A Monthly Summary of News and Events
Vol. 9 No. 8 - August 2006
This newsletter is sponsored by EEG Spectrum International Intl, Inc.,
a leader in providing clinical service and training professionals.
Past issues are available at start.eegspectrum.com/Newsletter/
Information on how to subscribe or cancel a subscription appear at the end.
The opinions related in this newsletter reflect those of the author only.
Copyright (C) 2005 by David Kaiser or ESII. All rights reserved.
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All links at: news.yahoo.com/fc/Science/Brain_Research
Nearly all educators want smaller schools. Smaller schools serve our children best. So why then are public schools so large? How did America go from English High in 1821, the first public secondary school in America, to Patrick Henry High in Roanoke, Virginia with a current enrollment of 1,821 students?
For most of our history America has been a nation of small schools. The proverbial one-room school house with a single school marm was synonymous with public education for most of the past century. In 1910 five out of six elementary schools employed a single teacher and most consisted of a single room or two. By mid-century nearly half of all elementary schools remained one-teacher schools but circumstances had already begun to change. Between 1930 and 1970 state and local agencies closed and consolidation schools at a record pace, mostly in an effort to increase resources and improve cost efficiency. But with school consolidation came crowding, especially as the general population rose, and along with crowding came its traditional responses such as competition, aggression, and violence. Violence in schools has to some degree become not just tolerated but accepted and expected - how else can one explain that 738,000 violent crimes were committed at schools last year with little media attention? More than 30 million crimes were committed in our public schools over the past decade. Think about that number. Thirty million! Children are now more likely to be the victim of a crime at school than away from school. That is a true figure. 28 million crimes were committed away from school against children during the same time frame.
Girls are 17 % more likely to be a victim at school than away, boys 23 % more likely. Schools were once a protective haven and parents sent their children there to keep them safe and off the streets, but now the streets are safer than the schools. Nearly three-quarters of public schools will experience one or more violent incidents this year. Why? What has happened?
Take the state of California. California once possessed the best public educational system in the nation but in the last 20 years the state of California has built 33 new prisons and a single university. It increased its juvenile detention centers by 50 percent over the past five years, or more when one factors in the dozens of impersonal mega-schools built during this time. Mega-schools are high schools with student enrollment above 2,000 and last year 23 new monstrosities were opened nationwide. Add this to the other 1,414 mega-schools already operating in this country, and take a look into one, and the reason for school violence and dropping test scores and other social ills will become apparent. We've come a long way from the one-room school house in only 50 years, but all of it in the wrong direction. Nearly one in ten public high schools in America is now a mega-school and one in four teenagers are now warehoused in a mega-school. We are building the wrong kind of buildings for our children.
Some believe that small schools are more costly per student. But because small schools are more accountable to students they actually cost significantly less per graduate than larger schools. A 1998 study of New York City schools determined that dropout rates of schools below 600 enrollments were nearly a third below larger schools and cost less per graduate than larger schools. The largest public school in the country, Belmont Senior High in Los Angeles with an incomprehensible enrollment of 5,410 students consists mostly of freshmen and sophomores as only 33% of students entering school at this megaschool graduate. The National Association of Secondary School Principals now recommends that secondary schools be capped at 600 students, and the Cross City Campaign for Urban School Reform recommends a limit of 500 students. Ironically, the lead advocate for school and district consolidation would have suggested even smaller enrollments. In 1959 and again in 1967 James Conant, past president of Harvard University, contended that the small high school was the number one problem in education and advocated for its elimination through district and school consolidation. However small then was 30 in a graduating class, and he advocated for at least a 100 Seniors in order to provide a diverse curriculum to equip students to met the challenges of the modern world. But once a process is started, some of the original ideas are often lost. Since 1940, 200,000 public elementary and secondary schools have been whittled down to a third, 65,000 in 2005, despite a 70% increase in population. The number one problem in education today is the large school.
Children undergo the longest period of socialization of any animal, a dependency of two decades or longer. Intelligence, along with the disproportionately large cortex, is in great part an adaptation to the special complexities of primate social life. The size of our brain limits the number of individuals we can significantly interact with on a regular basis. This so-called natural group size, when exceeded, is socially unstable and often results in social conflict and group splintering. One hundred and fifty (150) is the size of many hunter-gatherer bands and horticultural villages, groups humans survived within for the vast majority of our species' history. Throughout history when people are faced with too many faces, too much competition or social complexity, their response has commonly been to leave, to separate. Bands and villages splinter into daughter groups and move apart when there are too many people to feed and figure out. Humanity spread across the globe in a relatively short time in part because of the constant process of division down to appropriate-sized social groups.
Grade size in public high schools as a function of locale (School year 2002).
Locale High schools Median Largest Grade Size
Number Grade Size Size Above 150
City 2,054 408 1,522 93 %
Suburb 3,832 303 1,289 82 %
Town 2,175 159 745 53 %
Rural 4,980 86 1,244 25 %
All Locales 13,041 185 1,522 57 %
Primatology, the study of non-human primates, provides clear and simple insights into adolescent behavior. All adolescent primates, human or animal, strive for social status, which is especially true for males. The use of aggression, even violence, to improve social status is nothing new to our species. Witness the current events around the world. How many violent acts are acts to improve social status? All of them. The emergence of mega-schools, high schools with enrollments in the thousands, has simply made adolescent status competition more lethal and indiscriminant. Each year nearly 1 in 10 high school students report being bullied at school, and more report being threatened or injured with a weapon. Most teenagers in public high schools today are surrounded by strangers. Some children thrive in large anonymous groups, but most do not. Has my child been harmed by attending a larger school - well, more to the point, has half of him or her been damaged, her right (nondominant) hemisphere of the brain, the social brain. Probably -- if he or she spent any significant time in such an environment.
Intellectual development necessarily suffers in such massive social settings as a great proportion of time and resources are spent maintaining an orderly learning environment at the expense of learning. Behavioral regulation through face-to-face interaction and rapport is beyond the capabilities of student, teachers, and administrators in larger schools so formal institutions of security must be employed. When group size is natural, 150 or less for adults, we police ourselves. When above, we need formal methods of social control - we need police.
A simple test to assess right brain ability in children (and adults) is the Street Test, a silhouette closure task (see below or http://start.eegspectrum.com/Newsletter/street.jpg) which has been used to identify right hemisphere dominance in both individuals and cultures. Recent data with college students which I collected suggests a right hemispheric decline associated with grade size in school (see Figure 1, http://start.eegspectrum.com/Newsletter/stresult.jpg). The right brain is the social brain: inhibit its development, curb its maturation, and you'll produce social retardation and conflict, even violence. As I told my students, tongue in cheek, feel free to use this data to bring a lawsuit against your school district for damaging half of your brain.
Figure: Right Brain performance (smoothed) for 80 college students.
Items are 1-10 are (1) eagle; violin, dog; horse and rider; sprinter; (6) rabbit; knight on horseback, boxers; adult couple; baseball player at bat
-DK
News & Reviews
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Composition of brain oscillations in ongoing EEG during major depression disorder.
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Major depression affects brain activity in most of the cortex and across much of the frequency spectrum.
Behavioral Electrophysiology of Psychostimulants.
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A dopamine-glutamate interaction influences amphetamine-induced activation of striatal neurons.
Functional connectivity at EEG alpha and beta frequency bands in opioid-dependent patients.
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Brain functional connectivity was disrupted by chronic opioid abuse.
Disordered connectivity in the autistic brain
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Autism appears to consists of an abnormality of information integration that is caused by a reduction in the connectivity between specialized areas of the brain.
Intra-Subject Variability in ADHD
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ADHD groups are best identified not by mean performance but variability across the group.
Imaging cerebral activity in recovery from chronic traumatic brain injury
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Examined the effect of an alternative intervention for TBI and discovered hindbrain involvement in recovery (cerebellar hemispheres, vermis).
Partially enhanced thalamocortical functional connectivity in autism.
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Authors argue against general underconnectivity in autism and instead suggest hyperfunctional subcortico-cortical connectivity, which may compensate for reduced cortico-cortical connectivity.
Volumetric alterations of the orbitofrontal cortex in autism.
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Autistic individuals show decreased gray matter volume of right lateral orbitofrontal cortex.
Frontal EEG asymmetry and the risk for anxiety and depression.
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Frontal EEG alpha asymmetry was related to risk for anxiety and depression in young adult females only.
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Conferences for Neurofeedback Clinicians & Researchers | ||
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| CONFERENCE | LOCATION | DATES |
| ISNR - www.isnr.org | Atlanta GA | Sep 7-10 |