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Sun October 22, 2017 11:19 am
Fri November 10, 2017 11:26 am
http://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-ba ... nt-in-math
13 Baltimore City High Schools, Zero Students Proficient in Math
by Chris Papst
BALTIMORE (WBFF) - An alarming discovery coming out of City Schools. Project Baltimore analyzed 2017 state testing data and found one-third of High Schools in Baltimore, last year, had zero students proficient in math.
But that’s not all we found. In the midst of that troubling number, there are some bright spots.
Most mornings, at Baltimore Collegiate School for Boys, start the same way – with students chanting the school’s motto in the gym.
“There’s an urgency about the work we’re doing,” said Jack Pannell, the school’s founder.
That urgency was born out of need.
“Nine out of ten black boys in Baltimore City are not reading at grade level,” added Pannell.
That grim statistic, lead Pannell to open his north Baltimore school three years ago. As the name implies, in these halls, there are no girls.
“They tend to stay very focused on their studies,” he stated, with a smile.
The charter school also has no entrance exams. What it does have is a school day extended by one hour, a teaching staff that is 60 percent male and shorter class periods. All of it tailored to how boys learn.
“We designed this school to make a fundamental difference in the lives of mostly black and brown boys in the city,” said Pannell.
That design appears to be working. Since 2015, the number of Baltimore Collegiate’s boys who scored proficient in state math tests spiked by 60 percent. In 2016, nine percent of students were proficient. This year, 14.4 percent were proficient.
“No,” replied Pannell, when asked if he was happy with the results. “I mean, we can do better.”
But Project Baltimore discovered as this school’s making process, many other city schools seem to be going nowhere.
Project Baltimore analyzed 2017 state test scores released this fall. We paged through 16,000 lines of data and uncovered this: Of Baltimore City’s 39 High Schools, 13 had zero students proficient in math.
Digging further, we found another six high schools where one percent tested proficient. Add it up – in half the high schools in Baltimore City, 3804 students took the state test, 14 were proficient in math.
Zero students proficient in Math:
Achievement Academy
Carver Vocational-Technical High
Coppin Academy
Excel Acadamy @ Francis M. Wood High
Forest Park High
Frederick Douglass High
Independence School Local 1
Knowledge and Success Academy
New Era Academy
New Hope Academy
Northwestern High
Patterson High
The Reach! Partnership School
High Schools with 1% math proficiency:
Ben Franklin H.S. at Masonville Cove
ConneXions: Community Based Arts School
Digital Harbor High School
Edmondson-Westside High
Renaissance Academy
Vivien T. Thomas Medical Arts Academy
With these eye-opening results, Project Baltimore reached to North Avenue. But no one inside the building would sit down to answer our questions. Instead, we got a statement. Concerning our investigation, it read, “These results underscore the urgency of the work we are now pursuing. We must do more to meet the needs of all our students.”
That work, according to the statement, involves a new math curriculum started this year, enhanced teacher development and expanded partnerships to provide opportunities for students.
The statement concludes, “There is no simple answer that will close the achievement gap for Baltimore’s students. Though we all want to see results quickly, the work is hard and will take time.”
At Pannell’s school, results took just two years. With 440 students, his school is now at capacity. Another 300 are on the waiting list.
“We believe we can change the narrative. We believe we can change history. We believe we can change the status quo if we keep doing what we’re doing,” said Pannell.
Fri November 10, 2017 4:24 pm
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Mon November 13, 2017 7:00 am
surfndestroy wrote:http://nationalpost.com/opinion/christie-blatchford-thought-police-strike-again-as-wilfrid-laurier-grad-student-is-chastised-for-showing-jordan-peterson-video
A Wilfrid Laurier University teaching assistant has been identified as “transphobic” and sanctioned for last week showing her class an excerpt of a video debate involving the controversial University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson.
In fact, her supervising professor, Nathan Rambukkana, told her that by showing the video to her “Canadian Communication in Context” class, “it basically was like … neutrally playing a speech by Hitler …”
Lindsay Shepherd, a 22-year-old graduate student at the school in Waterloo, Ont., was informed that merely by showing the clip, taken from a televised debate between Peterson and Nicholas Matte, a lecturer at the U of T’s Sexual Diversity Studies program, she was “legitimizing” Peterson’s views about genderless pronouns.
She has been told that she must now submit her lesson plans to her supervisor in advance, that he may sit in on her next few classes and she must “not show any more controversial videos of this kind.”
The debate was originally aired last fall on the well-regarded TVO news show The Agenda, hosted by Steve Paikin, when Peterson’s YouTube lectures about the dangers of the then-looming federal Bill C-16 first went viral.
It was in the context of this bill, which added “gender expression” and “gender identity” to both the federal human rights act and the Criminal Code, that Peterson first publicly criticized the use of gender-neutral pronouns such as “zie”, “zher” and “they” and found himself in a free speech battle.
The bill received royal assent in June and is now law.
Shepherd was this week hauled into a meeting with Rambukkana, program co-ordinator Herbert Pimlott and Adria Joel, acting manager of the “Gendered Violence Prevention and Support” program.
She was told that after she showed the five-minute video clip, “one student/many students” — the group refused to say how many students were unhappy because that information is deemed confidential — complained that she had created “a toxic climate.”
Spunkily, she asked if she was supposed to shelter students from controversial ideas. “Am I supposed to comfort them?” she asked at one point, bewildered, and said it was antithetical to the spirit of a university.
Rambukkana then informed her that since Bill C-16 was passed, even making such “arguments run(s) counter” to the law.
In the 35-minute meeting, where she was outnumbered three to one, Shepherd vigorously defended herself, explaining she had been scrupulously even-handed and not taken a position herself or endorsed Peterson’s remarks before showing the video, and that her students seemed engaged by it, and had expressed a wide range of opinions.
But that was part of the problem, she was told — by presenting the matter neutrally, and not condemning Peterson’s views as “problematic” or worse, she was cultivating “a space where those opinions can be nurtured.”
The two professors seemed suspicious that perhaps Shepherd was a plant of Peterson’s, and were alert to any hint that she was a closet supporter of the dread “alt-right” movement they both mentioned.
Rambukkana asked her off the top if she wasn’t from the University of Toronto, and Shepherd said no.
In fact, she got her B.A. (Honours with Distinction) in Communication, with a minor in political science, from Simon Fraser University and is a native of Burnaby, B.C. She was accepted to Wilfrid Laurier on a $4,500 graduate scholarship, in addition to her TA funding package.
Ah, said Rambukkana, “so you’re not one of Jordan Peterson’s students.”
He then told her Peterson was “highly involved with the alt-right,” that he had bullied his own students and asked, “do you see why this is not something … that is up for debate?”
When Shepherd protested that it is very much up for debate, Rambukkana chastised her by saying the discussion creates an “unsafe learning environment.”
Thu November 30, 2017 1:53 pm
Wed March 14, 2018 12:50 am
Sat March 17, 2018 5:10 am
Bi_3 wrote:The value of generational wealth is obvious here:
Fri April 27, 2018 1:03 am
Fri May 04, 2018 1:30 am
Tue May 22, 2018 6:33 am
run2death wrote:AZ teachers will be back to school tomorrow, but they shouldn't be. The deal they got sounds awesome, but in reality it's not sustainable and not really funded. They'll end up in the same spot in a couple of years after classes go to 40+ kids and spec-ed programs get slashed. Then Republicans will say it's because teachers were greedy and don't really care about the kids.
They should have demanded an additional tourism tax to fund it.