EDITORS: Learning Matters for August contains items about the digital divide, charter schools and gifted instruction, homeschooling, student expression and the Internet, and challenges facing urban schools in Indiana.
The Digital Divide
The schoolhouse digital divide as we know it is gone. In its place is a new type of divide involving Internet access and poor quality instructional software, which emphasizes memorization and lower-level skills rather than critical thinking skills, such as evaluation and problem-solving.
"We live in an information economy," said Barbara Bichelmeyer, associate professor in the Department of Instructional Systems Technology in Indiana University Bloomington's School of Education. "The best jobs will now, and for the foreseeable future, go to the students who know how to find, manipulate and critique information, which is what you do with higher-level thinking skills. You cannot do this if the skills you are developing are rote memorization and simply being able to state facts. That kind of learning in schools is not going to give our poorest students the skill sets they need to be successful in the new economy."
Historically, the digital divide was defined as the difference in computer access between children from the highest socioeconomic levels and children from the lowest. In the last year, a variety of statistical indicators show the gap has all but disappeared, Bichelmeyer said.
"Computers are now available to students of all socioeconomic classes, but the computers in schools that serve lower socio-economic classes are not connected to the Internet," said Bichelmeyer, who prepares an annual report about trends related to instructional technologies in K-12, higher education and corporate settings for the Educational Media and Technology Yearbook.
The new digital divide extends to the content available on computers, Bichelmeyer said. A big component of the federal No Child Left Behind Act involves a school's ability to show "Annual Yearly Progress" based on standardized test scores. Schools that fail to show AYP face sanctions and the possibility of declining enrollments because students are allowed to attend other schools as a result of poor test scores. Lower socio-economic schools are most vulnerable to these challenges, Bichelmeyer said. Many information system technology experts, including Bichelmeyer, are concerned that staff at vulnerable schools are spending their technology funds on "drill and kill" software geared toward helping students perform better on the standardized tests. Struggling schools have access to millions of dollars in improvement funds, Bichelmeyer said, making them targets for companies that sell poor-quality instructional software. At the same time, the federal block grants that have traditionally been used to help schools pay for instructional technology are being cut, making these improvement funds even more enticing to educational software vendors.
"In schools with high quality instruction, technology is being used to develop higher order thinking skills involving problem-solving, analyzing and evaluating. Computers in these schools are being used for more than just teaching students to state facts or decide if something is true or false," Bichelmeyer said.
Gifted Instruction and Charter Schools -- Potential, Challenges
A gifted student who is bored or stifled could be an underachieving student at risk of dropping out.
Charter schools, because of their small size, greater flexibility and student body -- which is usually more racially, academically and socioeconomically diverse than traditional public schools -- could provide gifted education services to students who would not otherwise receive it, according to two Indiana University Bloomington education professors. This opportunity typically is lost to budget cuts and a national focus on minimum academic performance on standardized tests.
"If you can buy time for gifted kids, they're not bored by sitting through the same thing over and over again, and they have more time to do more challenging work," said Jonathan Plucker, director of IUB's Center for Evaluation and Education Policy. "What frightens me is we're seeing less of this now because of the 'No Child Left Behind' focus. I don't disagree with the NCLB goals, but we've become so focused on the minimum standards that we've forgotten about excellence."
Plucker and school law expert Suzanne Eckes write about charter schools, gifted education and school law in the latest issue of Journal of Law Education. The primary goal of the federal NCLB Act is to close the achievement gaps between students by bringing all students, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender or income, to the "proficient" level on state standardized tests by the 2013-2014 school year. State educational accountability systems now focus on whether students meet minimal standards of performance on standardized achievement tests, leaving little attention or resources for gifted education, according to Eckes and Plucker. Charter schools are publicly funded, secular schools that are not subject to as many administrative constraints as traditional public schools but must comply with state accountability systems. The first charter school opened in Minnesota in 1992. Now, roughly 3,000 operate in 40 states and territories.
Homeschooling: Advocates Making Themselves Heard
Efforts by some homeschooled students to participate in extracurricular activities at public schools are shining a legal spotlight on a traditionally low-key, albeit politically savvy, "educational phenomenon."
Robert Kunzman, an assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Indiana University Bloomington's School of Education, expects increasing pressure by some homeschoolers and lawmakers sympathetic to homeschooling to bring the issue to a head in the coming school year.
"The homeschooling community appears divided over whether participation in public school extracurricular activities is a good thing," said Kunzman, who is in the midst of a multi-year research project exploring homeschooling practices and philosophies across the United States. "Some families and organizations are concerned that with more homeschoolers accessing government resources, it opens the door for further regulation."
Some parents think their homeschooled children have a right to extracurricular activities at public schools because the parents continue to pay taxes. Tensions can arise when parents of public school students resent their children missing out on these same opportunities because of a homeschooled student's participation. Some school administrators cite logistical challenges, too, when it comes to planning, although some say they value the connections between their students and the homeschooled students.
In the spring of 2003, an estimated 1.1 million students were homeschooled nationwide, according to federal statistics, representing a 29 percent increase from four years earlier. The number of homeschooled students nationwide has increased at a rate of 10 times that of public school students during the past four years, Kunzman wrote in, "Homeschooling in Indiana: A Closer Look," the latest report in the IUB Center for Evaluation and Education Policy's Education Policy Brief series.
"Homeschooling is quickly becoming a significant educational phenomenon," Kunzman wrote.
Kunzman also writes about the political clout of the homeschool community. Families and homeschool organizations respond quickly and effectively to proposed legislation geared toward regulating homeschooling. The CEEP policy brief can be viewed here.
Blog, Blog, Blog
What students say on their own private Web sites, as well as what students try to access over the Internet at school, likely will become a more prominent legal issue in the coming school year, according to school law expert Martha McCarthy, Chancellor's Professor of Education at Indiana University Bloomington.
If a student bashes her teacher on a private blog, for example, she could be disciplined at school.
"School administrators might be able to punish students for expression that negatively affects the school even though the speech in question is on a private Web site," McCarthy said.
But students have won several cases involving such expression in this emerging area of school litigation. Student expression has experienced a roller coaster of restraint over the years. In 1969, the Supreme Court in Tinker v. Des Moines made it more difficult to curtail expression, requiring the educational process to be disturbed before a student could be disciplined. Then, Supreme Court rulings in 1986 and 1988 made it easier to curtail student expression. In Bethel School District v. Fraser (1986), the court stated that lewd and vulgar speech is not protected by the First Amendment, so such expression does not have to be linked to a disruption. Two years later in Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, the court distinguished private from school-sponsored speech, holding that the latter could be censored for educational reasons. But the courts have continued to apply the Tinker disruption standard to student expression on the Internet.
"I think we'll see more litigation concerning student Web pages and also with how schools censor what students have access to over the Internet at school," McCarthy said.
Because so much personal information is available over the Internet, McCarthy thinks privacy issues will drive more litigation, too.
Student Achiement, Money and Urban schools
Closing the achievement gap and dealing with tighter than usual budgets will be among the top challenges faced by schools in Indiana's urban areas this coming school year, according to Chuck Little, Executive Director of the Indiana Urban Schools Association.
The achievement gap has narrowed, said Little, a clinical professor of education at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, because of strategies that include teacher training, greater curriculum alignment through the grades and more school time, such as summer sessions. But he still described the gap as "gigantic," between white and black students; white and Hispanic students; students who speak English and those who do not; and students who receive subsidized lunches and those who do not.
Last spring, the Indiana legislature approved a "significant fiscal shift" when it moved funding from the state level to the local school corporation, Little said. As a result, he expects to see "lean and shrinking school budgets, the reduction of services, increased class sizes" and, ultimately, local property tax increases.
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