Videoconference: Education and Health Disparities

Here's a press release of some interest. The indicators we use often deal with this intersection of educational and health disparities. This videoconference should be really good. 

15th Annual Summer Public Health Research
Institute and Videoconference on Minority Health

Announcement

Please join 1,000 other participants in 45 states and 6 countries for the 15th Annual Summer Public Health Research Videoconference on Minority Health. When? Tuesday, June 9, 1:30-4:00pm EDT Where? Webcast, C-band satellite, and Tate-Turner-Kuralt building auditorium (at UNC Chapel Hill) - see www.minority.unc.edu Topic: "Breaking the Cycle: Investigating the Intersection of Educational Inequities and Health Disparities" Featuring: Reginald Weaver, Vice President, Education International; Past President, National Education Association Dina Castro, M.P.H., Ph.D., Scientist, UNC FPG Child Development Institute, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Nicholas Freudenberg, Dr.P.H., Distinguished Professor, Program in Urban Public Health, Hunter College School of Health Sciences/City University of New York Lillian A. Sparks, J.D., Executive Director, National Indian Education Association Moderator: Howard Lee, M.S.W., Executive Director, North Carolina Education Cabinet This interactive session will be broadcast with a live audience in the Tate-Turner-Kuralt auditorium at the UNC School of Social Work and can be viewed over the Internet (webcast) and c-band satellite. Questions will be taken from studio and broadcast participants by email and toll-free telephone. For more information: www.minority.unc.edu/institute/2009/ To view on your personal computert: www.minority.unc.edu/institute/2009/broadcast/ To view with a group: www.minority.unc.edu/institute/2009/broadcast/sites.cfm To register a viewing site: www.minority.unc.edu/institute/2009/broadcast/ To register for the studio audience at the TTK auditorium: www.minority.unc.edu/institute/2009/studio/ (Note: If you have registered for the Videoconference you will receive an email by 6/4 reconfirming your registration and giving specific information for receiving or attending the broadcast.) To read the abstracts, agenda, and speaker biographies: www.minority.unc.edu/institute/2009/abstracts.cfm, www.minority.unc.edu/institute/2009/agenda.cfm, www.minority.unc.edu/institute/2009/spkrbios/. To download materials (publicity, slides when they become available, attendance sheet for group sites): www.minority.unc.edu/institute/2009/materials/. Answers to frequently asked questions: www.minority.unc.edu/institute/2009/faq.cfm This year's Videoconference is presented by UNC Diversity and Multicultural Affairs and the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health Minority Health Project (ECHO). Funding comes from the Dean's Office of the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, UNC Diversity and Multicultural Affairs, UNC FPG Child Development Institute, UNC Center for Development and Learning, Counseling and Wellness Services (UNC Campus Health Services), NC Health Careers Access Program, Sheps Center for Health Services Research, UNC American Indian Center, UNC Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, UNC College of Arts & Sciences, and a growing list of cosponsors (www.minority.unc.edu/institute/2009/cosponsors.cfm). This activity is supported by an educational donation provided by Amgen. Please thank them - and consider joining them or providing an endorsement. Vic Schoenbach ( www.unc.edu/~vschoenb/) Director, Minority Health Project [Please support the Minority Health Project! www.minority.unc.edu/support/] UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health Cookie Newsom Director of Diversity Education and Research UNC Office of Diversity and Multicultural Affairs _________________ * 20+ health disparities-related broadcasts and seminars are available as on-demand webcasts at www.minority.unc.edu/resources/webcasts/

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Book Review: Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell

You know Malcolm Gladwell from The Tipping Point and Blink. Last night I had the opportunity to read Outliers: The Story of Success, and thought it might be of interest to some of the readers here.

This is a different kind of book, more in the mode of Freakonomics than anything else. While trying to discuss success, Gladwell outlines a series of interesting data points that suggest that our cultural story of how someone becomes successful is (at best) incomplete.

Some of the data-driven anecdotes are interesting -- why hockey players are more likely to be born in the month of January suggests that the notions of equality of opportunity are mistaken. Some are poignant, as he discusses in the end chapter the influences that led his mother to success. Some are merely intriguing -- why some birth years mattered for successful computer programmers, Jewish lawyers, and wealthy capitalists. (You're left at the end of these chapters with a sense of knowing something you didn't know before, but feeling that this knowledge is essentially trivial -- it has no predictive or replicative power, can't be used to design program or policy, and doesn't do you any individual or collective good in searching for how to be successful.)

The chapters that would seem to hold some promise for discussion about community-level indicators make these points:

1. There's no substitute for hard work. Success takes 10,000 hours of investment before it pays off. Those that succeed have a level of competence, the opportunity for those 10,000 hours, and the drive/diligence to accomplish the hard work. While Gladwell doesn't get prescriptive here, this implies something for those involved in community-building about access to opportunities for practice and investment of time in a given arena.

2. Culture matters. He traces the influence of Scotch-Irish immigration patterns into Appalachia on codes of honor and honor-related violence and murder rates in the American South. (He stops much too soon on this topic: read this with Code of the Street and you may start drawing conclusions that the inexplicable internal urban violence we face may have its roots in culture transfer from Scotch-Irish slaveholders. I'd love to see more work on this topic, and means to move beyond explanatory to actionable policy.) He also takes Asian proficiency in mathematics back to the differences in rice and wheat cultivation, differences in language systems, and differences in length of the school year. I found useful the point at which he began to describe how Korean Airlines crashes were reduced once cultural deference patterns were identified and pilots trained specifically to operate in a different cultural milieu, but this section ended much too soon again to get into how one addresses disadvantages of culture.

3. Summer vacation hurts poor children. This section on public education is worth exploring further, as he suggests that public education systems are working for poor, middle-income, and upper-income children who all make roughly equivalent learning gains during the year, but upper-income children also make learning gains over the summer while poor children slide backward. He traces a large portion of the achievement gap in public education to summer breaks, and touts the KIPP schools as an answer to this problem. I suspect the answer is a little more complicated (see JCCI's Eliminating the Achievement Gap discussion), but if we're serious about improving educational opportunity, using an outdated agricultural model to schedule class hours doesn't seem to make sense.

Overall, an intriguing book -- not likely to have the impact of The Tipping Point, but worthy of reading and prompting more discussion, especially among community indicators practitioners. The book suggests that we need to be doing a better job of mining the data for unexpected patterns -- I'd love your thoughts on that.

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American Human Development Project

The American Human Development Project is an interesting data resource and attempt to create a national indicator set to "stimulate fact-based public debate about and political attention to human development issues in the United States and to empower people to hold elected officials accountable for progress on issues we all care about: health, education, and income."

The site includes a report, The Measure of America: American Human Development Report 2008-2009; a set of interactive maps that let you select indicators like SAT scores, army recruits, or obesity rates; and the most intriguing (and awfully-named) section, the Well-O-Meter.

The Well-O-Meter starts off with a series of questions about yourself. Some of them are odd -- after asking my gender, it also asked if I were a woman who received annual gynecological checkups AND if I were a man over 40 who had annual checkups. Income and education were asked in two separate ways. Overall, it was an interesting set of questions -- made as interesting but what wasn't asked as by what was. At the end, it gives you a score, and then plots your score against some comparatives. So while race/ethnicity and region of the country are factors the Well-O-Meter think are significant for health differences, it asks about neither for you personally.

It does ask about family characteristics, health events, and life expectancy -- which is quite interesting, since the purpose of the site otherwise seems to be arguing for public policy debates about shared community characteristics.

I thought you might enjoy playing with the site and seeing what information it has on your community. The attempt to link you personally with the larger community/national picture is an intriguing concept, though I suspect it would have been more useful to place the individual answers within the geographical context that the site is mapping already.

What are your reactions to the site?

(Hat tip: Media General News Service -- read the article!)

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Education Week Report Release

News from Education Week:


It’s here! The Diplomas Count 2008: School to College has arrived. This third annual report, with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is now available online at edweek.org. During our edweek.org Open House, you can access the whole report for FREE!


The report explores the rapid growth of state-level P-16 councils and how they seek to create a more seamless schooling continuum that prepares students from preschool through college and beyond for life, work, and further education. While you’re at it, be sure to check out our other benchmark reports, Quality Counts and Technology Counts.

Some things you shouldn’t miss in this year’s Diplomas Count:

Interactive media that will allow you to review:

• State Graduation Briefs


• Interactive maps of graduation rates at District, State, and National levels as well as by Congressional District

Feature stories and analyses such as:

• P-16 Councils Bring All Tiers of Education to the Table


• The ‘Three A’s’ of Successful P-16 Reform


• States Notch Slow, Steady Progress Toward Consistent Graduation Goals


• And much more!

Our data tables and charts for historical graduation rates, ranked graduation rates for the 50 largest school districts, and the projection of graduates and non-graduates for 2008. You can download these right now and refer to them at your convenience.

Remember, our doors will be wide open through June 10. That means you’ll have access to everything our premium subscribers see daily for only a week!

If you like what you see during the edweek.org open house, get even more by adding a 4-week trial subscription to Education Week. This trial offer of 4 weeks of print and online access is available for only a short time at: http://e-news.edweek.org/ct/3007413:3306394050:m:1:219602297:7973631C425A23950A49BD66024F1786.
To order extra copies of Diplomas Counts 2008, simply go online or call 800-788-5692.
Tell your colleagues about the complete, FREE access to Diplomas Count and our Open House!

See you there,

Virginia B. Edwards
Editor and Publisher

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US Department of Education Publications

Some more information to pass along to anyone interested in education data and other information:

As a valued customer of ED Pubs, we are sending you this email to let you know of our recently redesigned web site, http://edpubs.ed.gov.

In an effort to serve you better, the U.S. Department of Education's ED Pubs (Education Publications) web site has undergone an extensive redesign. The web site combines bold colors, strong lines and a greater amount of “white space” to give it an eye-catching, modern look. The shopping process has been improved by adopting the latest in eCommerce "shopping carts," making it easier to order publications and provide concise, accurate shipping information. The capabilities of "your account" have been extended to realize a more user-friendly environment tailored to your preferences. Please visit us at http://edpubs.ed.gov to see for yourself. If you had previously registered on the site, no need to re-register, your user name and password will work and your order history is still available!

New features include:

News—this section highlights one or two "newsworthy" items, such as information about new pub releases, announcements by Secretary Spellings, etc. The items will have relevancy to publications and the ability to quickly find all publications related to a "news" item. Check back often because the information will be updated regularly.

Featured Items—this section highlights 3-6 publications that are orderable directly from the home page. Each item displays a thumbnail image and title. By clicking the title you can view the publication’s detailed information page. Featured items will be updated every 1-2 weeks.

Hot Topics—this section lists items in response to current events, key ED initiatives, and other timely information. By clicking on a hot topic the system will run a search and find all publications that relate to the topic.

Find Publications By—the links to audience, education level, language, publication type, and subject allow you to quickly find publications related to the groupings. For example, a principal could click on audience and then select "principals" to find all publications that are intended for him/her; a teacher searching for posters could click on publication type and then select "posters" from the list of terms.

Students/Parents/Teachers/Administrators—these menu items listed near the top of the page allow you to quickly find publications that are intended for you. In order to make the search results more manageable you can further refine your group by education level (e.g., elementary, middle, high, college/university, etc.) and subject (e.g., English, math, science, and social studies).

Español—this section links to publications that are written in Spanish and a Spanish version of the FAQs.

Breadcrumbs—this tool aids you in navigating the site. It is listed below the header and before the main content. You can click on any item in the breadcrumb trail and return to that page.
Zoom—this allows you to quickly view a larger publication cover image.

Quantity—the ability to add the desired number of copies from any page. The system will validate the quantity entered and let you know if the number is above the maximum that is allowed. Over the next several months, we will continue to fine tune the site and we encourage you to check back frequently to see our progress, check out the latest news items, and browse the new arrivals.

Of course, if you have any problems or questions please feel free to call us at 1-877-4ED-PUBS (433-7827). Our professional, knowledgeable Customer Service Representatives are available to assist you Monday through Friday from 9:00am to 6:00pm EST. If you aren’t able to call during this time, please feel free to leave us a voicemail or simply send an email to edpubs@edpubs.ed.gov. You can expect a response within 1 business day.

Have a great day!

U.S. Department of Education

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Graduation Rates Mapping Tool

A friend sent along this mapping tool for high school graduation rates in the United States. See http://mapsg.edweek.org/edweekv2/default.jsp to look at graduation rates by state or zoom in for district comparisons.

Beyond just seeing the color-coded map, you can hover your mouse over a district and get additional details, or click for a full district report. Quick, easy, informative. See http://mapsg.edweek.org/edweekv2/help.htm#district for more information about how to use the tool.

Keep sending along these data tools!

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Free Access to Education Week Data

Important news from Education Week. I like having free access to data, even if it's only for 10 days:

Now that summer is over, edweek.org is having an Open House to kick off the new school year! You are invited to come in and take a look around. You'll find everything you need to be up to speed on K-12 news, policy changes, commentary, analysis and more.

Our doors are wide open from September 5 through September 15. That means you'll have full access to everything our premium subscribers see daily!

Here are some of the most popular articles read by your colleagues this summer. Now is your chance to read them, too:
Reading Curricula Don't Make Cut For Federal Review - By Kathleen Kennedy Manzo
Learning and Earning - By Christopher B. Swanson
Teachers Say That NCLB Has Changed Classroom Practice - By Debra Viadero
Teaching Secrets: Students Behave When Teachers Engage - By Anthony Cody
Plus, you can do research using our archives, review our special reports, and get all of the current news.

There is so much to see – all for free – and only 10 days to see it. So hurry!

If you run out of time, you can still enjoy free access to edweek.org and Education Week by starting a free trial subscription. Click here to start your free trial of print and online access: www.edweek.org/go/4weektrial.

Enjoy your free access, and welcome back to the 2007-2008 school year.

Best regards,

Virginia B. Edwards
Editor and Publisher

P.S. Pass the word along about this Back-To-School Open House to your colleagues!

OK, I'm passing it along. The research center can be found at http://www.edweek.org/rc/index.html

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Measuring Rural Education

The National Center for Education Statistics has issued a new report, Status of Education in Rural America. In the section called Measuring Rural Education, they discuss the research and reasons for a new classification system to understand rural schools. The list of tables gives you direct access to the data in the report.

Highlights from the report include the following:

• In 2003-04, over half of all operating school districts and one-third of all public schools in the United States were in rural areas; yet only one-fifth of all public school students were enrolled in rural areas.
• A larger percentage of rural public school students in the 4th- and 8th-grades scored at or above the Proficient level on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading, mathematics, and science assessments in 2005 than did public school students in cities at these grade levels. However, smaller percentages of rural public school students than suburban public school students scored at or above the Proficient level in reading and mathematics.
• Current public school expenditures per student were higher in rural areas in 2003-04 than in any other locale after adjusting for geographic cost differences.
• In 2004, the high school status dropout rate (i.e., the percentage of persons not enrolled in school and not having completed high school) among 16- to 24-year-olds in rural areas was higher than in suburban areas, but lower than in cities.

While you're at the NCES site, be sure to check out the 2006 Digest of Education Statistics, just released on July 26. The latest reports and data from NCES can be found here. Don't miss the international education indicators either.

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Education Data Available Free -- Limited Time Only

A special announcement from Education Week. Check out the interactive mapping tool.

The 2nd Annual Diplomas Count is here. Produced with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, this eye-opening report is now available online at edweek.org. During our edweek.org Open House, you can access the whole report for FREE! The report examines college and career readiness and provides the most accurate and far-reaching analysis of high school graduation policies and trends. While you’re at it, be sure to check out some of our past reports and our most recent edition of Technology Counts.

Some things you shouldn’t miss in this year’s Diplomas Count:

• A national snapshot of graduating high school students in the Executive Summary.
• Feature stories, commentaries, and analyses such as: What it takes to graduate for the class of 2007 - By Sterling C. Lloyd

‘Soft Skills’ in Big Demand: Interest in teaching students interpersonal skills needed for success in life is on the rise. - By Catherine Gewertz

Learning and Earning: An analysis that shows the relationship between education and pay. - By Christopher B. Swanson

Access to Opportunity: Skilled workers for the jobs of the future are in short supply, risking further expansion of the American family-income divide. - By Anthony P. Carnevale

Our totally new edweek maps tool allows you to map graduation rates by school district. You can see how your district compares to other districts in your area and nationwide. This great tool gives you access to incredible amounts of information right at your fingertips!

Remember, our doors will be wide open through June 25. That means you’ll have access to everything our premium subscribers see daily for a full two weeks!

If you like what you see on edweek.org, get even more by adding a 4-week trial subscription to Education Week. This trial offer of 4 weeks of print and online access is available for only a short time at: http://enews.edweek.org/GoNow/a15864a167576a424495831a8.

Tell your colleagues about the complete, FREE access to Diplomas Count and our Open House!

See you there,

Virginia B. Edwards
Editor and Publisher

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