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Seismic upgrades to Vancouver’s most vulnerable schools set at $618 million
Seismic upgrades to 48 of the city of Vancouver’s most vulnerable schools will cost $618 million, about 40 per cent of the amount budgeted for the entire province, according to a consultant’s report released Wednesday.
The B.C. Ministry of Education, which largely financed the report, announced $1.5 billion over 15 years in 2005 to seismically upgrade more than 700 of the province’s schools.
The $618 million would cover bare-bones seismic upgrades. But Vancouver Board of Education chairwoman Patti Bacchus said many schools require major renovations that should be done at the same time, which means her district would need more than $1 billion on its own.
B.C. Education Minister George Abbott did not say whether more funding would be forthcoming, but said the province is making “good progress” on its 15-year pledge to seismically upgrade B.C.’s at-risk schools.
“In the near future, the ministry intends to bring forward the next phase of the school seismic mitigation program,” he said in a statement on Wednesday.
Vancouver has the most at-risk buildings of any school district and has already spent several hundred million dollars on completed or current projects, Bacchus said. The cost of upgrading or replacing schools that have already been completed or approved is not included in the report, which was prepared for the Vancouver school board by Coriolis Consulting.
The 48 schools identified in the report have structures that are considered by consultants to be high risk in the event of a “significant seismic event.” That means those buildings could sustain “widespread damage,” or “structural failure” in the event of a major earthquake in the region, according to the report. The report offers three options for each of the 48 vulnerable schools, including seismic upgrades only, seismic upgrades combined with general facility upgrades, or replacement.
To read the entire Vancouver Sun article, click here.
Do the best students make the best teachers?
The idea behind the North Carolina Teaching Fellows Program is simple: the state pays top academic students to attend a public college, and in return they spend at least four years teaching in a public school. In the 20 years since the first fellows began teaching, the program has flourished. High school seniors selected for the program average about 1,200 on the SATs compared with a state average of 1,000. Of the 500 fellows chosen each year, about a quarter are black or Hispanic.
It is not enough for the smartest to become teachers; they have to stay teaching. Research has shown that experienced teachers perform far better than beginners. A Carolina Institute for Public Policy study by Gary T. Henry, Charles Thompson and Kevin Bastian in 2010 found that of a dozen training programs in the state, Teach for America had the best test results, with the Teaching Fellows Program second. There is, however, a large difference in retention. Teach for American requires only a two-year commitment. After five years, 7 percent of the Teach for America participants were still at work in North Carolina, versus 73 percent of the fellows. Sixty percent of the fellows who started teaching 20 years ago still work in North Carolina public schools.
This article features John Williams III, a fifth grade teacher in Durham. To read the full New York Times Education article, please click here.
Want good grades? Be sure to get your Zzzs!
Roberta Longpré is an expert in the sleep habits of teenagers, and it is all because over the past decade many have showed up in her classroom each morning yawning and exhausted.
“In my last 10 years of teaching in four different schools I have seen a lot of tired teenagers,” says the head of student services at Branksome Hall, a private girls’ school in Toronto. “I started doing some reading into and looking at what’s going on.”
Ms. Longpré formulated plans for a full-fledged study after joining a research group called TARGET, short for Toronto Action Group for Excellence in Teaching.
“In the last 30 years, sleep researchers say that teenagers are sleeping an hour less,” she says. “They are calling that the “lost hour.” I wondered what that lost hour meant for our students here at Branksome Hall, and if they are, what is the impact on them? Is there an academic connection between sleep and how well students perform academically?
The findings showed that:
- Seven to eight hours of sleep is optimal for this group of girls, as those that did had the highest grades. Interestingly, the same group had fewer hours of homework per night (two-to-three hours).
- Most (nine out of 10) surveyed reported inadequate sleep, as defined by the U.S.-based National Sleep Foundation.
- More than one recreational technology activity after 8 p.m. could interfere with the amount of sleep attained by the students surveyed.
To read the full article please click here for the National Post article
Students give e-learning a grade of incomplete
They’re addicted to Facebook and slaves to their smartphones — “digital natives” trying to navigate the post-secondary world. But as universities spend millions on e-learning tools to help cater to this tech-savvy generation, current students say they’re learning more in classes that don’t have all the technological bells and whistles.
In fact, the first Canadian study of its kind has discovered that students prefer — and learn more — when a live lecturer stands at an unadorned podium. The finding surprised even the study’s authors.
“We were expecting to see evidence of what’s known as the ‘digital native’ era and we just didn’t see that,” said Joseph Berger, director of business development and communications at Higher Education Strategy Associates, the Canadian education consultancy that published the study. “It’s not the portrait we expected whereby students would embrace anything that happens on a more highly technological level. It’s to the contrary — they really seem to like access to human interaction, a smart person at the front of the classroom.”
The study to probe the attitudes and preferences of students being taught with online resources found the more technology there was in a particular course, the lower the proportion of students who said they learned more. And while the 1,370 undergraduate students from more than 60 universities nationwide were generally happy with their courses, those with more message boards and websites where students can access grades and study notes were associated with a drop in satisfaction compared with courses with less online interaction.
E-learning tools have become far more common at Canadian universities over the past 10 to 15 years in the face of sky-high enrolment rates (Ontario’s first-year undergraduate enrolment hit a record 90,000 this fall) and the constant challenge of always getting better.
The study went on to find that more than half of respondents said they would be more likely to skip courses with more online resources because it’s easier to catch up later. Four out of five students said they’d rather watch a live stream of a lecture than attend it in person.
To read the entire article, published in the National Post, click here.
The Secrets of a Good Principal
According to Michael Winerip, a good principal:
- has been a teacher
- feels at home in a cafeteria filled with 800 children eating rubbery scrambled eggs for breakfast
- has her own style
- protects her teachers from the nonsense
- sets her own high standards
- works with union leaders to carry out her educational agenda, and if she can’t, takes them on
- knows teachers are only part of what make a school run
- takes money out of her pocket for the school
- loves and trusts the public schools where she works
- worries in private, ignores the surreal and finds a way to get things done
- has a To Do list several feet long
- leads by example
To read the entire article, published in The New York Times‘ On Education section, click here.