The Germans defend the law:

“The reasoning behind the German law, cited by officials and in court cases, is to foster social integration, ensure exposure to people from different backgrounds and prevent what some call ‘parallel societies.’”

But that argument wasn’t good enough for Judge Burman, who granted asylum to Mr. Romeike and his family.

“In a harshly worded decision, the judge, Lawrence O. Burman, denounced the German policy, calling it ‘utterly repellent to everything we believe as Americans,’ and expressed shock at the heavy fines and other penalties the government has levied on home-schooling parents, including taking custody of their children.”

ICE is appealing the decision, and this topic is so untested there is no way to no how it will end up in the courts.

As for the German laws, the Romeike family had been homeschooling in Germany, prepared for some fines but got much more attention from teh government than they expected.

“But they soon discovered differently, he said, facing fines eventually totaling over $11,000, threats that they would lose custody of their children and, one morning, a visit by the police, who took the children to school in a police van. Those were among the fines and potential penalties that Judge Burman said rose to the level of persecution.”

You don't want know what they'll do if your kids are tardy.

Clearly the German government doesn’t have enough to do, because it has the resources to use police officers to force homeschoolers into the public school system. At least they offer personal service.

“It is precisely what happened to a Western Sydney school when they were virtually held up to public ridicule for their HSC results one year. Young people from that school then found it very hard to get jobs.”

Wouldn’t you, as a parent, want to know which schools – public, private or otherwise, were the best and which were the worst? Obviously, this website cannot account for external factors in student performance, namely ones which come from dysfunctional households. But it still seems to me that this information should be available, if nothing else to create a public demand for improvement in the worst schools.

Author: Tom Jacobsen

When we look at the job market it is obvious that those with the better education get the better jobs. Not all well educated people will be able to handle the high flying jobs or be able to come across well in an interview situation. Although education is a must if you want to succeed, it is not the only attribute that is required.

To succeed in our very busy and competitive world you need to have all round skills. Good grades are very important but so is attitude. Students who find themselves in the job market need to be able to present themselves well. If they can show some leadership skills, speak well to their contemporaries and maybe take part in a community project it will make them a well rounded person that is very employable.

To help your child become a well rounded person who can succeed in adulthood will take more than just sending them to school. Of course they will need to get good grades and be able to get into the better high schools or colleges. Some additional tutoring would be advantageous to make sure they get the required grades. It is not just teaching the same old thing over and over, but sometimes taking a new approach can achieve better things. Having a tutor that your child can engage with will make them learn more. But it is not just the academic side that needs to be developed. Encouraging your child to take part in sports will build team spirit and may also show leadership skills. Taking part in a community project or some form of philanthropy will help to build the ethical side of your child’s nature.

Not everything can be taught at school. Your influence as a parent is paramount. Your child will have been watching you from the minute they first open their eyes, so your example is the bigges influence on their life.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/education-articles/helping-your-child-succeed-in-a-competitive-world-1924473.html

About the Author

FivePointsLearning.com is dedicated to developing well-rounded students who are equipped to succeed in our ever changing world. They are a Brooklyn Learning Center, so if you are looking for a Sunset Park Tutor or Brooklyn tutoring you are in the right place. Tom Parker is a writer for www.FivePointsLearning.com who specializes in college admissions.

Unfortunately some parents tend to take over and end up virtually doing the whole job themselves. They think they are helping. In reality they are not. Doing it for them teaches the child nothing. Often we learn best by doing it ourselves. It’s okay to show an interest or to explain if your child is not clear about what to do, but you should never take over the task and do it for them.

Source.

And we mean everyone. At least that’s what one Rhode Island school is trying.

“Take a look at what happened to one of the lowest performing  high schools in Rhode Island a few days ago. The school board needed to make some drastic changes and, as it turns out, they certainly did by firing all the administrators, teachers, and personnel at Central Falls High School.”

What do you think? When the teachers and administrators can’t come to an agreement on how to fix the school, perhaps the best thing to do is start over.

Update: the original source of this story is here, I’m leaving the link in the story as a hat tip to the blog which brought the story to my attention.

Source.

Digital Education discusses whether online learning could address some of the issues facing the modern classroom.

The three challenges they highlight are:

[L]ow high school graduation rates, an imminent lack of funding for schools, and a shortage of high-quality teachers to teach students, especially in the STEM subjects.

I would take issue with the second concern, an imminent lack of funding. I understand the point is that local governments everywhere are struggling to close large budget gaps, but generally some of the poorest performing schools are very well funded. And education funding in general is very high per pupil. I would cite experiences from charter and private schools which have to work with much less funding per student, yet perform much better than their public school counterparts, on average. Clearly, there are other factors, such as parental involvement, at play.

However, the issues about low graduation rates and teacher shortages are interesting to consider in the context of online learning. Would students be more likely to do the work necessary to graduate if they could do so on their own schedule via e-courses? Would the unstructured environment presented by online learning backfire and cause the poorest performing students to simply give up? It’s difficult to say. I would submit that with uninvolved parents would lead to high drop out rates, with or without a PC and an internet connection. We’ve already seen studies indicate that students do better when they are part of functional, intact families with parents who have high standards for their childrens’ academic performance.

The one place where, very clearly, online classes would seem to be effective is in the issue of teacher shortages. Teachers are normally limited to teaching a certain number of students because of physical limitations, such as facilities or grading work. But those problems would be eliminated in a virtual classroom where the number of students a teacher can reach are virtually unlimited. Of course, this would clash with the student-teacher ratio concern as one teacher could have far more students than the do now and one-on-one attention would be very minimal.

What do you think? Is online learning in grade school viable, or are other solutions in order?

Some of my favorites from the list:

Placefy is a fun and challenging geography game that uses pictures as questions. Placefy presents players with an image of a city square, buildings, and other famous landmarks. Players then have to choose the correct answer from four answer choices. Playing the game is simple, but the images as questions make it a challenging game.

UMapper offers a platform for creating your own geography game. UMapper GeoDart is a simple game in which players have to locate the places the you specify. The directions for creating your own GeoDart game are contained in the video below.

The comments for that post have also turned into a healthy discussion of additional resources of similar design. Check it out!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gilest/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

A school district provides laptops to some of its students for use during the school year. How could this be a problem? What if the laptops had built in webcams which were programed to secretly take photos whenever the laptop was on? Yeah, I think that might push a little too far.

Education Week‘s Digital Education blog has been covering a story out of Ardmore, Pa. where  the local school district has been “accidentally” spying on its students. At least, that’s the administrations defense, so far. It might be a plausible explanation, software the school intended only to use to track lost or stolen laptops acting in a way they did not anticipate, until you find out:

One sophomore and his parents have filed a federal lawsuit against the school district after the student was allegedly confronted by his assistant principal because of a photo snapped of him at his house holding Mike & Ike candy, which the assistant principal thought was drugs.

Time, a lawsuit and a likely investigation will probably determine the truth. But, the case forces us to wonder if we can trust any government provided gadgets.

Since then, some colleges have been testing the use of the Kindle DX, the larger, more book-sized version, to replace analog textbooks for some of their classes.

One of those schools, Princeton, just released some data about their pilot and most of those participating found the results to be somewhat disappointing.

Disappointing because the e-ink device does not provide anything new to the experience, instead they act like a less versatile text book.

In other words, there’s nothing new about these textbooks other than the format by which the information is delivered. Same old material, still controlled by the publisher, with no options for students to interact with it.

Hopefully we’ll see hardware manufacturers have Apple-esque breakthroughs, giving the classroom more flexibility. The article points out that the Kindle, in this capacity, simply gives more control to the publishers and the students even less control of the books they “own.”

They also noted that students who used the Kindle tended to print more, clearly the opposite of what it was intended to do.

Something not mentioned directly is the impact this would have on the secondary market. Publishers already do everything they can, changing minute details or formatting in textbooks, in an effort to force students to purchase new books every semester/quarter/year. If this new technology were in use, publishers could kill used books altogether because students cannot resell digital books.

We will watch these devices to see who is the first to figure out how to make a device suited to the classroom, they will likely make a ton of money.