California's Children

Toddlers listen, learn when we pause in our talk

Exchange Every Day reports this morning:

Uhs" and "ums" that fill pauses when adults speak to toddlers, may actually aid the toddlers in expanding their vocabularies. In an article titled, "Toddlers use speech disfluencies to predict speakers' referential intentions," Celeste Kidd, Katherine S. White, and Richard N. Aslin at the University of Rochester (NY) found that such pauses often occur before adults use a word that is infrequent or unfamiliar in their speech or prior to using a word for the first time in a conversation. 

In their research, reported in Developmental Science, Kidd found that when such a pause occurred, the toddlers paid significantly more attention to the unfamiliar for the next two seconds.

From the abstract:

We conducted an eye-tracking study to investigate whether young children can make use of this distributional information in order to predict a speaker’s intended referent. Our results reveal that young children (ages 2;4 to 2;8) reliably attend to speech disfluencies early in lexical development and are able to use disfluencies in online comprehension to infer speaker intent...

$12.6 mil from feds to LAUSD charters for 13 new schools

The LA Times is reporting two LA-based charter school organizations have received $12.6 million in federal grants from the U.S. Dept. of Education to open 13 new middle and high school campuses. Alliance College-Ready Public Schools, awarded $3.1 million, will open 10  campuses, substantially adding to its organization of 20 charter schools. KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) was awarded $9.4 million and will open 3 middle schools in South and East Los Angeles, and an additional 15 schools nationwide.

Both charter school organizations have received recognition for raising levels of academic achievement, particularly in low-income Latino and African-American communities.

Judy Burton, a former senior administrator for the Los Angeles Unified School District who now runs the Alliance College-Ready Public Schools, said, "Given all the financial cuts in California now, it makes a huge difference to know we have startup funds for the new schools."

She believes that more time spent in school is the key to success: the school years runs for 190 days and students are expected to attend a 20-day summer session.

Written for California's Children by Elizabeth J Carlyle.

When schools cheat: should we refund "erasure analysis"?

When the budget for standardized testing in K-12 public schools was slashed by $17 million in September 2009, security audits, at a cost of $105,000 annually, were eliminated, reports Diane Lambert in yesterday's Sacramento Bee.

Security audits were done by running the bubble tests through a machine to check for excessive erasures, but instead school districts are now expected to self-report by submitting irregularity reports to the California Department of Education. If irregularities are found, schools lose the chance to receive state awards like the Distinguished Schools Award; if they are found in more than 5% of students tests, the Academic Performance Index (API) is thrown out.

The State Board of Education, while recognizing there is a problem, believes it is not big enough to warrant re-funding of erasure analysis, according to its president, Mike Kirst. However, a school's API is based on standardized test results; a low API could put in the school in jeopardy of being labelled as failing, and in worst case scenarios, being taken over by the state. This leads to conflict of interest, said Robert Schaeffer of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing. "They want scores to be high and they want to look like their staff is honest and aboveboard."  

However, this is not reflected in the numbers: reports of irregularity from the state's schools have increased in the last three years. Between 2009 and 2011, the reports of testing irregularities grew from 35 to 121. Los Angeles Unified School District recently threw out the API for two schools for irregularities on tests. However, it might be more difficult to catch major episodes of cheating.

According to Schaeffer, erasing answers is not the only way to manipulate test scores: schools can teach to the test, limit curriculum, exclude students likely to have low scores, and hold kids back a grade in critical years and promote them after the test.

Written for California's Children by Elizabeth J. Carlyle.

 

Latino kids largest group of poor US kids: 2010 Census analysis shows

"Nonpartisan analysis" by the Pew Research Center of recent Census Bureau data reveals that 6.1 million Hispanic children are living in poverty in the U.S., more than any other ethnic group, the Wall Street Journal reports this morning.

In 2010, 37.3% of poor children were Latino; 30.5% were white and 26.6% were black. The negative milestone reached by Hispanics resulted from their distress amid the difficult economy coupled with their high birth rate, the Pew Report says....

The vast majority of Latino children living in poverty were born in the U.S. More than two-thirds of them, or 4.1 million, have immigrant parents, according to the report. The other 2 million have U.S.-born parents.

In 2006, the 4.2 million white children in poverty surpassed any other group. There were 4.1 million poor Latino children and 3.8 million poor black children.

But the subsequent economic downturn disproportionately hurt Hispanics. Many are employed in blue-collar jobs in construction, hospitality and otherhard-hit sectors. The unemployment rate among Hispanics is 11.1%, compared with 9.1% overall, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In the U.S. overall, 22% of children 17 and under live in poverty, which is defined as being in a family where the annual income for a family of four is below $22,314. In California, the number of children living in poverty is 23.4%.

Health/welfare cuts topic of sub'comm hearing in Sac today

The Assembly Budget subcommittee, headed by Assemblywoman Holly Mitchell (D-Los Angeles) will take a look this afternoon at how federal budget cuts will affect the health and human services in California.

Beginning at 2 p.m., the committe  will head Edwin Park of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Frank Mecca, exec director of the California Welfare Directors Association, Jean Ross of the California Budget Project, Anthony Wright from Health Access California, among others. Capitol Room 4202.