers free tutoring to high school students.

CBS Baltimore.com: Baltimore Co. Parents Offer To Pay For School’s Air Conditioning; Officials Say No
Some Baltimore County parents are concerned that their children will suffer when hot weather comes back this spring, so they offered to pay for air conditioning window units. The school district turned down the offer, and requested $70 million from Maryland instead.

Click on Detroit: West Bloomfield Schools closed due to vandalism
A Michigan school district canceled the first day of the second semester after vandals put 15 buses out of commission.

by the CNN Wire Staff

(CNN) - An admissions officer at Claremont McKenna College in California has resigned after the school's president revealed that the officer had inflated college entrance examination scores for incoming freshmen since 2005.

"As an institution of higher education with a deep and consistent commitment to the integrity of all our academic activities, and particularly our reporting of institutional data, we take this situation very seriously," college President Pamela B. Gann wrote in an e-mail Monday to students, faculty and staff.

Gann wrote that a lone administrator reported composite scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test that were exaggerated by 10 to 20 points. That employee, whom she did not name, has resigned, she said.

Such scores are often used in various comparisons of colleges across the country, including U.S. News & World Report's prestigious annual rankings.

By Pamela Greyer, Special to CNN

Editor’s Note: Pamela Greyer is a K-12 science educator, STEM education consultant and NASA solar system ambassador. She is the former site director of NASA’s Science, Engineering, Mathematics and Aerospace Academy Chicago Program and continues to mentor and engage youths in NASA engineering competitions and contests.

In 2004, I became a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) educator. At the time, STEM was an emerging concept in the education landscape and just another acronym used by NASA condensed from a series of words.

I had no idea the influence that teaching in the STEM fields would have on my life - as an educator, on my ability to inspire my students to develop a love of science and most importantly, to introduce my students to and engage them in engineering.

As an inner-city high school science teacher from Chicago, I am always looking for new opportunities to involve my students in STEM learning. I am ecstatic this year because I have a team of high school students entered in NASA’s 19th Annual Great Moonbuggy Race. FULL POST

by Greg Green, Special to CNN

Editor’s note:  Greg Green is the principal at Clintondale High School  in Clinton Township, Michigan. His guest post on this blog titled “My View: Flipped classrooms give every student a chance to succeed” generated more than 500 comments and was shared thousands of times on social media.  In this post, Green offers answers to some of the questions you asked the most.

The response to my guest post last week about flipping the classroom on CNN’s Schools of Thought blog was overwhelming and thought-provoking. While I appreciate that there are varying opinions, I would like to respond to some of the topics that were frequently brought up in the comments section, to provide some further food for thought on the issues.

1. Does the flipped model replace teachers with video? Does it turn teachers into classroom monitors rather than actual teachers?

There were many comments on the role of teachers in the flipped model, some questioning whether the flipped classroom replaces teachers with video instructions. I would argue that the opposite is true. The flipped instructional model makes teachers more valuable in the classroom. They are no longer just delivering information during class, but facilitating learning and comprehension with their students and providing one-on-one instruction.

Teaching is one of the only professions where people are expected to be experts in everything. In other jobs, people specialize in certain areas. Teachers, just like everyone else, are interested in certain subjects more than others. If a math teacher at our school also happens to be a Civil War buff in his or her spare time, why not have that teacher create a video lecture on the Civil War? And if one math teacher is better at explaining calculus while another specializes in geometry, why not have them share lectures with each other? Sharing knowledge this way and making it available 24/7 online benefits everyone. It enables our students, partners and guardians, and even community members, to learn by giving them unlimited access to information.
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by Athena Jones, CNN

CHANTILLY, VIRGINIA (CNN) - It's a Tuesday morning in January, and seventh-grader Katerina Christhilf is learning algebra. But it's no ordinary class. This one takes place entirely online, led by a teacher a few miles away.

As part of her training to become a ballerina, Katerina takes dance lessons four times a week, including up to eight hours on Fridays. All that training makes it hard to go to a conventional school, so she takes science, literature, composition, vocabulary, history, music, art and French - a full course-load - from the comfort of her home, through Virginia Virtual Academy, a program run by K12 Inc. that began operating in the state in 2009.

"Ballet is really important to me and it's usually in the mornings, so if I went to school I would only be able to go on the weekends," Katerina explained. "Sometimes I'll study in the morning and I'll do a few classes and then I'll go to ballet for maybe like three or four hours and I'll come back home and I'll do some more."

Katerina is one of a growing number of students who go to school online full time. About a quarter of a million students in kindergarten through 12th grade were enrolled in full-time online schools last year, according to the International Association for K-12 Online Learning, a 25% increase over the previous year. Some parents choose these schools because their children are struggling in traditional schools; others do so for their flexible schedules.

But as the number of students learning online full time has grown, so have questions about the effectiveness of that approach.
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