Education Week - September 26, 2012 - 12

EDUCATION WEEK

SEPTEMBER 26, 2012

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BLOGS of the WEEK
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Graphic Novels in the Classroom? Why Not!
I found myself at the Baltimore Convention Center recently, attending the annual two-day Maryland comic book extravaganza known as the Baltimore Comic-Con, where I attended a panel on using comics in the classroom. John C. Weaver, an English teacher at Williamsport Area High School in central Pennsylvania, was one of the panelists. He said using graphic novels in the classroom provides significant advantages: They appeal both to strong and reluctant readers; they encourage students to better understand “visual grammar” (how sequenced images relate to one another); and they can help students develop strategies for analyzing text and images, which he noted supports the English/language arts common-core requirement of understanding text complexity. Weaver has had success using elements of James Joyce’s classic tome Ulysses in conjunction with Ulysses ‘seen,’ an online graphic novel by Robert Berry and several collaborators. Berry created the comic with a group of like-minded people as a first foray (among many planned) to foster “understanding of public domain literary masterworks by joining the visual aid of the graphic novel with the explicatory aid of the Internet,” according to an explanation on the comic’s website. The aim is to help preserve the vitality, and proliferation, of masterworks for the future. Weaver said the lesson has led some of his students to become Joyce fans, which is no small feat for such a difficult text as Ulysses. RHSengeAdSmallUpdate7-12_Layout 1 7/24/12 As a side note, during the panel Weaver also

summarized methods that he’s used in his 12th grade English class to teach Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen, a graphic novel set in an alternate reality in 1985 where the world is on the brink of nuclear war and superheroes are either outlawed or government agents. Watchmen is not your run-of-the-mill graphic novel. In 2005, it made Time magazine’s list of top 100 Englishlanguage novels written since 1923. According to Weaver, Watchmen’s complexity and literary merit make it a rich text to study and explore inside the classroom.
—CATHERINE A. CARDNO

Black-Male Diploma Rates Lag
By Lesli A. Maxwell
The four-year graduation rate for black males has steadily improved during the last decade, but remains dismally low compared with the rate for their white male peers, according to a study released last week. In its fifth biennial report on graduation rates for African-American males, the Schott Foundation for Public Education found that in 2009-10, 52 percent of black males graduated from high school with a regular diploma within four years. It’s the first time that more than half of the nation’s African-American boys did so, according to Schott’s report. But the significance of that progress would seem to be blunted by the report’s comparison with white, non-Hispanic males, whose four-year graduation rate for the same school year was 78 percent. The gap between black and white males has closed by only 3 percentage points in 10 years. The Schott Foundation also included the national graduation rate for Latino males for the first time, which was slightly higher than that for black males, at 58 percent. The report draws on federal, state, and district data. “We recognize the progress, but at that rate it would take over 50 years for black males to be on par with white, non-Hispanic males,” John H. Jackson, the president and chief executive officer of the Cambridge, Mass.-based Schott Foundation said in an interview. “The data have shown consistently slow progress, which indicates that black and Latino males are being ignored.” Among the 10 states that had the most black males enrolled in public schools (all of them had more than 160,000 such students), North Carolina, Maryland, and California posted the strongest graduation rates at 58 percent, 57 percent, and 56 percent, respectively. New York had the worst graduation rates for black males at 37 percent. Illinois and Florida were also among the lowest with graduation rates of 47 percent for AfricanAmerican boys. Three of the four states with the highest graduation rates for black males were those where the enrollment numbers are small. Maine, with 2,870 black males enrolled, had a rate of 97 percent, while Vermont, with just under 900 black males enrolled, had a rate of 82 percent. Utah, where more than 4,500 black males were enrolled, had a rate of 76 percent. Of any state that enrolled more than 10,000 black males, Arizona had the best graduation rate for such students at 84 percent, which was two percentage points higher than white, non-Latino males. “The bottom-line issue about black male achievement is that the schools that most of these students attend are not as good as those attended by their white peers,” said Michael Holzman, a researcher for the Schott Foundation and author of the report.

| NEWS | K-12 Parents and the Public

Index Rates ‘Parent Power’
The “Parent Power Index,” a new interactive online tool from the Center for Education Reform, is designed to show parents how much influence they have over certain aspects of their children’s education in their state. To create its index, the Washington-based organization used a select group of indicators that reflect its pro-charter position. The criteria include: charter schools, school choice, teacher quality, and the availability of online learning. Indiana is ranked No. 1 and Montana No. 51. The index highlights whether a state has a “parent trigger” law or a “pro-reform governor.” Each state summary includes “Fast Facts,” such as the graduation rate, average sat and act scores, national assessments results, perpupil funding, transparency, and public school enrollment. “The Parent Power Index represents the first time someone has quantified for parents how much power they do or don’t have over their child’s education,” cer President Jeanne Allen said in a statement. —MICHELE MOLNAR
To see all Education Week blogs, 12:37go to edweek.org/go/blogs. PM Page 1

Top Performers
States with large enrollments of Latino males that produced the best graduation rates were Arizona at 68 percent, New Jersey at 66 percent, and California at 64 percent. New York, which had an enrollment of more than 305,000 Latino males, had the worst graduation rate for them at 37 percent. Among states with high graduation rates for black males, Montgomery County, Md., and Newark, N.J., tied at the top, graduating 74 percent of African-American males—but posted slightly lower graduation rates for Latino males. One of the most persistent problems for black male achievement, the report contends, is the ongoing “pushout” problem. African-American boys are far more likely than their white peers to be suspended outside of school, expelled, or placed in alternative settings. A recent analysis of federal civil rights data covering about half of all districts in the nation showed that nearly one in six African-American students was suspended from school during the 2009-10 school year—more than three times the rate of their white peers. The new report comes just a few weeks after the lagging achievement of black males was highlighted at a national summit at the U.S. Department of Education, where educators and policymakers discussed solutions and strategies for capitalizing on the momentum from President Barack Obama’s creation earlier this summer of a special initiative on the educational achievement of AfricanAmericans.
Scan this tag with your smartphone for a link to “The Urgency of Now: The Schott 50 State Report on Public Education and Black Males” www.edweek.org/links

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Education Week - September 26, 2012

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - September 26, 2012