Numbers are so amazing -- especially when they seem so specific. I find myself temporarily blinded - don't you? (Statisticians and significant digits)
Life of an online teacher Joanne Jacobs: Kristin Kipp, national online teacher of the year, talks about teaching high school online.
NPR's Guy Raz reports on a new study from the Pew Research Center on the decline of "the American Dream." "Does America Promote Mobility As Well As Other Nations?" suggests that it is now easier to climb up the economic ladder in Europe and Canada than it is in the U.S. It concludes, that in America, "there is a stronger link between parental education and children's economic, educational, and socio-emotional outcomes than in any other country investigated." The big problem is "stickiness at the bottom," meaning that poor American kids have less chance of improving their lives. France is a great example of the educational path not taken in the United States. French children who participated in universal pre-K "saw significant increases in their monthly wages, and that has a difference in their mobility prospects over time."-JT (@drjohnthompson)Image via.
Online Schools Score Better on Wall Street Than in Classrooms NYT: Current and former staff members of K12 Inc. schools say problems begin with intense recruitment efforts that fail to filter out students who are not suited for the program. Online schools typically are characterized by high rates of withdrawal.
New teacher contract could shut down Los Angeles school choice program LA Times: The competition for schools could end immediately, however, if teachers approve a tentative three-year pact with L.A. Unified this week. ALSO: L.A. county hit by a rash of tuba heists USA Today
States Creating New Districts to Steer ‘Turnarounds’ EdWeek: Experts say the “new breed” of turnaround districts getting under way in Louisiana, Michigan, and Tennessee require new kinds of leaders.
Race to the Top Likely to Stick Around Politics K-12: Lawmakers are putting the finishing touches on a bill financing the U.S. Department of Education for the rest of the fiscal year (which goes until Sept. 30, 2012). And it looks like the Obama administration's signature education reform initative—Race to the Top—is going to get another year of funding.
Unemployed teachers finding work as nannies Chicago Tribune: As job prospects across the state and nation remain bleak for new and laid-off teachers — more than 8,800 Illinois teachers received pink slips in 2010, according to officials — many are finding welcome work as nannies and baby sitters.
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When companies treat talent as a commodity, the consequences are severe. It takes years to repair a reputation. -- Recent Washington Post article about brutal working conditions (and aggressive use of performance metrics) at the highly profitable company responsible for Farmville, Mafia Wars, and Words With Friends
Via The New Yorker. Bonus peer review cartoon below.
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Race to the Top Likely to Stick Around Politics K12: Race to the Top would be funded in the bill, soon to be introduced. For the first time it would include a district-level competition, sources say.
January 7: National Opt Out Day teacherken: Posting for your information a message that is being widely distributed among some educational lists and Facebook groups (see image).
Santorum Concerned Gay Marriage Will Be Taught In Schools HuffPost: Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum said he is concerned about legalized gay marriage spilling over into lessons in the classroom, during ...
U.S. school excuses challenged Jay Mathews: The percentage of resilient students in the United States is below the PISA average. Twenty-seven countries, including Mexico, are ahead of us.
Why Should We Care About Integrating Schools? GOOD (Bill Kurtz): We need to put as many resources into opening high-performing, economically and racially integrated public schools as we do into schools that focus solely on low-income students.
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Jodi Weigand's "Consultants Eat Up Pittsburgh School's Gift," in The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, reports that 68% of the first $19 million dollars of the Gates Foundation grant for improving teacher quality is being spent on consultants. Hillsborough County Public Schools and Memphis City Schools also have spent most of their grant money on contractors and consultants. Pittsburgh signed a $6.8 million dollar contract for information services, which makes sense because the district could not be expected to create data systems for measuring teacher effectiveness without outside help. Consultants might have also been helpful in drafting the goal of increasing the number of college-ready graduates by 20%. It's anybody's' guess, however, whether consultants actually contribute to the real-world process of improving the instruction those students get, or whether the systems and programs they create will end up being effective.-JT (@drjohnthompson)Image via.
Here's the #TUDA 2011 data for charter schools in ATL, Baltimore City, Chicago, Houston, Miami-Dade, and Milwaukee, compiled by NAPCS and presented with all the usual caveats regarding selection and demographic differences. Reacting to a Dana Goldstein post about DCPS scores under Michelle Rhee, I complained last week that it seemed strange charters weren't included in TUDA data when they're (a) part of the geographic unit and (b) included in state NAEP data. I argued that in places with lots of charter school kids and a pro-charter superintendent like Rhee or Vallas it makes sense to look at charter scores as well as district scores even though there's no bureaucratic responsibility involved. Parents certainly don't care whether the schools are charter or not, or even who has official responsibility. They just want good schools. What about the other 15 TUDA districts? It's a sample size problem, we're told, though there's no reason I can think of that data collectors couldn't find a big enough sample in DC charters or New Orleans or LA given how many charter kids are there.
Speaking of technology, the weekly EdSurge hasn't ignored all the skeptical press that online and blended learning has been getting in the mainstream press, dutifully linking to stories in The Nation, Mother Jones, and the New York Times -- but the folks behind the Gates-funded newsletter don't think that the negative coverage is going to make much difference (they may well be right) and they seem to think that the pushback against critical stories has already been felt at the Gray Lady: "The NYTimes, perhaps a little weary from the flak over Matt Richtel's pieces, has noticeably broadened its coverage with some pro-edtech reports." (Mayor Bloomberg's recent remarks about firing teachers and replacing them with computers are described as "un-PC.") It's good that they're including critical stories, and the newsletter is full of interesting market tidbits, but wouldn't it be great if it also included some of the cautions and critical distance you often hear from even the most enthusiastic edtech supporters -- more than just linking out? There are smart ideas and operations in this space, and there are also folks that are just here for the goldrush, and it wouldn't be such a bad thing for EdSurge or the rest of us to get some help telling the one from the other. Or maybe I just haven't read it enough and am annoyed that the updates come in email form only. Thoughts?
Here's something you may not have heard of yet -- or at least I hadn't -- the Teaching Channel. It's a relatively new Gates-funded nonprofit video site and online lesson planning tool that might or might not "revolutionize lesson planning." The lesson planner sounds like a sort of Instapaper for teachers -- allowing you to gather things as you surf and organize them later -- plus it has a calendar function with reminders. There's also a weekly broadcast element via WNET. There've been a couple of writeups including this one in KQED's MindShift (Five Big Changes to the Future of Teacher Education). Of course, the big question is how the content is -- hard to tell at this early stage. The handful of folks I asked about it hadn't heard much or used it yet, though apparently there was something called Teachers TV in the UK that was good (but exists no longer).
Romney Hits Gingrich on Child Labor Law Stance PoliticsK12: Meanwhile, Gingrich also said that an entry janitor in New York City schools get pays twice as much as an entry level teacher. He may have gotten that fact from this story, which shows that the figure is true at least one high school in the Bronx.
Newark School District in Debate Over State Control NYT: The state took over Newark schools in 1995, but with an influx of money, some parents and officials have begun to seek more local control.
State Takeovers of School Districts Have Had Mixed Results NYT: Turning control of districts over to the state has improved test scores in places like Philadelphia and Oakland, Calif., but hasn’t solved every problem.
U.S. opens its doors to Iraqi students USA Today: The State Department and Iraqi government are stepping up efforts to enroll thousands of Iraqi students in American universities.
Web Tutors Become Stars Far From Classroom NYT: Sites have grown exponentially, helped by hordes of grateful parents whose dim memories of algebra or trigonometry are not enough to help with their children's homework.
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Honest Progress in Atlanta Schools? Educated Reporter: Atlanta's long-term trend of improved NAEP performance suggests there could be real improvement taking root. In other words, nobody had to cheat. ALSO: Which Districts to Avoid When Reincarnated as a Poor Child… Matthew Ladner
A Couple Thoughts on Tuesday’s NYT Op-Ed Rick Hess: I’ve noticed that Andy seems to have developed a tic: whenever I make an argument he deems insufficiently “reformy,” he accuses me of triangulation.
Repairing a Culture of Blame David B. Cohen: Assume good intentions. Avoid fundamental attribution error. Understand what motivates people. Work like crazy to create the conditions in which people have a sense of shared purpose.
The student teacher tsunami turns rogue wave NCTQ: Don't [the folks at NEA] get that the only way a system struggling to place the current number of teacher candidates with effective mentor teachers for one semester of clinical practice can be transformed into a smoothly functioning system that places teacher candidates with effective mentors for two semesters is with magic?
We Need To Talk About Kevin Slate: Source material doesn’t get much grimmer than Lionel Shriver’s 2003 novel in which the mother of a boy who has gone on a killing spree at school reflects on her son’s pre-massacre life as a miserable budding sociopath.
This Cancer-Curing Teenager Is Probably Smarter Than You The Atlantic Wire: The research itself sounds pretty amazing, regardless of Zhang's age. The Cupertino, California girl -- who also happened to be the only female finalist in the contest -- describes her discovery as a "Swiss Army knife of cancer treatments."
VP Biden stops to talk to a bunch of kids by the roadside and Duncan steps out to join the party just in case. None of the kids (or adults) seem to notice Duncan standing there until Biden tells them who Duncan is (in charge of the whole education department... and a great basketball player). Then it's back into the car. [Thanks for sending this in!]
Cognitive scientist Dan Willingham and Core Knowledge's Robert Pondiscio make two excellent observations about the continued rise in NAEP math scores, in contrast to the stagnation in reading. Firstly, unless you conclude that math teachers are better than reading teachers, the different patterns are a powerful argument against the theory that teacher quality should be the driver of school improvement. This is especially true in 4th grade, where increases have been the greatest, but the same people teach both subjects. It is also a strong argument for the importance of curriculum. Math instruction is particularly amenable to being aligned in a coherent manner. The issue, Willingham and Pondiscio would probably agree, is whether schools are improving reading comprehension, as opposed to better decoding of words that go into one ear and out the other. Are children learning how to read so they can read to learn? This is the most important academic skill that children need for the 21st Century. Teachers and curriculum are important, but the overwhelming issue is the creation of cultures of reading and of learning how to learn. That challenge is far tougher than aligning math instruction and assessments. -JT (@drjohnthompson)Image via.
It's not easy to get anything that feels like a complete picture of the current advo-political landscape these days, in education or more broadly. The rules have changed, the organizations are new and named confusingly, and the money is pouring in from everywhere (much of it undisclosed). But some things are becoming clearer. Lots of left-leaning publications are seeking to bring to light the growth and spread of conservative, big-business, and Tea Party money in the American political system -- just as they should be doing (see Mother Jones here). And lots of center- and right-leaning publications understandably like to share details about labor spending (especially when it doesn't seem to have helped). Philanthrogeeks like Lucy Bernholz, who pointed me to the Mother Jones story in a recent blog post, go a little bit farther and describe the connections between political advocacy and social advocacy in an age in which some nonprofits are focusing on political advocacy to help their causes or being created solely for advocacy purposes. In this new world Bernholz describes, foundations and people with lots of money are being asked to choose between three basic options: funding programs and services (so '90s!), funding issue-based advocacy efforts (so 2008!), and partisan/ideological initiatives paid for through traditional channels like the DNC and RNC or new SuperPACs like Priorities USA on the left or American Crossroads on the right (so 2010!). Nonprofit development directors who once had only to compete with each other for money now have to compete with advocacy efforts and political SuperPACs. She calls it the new social economy.
I was with @danagoldestein's recent post on achievement gaps in DCPS right up until the point at which she revealed that the numbers she was using -- NAEP TUDA stats just released this week -- didn't include charter schools. Of course it's not Goldstein's fault that charters aren't included -- a fact I hadn't known and really needs to be addressed. But the absence of charter school data undercuts her argument that achievement gaps remain large in DC (and by extension that Michelle Rhee's reign was largely ineffective) because it means so many low-income minority kids are left out of the NAEP data. The ever-helpful Jay Mathews tells us that there are 53 charters in DCPS serving 40 percent of DCPS students. Not all of those are high performing schools, of course, and DCPS like most urban districts doesn't have direct oversight of charter schools, but I feel that the presence, growth, and whatever impact the charter schools have had on DCPS students accrues in part to her. Someone figure out how to get NAEP scores for a sample of charter kids into TUDA and then we can really see what the achievement gap looks like in DCPS.
Some States Move Away from Exit Exams EdWeek: Three states—Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee—have changed their policies so that students will no longer be required to take those tests, according to a new report by the Center on Education Policy.
NEA Stakes a Claim in Teacher Effectiveness Debate EdWeek: A National Education Association commission issued a report today with specific recommendations for upping pre-service requirements, establishing career paths for teachers, and developing new evaluation systems.
At Va. Tech: 'We're just sad that this happened again' USA Today: As Virginia Tech officials and police locked down the campus following a shooting Thursday, shock set in.
Brother of VP Biden promotes charters, invoking family name Washington Post: Francis W. “Frank” Biden, a younger brother of Vice President Joe Biden, is a real estate developer in Florida. He also is helping a for-profit company open charter schools in the state by employing a major asset: his last name.
Health Care Law Yields More Grants for School-Based Health Centers Politics K-12: More school-based health clinics will be upgraded, expanded, or built from scratch—at least one will move out of a janitor's closet—that will also add enough capacity eventually to serve about 53,000 additional students across the country, thanks to a fresh infusion of federal cash.
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Slowly Brightening Education Picture Matt Yglesias: But some very large school districts -- most notably Clark County in Nevada, a bunch of non-Miami Florida districts, and Dallas, TX -- seem to prefer to wallow in ignorance. There's really no excuse for this.
Do Teachers Care About Pay? New America: It's school policies that diminish their calling and impede rather than support effective teaching and meaningful learning.
All in the Family: Teens, Sex, & Politics TAPPED: So why, on the one hand, is the LGBT movement getting some love from the administration—not just in this announcement, but on DOMA, DADT repeal, and more—while women are getting b*tch-slapped?
Education's Battle at Wounded Knee Steve Perry: My sons still want to play-date with the Obama daughters, and my wife still wants to know who does his wife’s hair, so I have no business questioning the president. I very badly want be on his side, yet I am dumbfounded as to how Obama has let the GOP upstage him on education.
NEA Announces “New Action Agenda” Larry Ferlazzo: I’m assuming many so-called “school reformers” will immediately criticize the report as “too little, too late,” but most would say the same no matter what the union proposed. INDEED: NEA’s “New Action Agenda” Looks a Lot Like ’90s Era “New Unionism” EIA
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Looking back at nearly 100 school closures and turnarounds, the folks at WBEZ Chicago Public Radio and Catalyst Chicago find that roughly 60 percent of the schools brought in to replace or transform low-performing programs are doing OK or better (Level 2 or Level 1 in Chicagospeak) -- but less than 20 percent are at Level 1 and many of those are charters or other special programs.
And so, the issue of whether the replacement schools are at all comparable to the ones they succeeded is the subject of heated debate -- as is the question whether the improvements are big enough or broad-based enough to justify continuing to do turnarounds and replacements and all the upheaval and job churn they entail. (Like many other cities, Chicago operates under a state testing and rating system that is considered to lack rigor and has been changed several times over the past decade.)
To see the map and the spreadsheet click here.
Shown: People who make graphs and charts vs. people who understand the difference between correlation and causation (via I Love Charts)
Urban school students do better in reading, math WSJ: Students in urban schools are doing better in reading and math, even in Atlanta, which has been embroiled in a cheating scandal on state exams.
Some New York City Scores Dip in NAEP Tests NYT: Even with the recent decline, New York City’s fourth- and eighth-grade math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress are still up since 2003.
City students remain in bottom third on test vs. other cities Baltimore Sun: Students showed slight progress in math, but achievement is within the bottom third of urban districts nationwide
D.C. public schools show largest black-white achievement gap in major national test Washington Post: The largest achievement gap between black and white students among major urban school systems belongs to DCPS, according to the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress.
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Why Innovation Can't Fix America's Classrooms Marc Tucker: Forget charter schools and grade-by-grade testing. It's time to look at the best-performing countries and pragmatically adapt their solutions.
Pondering Khan Academy Inside Higher Ed: At best, Khan Academy is a good idea with a lot to prove, says Carol Twigg, CEO and president of the National Center for Academic Transformation. At worst, it is "just another repository scheme" that will stagnate once the buzz dies down. Via Tyler Cowen
NYC students’ scores on national test are flat GothamSchools: Only one of the districts, North Carolina’s Charlotte-Mecklenburg, posted significant gains in reading, and nine districts showed significant gains in math.
You Big Bully E.J. Graff: The best hold teachers and school administrators accountable for intervening and rechanneling excessively cruel behavior... but some are written so broadly that they can be used to over-litigate schools and to rush to punish children instead of intervening and teaching them better ways to behave.
Five People to Watch in Education in 2012 Scholastic: David Banks, John Covington, Freeman Hrabowski, Dwight Jones, Heather Staker. (Scholastic Administrator sponsors this blog.)
Speaking of money, CUNY professor Robin Rogers is working on a new book called Billionaire Philanthropy and guest-blogging this week at the Education Optimists (Billionaire Education Policy). She notes several familiar themes -- the connections between philanthropy and policymaking, the small but growing coverage of the influence of philanthropy on political decisions -- then highlights the financial obligations and tradeoffs that even the most generously supported philanthropic efforts require and calls for increased scrutiny. "A handful of wealthy individuals and families control a large amount of this country’s wealth, and their “philanthropy” is beginning to feel more like governance." Somewhere in the middle, far away from extremes of unquestioning obedience or overheated paranoia, is a good place to be on this whole private money in education issue, and perhaps Rogers or someone else like her will occupy that space.
Lee Fang's "How Online Learning Companies Bought America's Schools, in The Nation, provides the reminder that educators need regarding the primary threat to public education. Since the election of Barack Obama, teachers have concentrated on attacks on unions and the micromanaging of schooling from the Left. Fang, however, reminds us that it the Right that is most skillful in using philanthropy as "a Trojan horse" in order to destroy schools as we know them. The biggest danger is the alliance between "the billionaires boys club" and corporate-types like Rupert Murdoch who see schools as a $500 billion untapped market. Fang cites the political advice of one "reformer," Richard Berman, "rather than 'intellectualize ourselves into the [education reform] debate…is there a way that we can get into it at an emotional level?'" Berman then added, “we need to hit on fear and anger. Because fear and anger stays with people longer." Berman has run glossy ads in Washington, DC. and New Jersey that portray teachers unions as schoolyard bullies and one even seems to compare teachers to child abusers.-JT (@drjohnthompson)Image via.
Don't forget -- urban district #TUDA NAEP scores coming out soon.
Number of students attending charter schools soars AP: The number of students attending charter schools has soared to more than 2 million as states pass laws lifting caps and encouraging their expansion, according to figures released Wednesday.
Lady Gaga discusses anti-bullying at White House AP: The pop singer met with Obama administration staffers on the issue and afterward, Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett praised the star as "a source of strength for many young people who feel isolated and scared at their schools."
Is Gingrich an Edu-Flip-Flopper? Politics K-12: The GOP's presidential frontrunner, Newt Gingrich, has one of the longest records on K-12 policy in the Republican field. His views on education have gotten a lot of attention lately. But they have been—and seem to still be—all over the map.
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A Much-Needed Charter School Unionization Report EIA: Charter schools that unionize through employee vote are a rarity, which might explain why such occurrences always get media play. Worrying about this becoming a trend or a movement is a waste of time and emotion.
Gopher It! Eduwonk: As policymakers innovate with [unions as authorizers] the twin principles of public oversight and accountability for quality must be at the forefront and it’s too soon to tell yet f they will be as these initiatives play out.
Is School Choice Failing DC? Matthew Yglesias: The trends are positive, especially for younger kids. So the question we should be asking is what's been driving improvements in DC public schools.
Why Education Innovation Tends to Crash and Burn Hessinator: All of this helps to explain why "innovation" is a term of endearment in an Apple store, but more likely to sound like an epithet in the nearest teacher workroom or faculty lounge.
The Source Behind The Mysterious "Bottom Third" Conspiracy DFER: Di Carlo traces the origins of the claim to two different McKinsey and Co. reports.
Obama's Education Policy Stuck Between Coddling the Rich and Containing the Poor Schools Matter: And so it is that we graduate from "Change We Can Believe In" to four years later, "Change Is."
What’s not to like about Newt’s education proposal? Fordham: Oh, yes, he doesn’t suggest killing the federal Department of Education – just “shrink” it and “return power to states and communities. The Department’s only role will be to collect research and data, and help find new and innovative approaches to then be adopted voluntarily at the local level.”
I thought the problem with “adequate yearly progress” was that it is too prescriptive... I thought the thing to do was to "drop the racial subgroups and wishful-thinking accountability." -- Andy Rotherham on today's Hess/LDH NYT column
#standforchildren As you can see from this Google search of blog postings from the past week, there's been surprisingly little commentary or response from any but the most anti-reform education sites about last week's Chicago News Cooperative / NYT story on the fallout from last summer's ed reform mini-scandal involving Jonah Edelman. Old news? Nothing new to talk about? Why focus on the negative? Not at all. The CNC article details some of what's happened within Stand For Children's IL chapter since the scandal broke -- experienced new leadership, greatly reduced fundraising, and attempts to refresh for the upcoming legislative season. The organization also bolstered its East Coast capacity by merging with EEP. If it can rebound in Illinois and nationally -- there doesn't seem to be any real reason it shouldn't -- it will be a remarkable comeback that will have happened without much public cheerleading from those who are ostensibly its allies and who pontificate about education issues every day. Publicly ignoring setbacks and shunning leaders who make mistakes is is what the school reform community nearly always seems to do. These tendencies have perhaps gotten worse in recent months, as reform efforts have become challenged more vigorously, but I feel that they're problems that continue to reduce public credibility and slow the learning curve. Image via NYT.
Minneapolis Union Will Help Authorize Charter Schools EdWeek: A nonprofit body set up by the Minneapolis Federation of Teacher has been granted the authority to charter schools, in what's apparently the first such arrangement of its kind in the nation.
Iowa GOP Voters Favor Scrapping Department of Education Politics K-12: Getting rid of the U.S. Department of Education is high on the wish list of Republican voters in Iowa, who next month will hold the first-in-the-nation caucus to select a GOP presidential nominee.
Obama meets with star presidents to talk reform Washington Post: President Obama summoned several university presidents and chancellors to his office today for an unusual two-hour session devoted to the economics of higher education.
NYC ban on after-school worship services stands AP: The Supreme Court rejected on Monday a plea from a tiny evangelical church in the Bronx to overturn New York City's ban on religious worship services at public schools.
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Like I always say, everything that happens in the world also happens inside a school. School Portrait (2011)
Last week, Todd Engdahl of Ed News Colorado addressed in "School Funding Headed for Collapse" the prospect of Colorado’s school funding system hitting the wall in less than five years. This week, Engdahl reported on the costs of implementing the state's testing and educator evaluation "reforms." The State Board of Education is requesting $25.9 million from General Fund to launch new assessments. Over the next three years, the state is scheduled to spend $120 million on testing. The state's new data-driven evaluations were were scheduled to cost $50 million, but now the governor is asking for an additional $7.7 million appropriation from the General Fund. Without this new spending, it is argued, the validity of the data to be used for teacher evaluations will be suspect. After two years of budgetary shortfalls, I wonder if there is some buyer's remorse regarding Colorado's gamble that weighing a hog more can somehow make it bigger.-JT (@drjohnthompson)Image via.
"There are two things we can be sure will happen in 2012. First, hundreds of millions, probably billions, of dollars will be raised by newly created, issue-specific nonprofit organizations in the United States. Second, that money will be used for political advertising in the American presidential campaign." This line is from the annual report just out from philanthropy geek Lucy Bernholz, which gives a good overview of how privately funded advocacy is relatively small but on the rise, its potential effects, good and bad, on funding for the much larger direct services sector and the public systems (like education) that are the focus of intended improvements. "We will see hundreds of millions of dollars with specific political intentions flow through nonprofit organizations in 2012. We can only guess at their cumulative effect."
This is a school? I thought it was a museum.
-- South Philadelphia senior Terence Lewis visiting a suburban school (via Mike Klonsky)
Chicago to join Gates Foundation charter compact Catalyst: Chicago Public Schools officials are set to sign on to a national intiaitive that encourages stronger cooperation between charter schools and traditional schools, as well as providing equitable district funding for charters.
Tiny church in NYC awaiting Supreme Court decision AP (Boston Globe): A Christian congregation with just 48 members and not even a storefront is hoping the Supreme Court will overturn a ruling that says holding its Sunday service in a Bronx public school is unconstitutional.
More NY Principals Join Teacher Evaluation Protest NYT: Almost 100 more principals have signed a letter of protest about a new state evaluation system that will rate teachers and principals based on student scores on standardized tests.
For College Admissions, 'I Am Not Asian' AP (HuffPost): The way it works, the critics believe, is that Asian-Americans are evaluated not as individuals, but against the thousands of other ultra-achieving Asians who are stereotyped as boring academic robots. Now, an unknown number of students are responding to this concern by declining to identify themselves as Asian on their applications.
Lessons for Children in Coping With Deployments NYT: Several programs at Camp Lejeune, N.C., show how the Marines have become expert at delivering high-quality school support services for children with parents at war.
Bullied Gay Teen's Poignant Video Series HuffPost: A bullied teen's poignant video has caught the eye of the blogosphere over three months after it was originally posted.
Continue reading "#LAUSD: The Story Behind John Deasy's Mystifying Labor Deal" »
NEA spent $133 million to lobby, aid allies Joanne Jacobs: Teachers’ unions are likely to lose members and dues in states that have passed anti-union measures.
Texas school district cancels Christmas events NBC News: A Texas school district's crackdown on Christmas decorations and celebrations, which it says is meant to protect all religious views, is upsetting some parents. KXAS's Amanda Guerra reports.
Baiting Teachers for a Viral Show Fordham?: The two most recent, high-publicity cases in the U.S. include a 14-year-old disabled student in Ohio, who was verbally abused by her teacher and a teacher’s aide.
The Persistence of Educational Inequality CAP: The report details that 36 percent of elementary schools have expenditures that are at least 10 percent above or below the district average for such schools. The figure for high schools is 42 percent, and for middle schools, 30 percent.
The Way of the Future: Next Steps at Khan Academy Matthew Ladner: Keep up the good work Sal. How long can it be until we see some similar platforms built for more specific niche purposes? Stay tuned…
Lamentably common misunderstanding of meritocracy Andrew Gelman: Nothing here about “hardworking” or “virtuous.” In a meritocracy, you can be as hardworking as John Kruk or as virtuous as Kobe Bryant and you’ll still get ahead—-if you have the talent and achievement. Throwing in “hardworking” and “virtuous” seems to me to an attempt (unconscious, I expect) to retroactively assign moral standing to the winners in an economic race.
#teacherpocalypse Lots of jobs have been lost over the last four years -- in manufacturing and construction especially -- but state and local government employment has gone down only a little and "education services" is on the rise:
Via The Atlantic
Previous generations have had friendly people like Isaac Asimov and Bill Nye to make the sciences more friendly to everyone. In recent years there's been all that CSI-style TV science that supposedly makes kids want to become crime scene investigators. Now we have Breaking Bad, the NSFW (warning!) cable drama that is extremely disturbing and violent and whose main character Walter is a high school chemistry teacher turned meth magician:
As a recent Forbes blog post claiming the show is the best thing on TV notes, "Science is used for all sorts of fun things... Chemistry has never been so fun. Aside from all the science-based action sequences, there’s even a few of Walter’s high school lectures that contain just enough science goodies to be really fascinating." Too bad you can't show many clips to your chemistry class without getting in trouble.
It's been an extremely rough week for charter school advocates in Chicago -- today's extremely critical Tribune editorial caps it off -- but help is apparently on the way in the form of Carly Bolger, the 10-month New Jersey charter school director who's now the incoming head of the New Schools office in Chicago. Congrats, condolences. She's moving because of a relationship, the paper reports - let's hope it's with another education type. We need more power couples.
U.S. Education Department Finds Salary Gap in Poor Schools NYT: More state and local dollars are spent on salaries in higher-income areas, the federal Department of Education found.
Gingrich Touts Controversial Janitor Proposal HuffPost: Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich defended on Thursday his controversial plan to have schoolchildren from poor neighborhoods serve as janitors.
Consultants Eat Up Pittsburgh Schools' Gift From Gates Foundation EdWeek: Two years after Pittsburgh received $40 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to increase teachers' effectiveness, the district has spent or allocated nearly a third of it.
Claim: Hershey school rejects HIV-positive Pa. boy AP: A private boarding school connected with the Hershey chocolate company says it was trying to protect other students when it denied admission to a Philadelphia-area teenager because he is HIV-positive.
Texas Schools Are Resigned to Robin Hood NYT: Although state financing of Texas public schools is still a subject of litigation, one thing is certain: the Robin Hood system of rich districts giving money to poor ones is here to stay.
On Long Island, SAT Cheating Was Hardly a Secret NYT: Charges that 20 students took SAT or ACT tests for others, or paid a test-taker, reflect the college admissions rat race.
*UPDATED: Deasy defends deal, E4E supports it (in comments)
Nobody I've been able to talk to yet has really been able to make heads or tails of the thinking behind the proposed deal announced yesterday between LAUSD and UTLA and reported in the LA Times and KPCC (LAUSD and teacher's union reach tentative agreement, Individual Los Angeles schools gain new autonomy). LAUSD superintendent John Deasy is in the air and unavailable for comment, I'm told by his press office. Ditto for Yolie Flores, though she's offered to talk with me later. In the meantime, the gist of the situation is that, after just two years of handing some schools over to outside nonprofits and charter groups including Green Dot, the charter network I wrote about in my book, the district has backed away from that approach and embraced a new setup that gives teachers and principals a lot more autonomy. "I think of this very much as unleashing the power of the professional," Deasy said during a school board meeting (as quoted in the LAT). Teams of teachers, he said, are "uniquely qualified" to drive improvement at schools "better than the system writ large." But the new proposal doesn't provide much by way of accountability or competitive pressure from what I can see and from what the reformy folks I've been able to talk to thus far are telling me. Former nonprofit head Mike McGalliard is skeptical about how the new approach will play out: "Having schools write their own plans for improvement... how is that a breakthrough exactly?" Parent Revolution head Ben Austin is similarly dubious: "Only the LAUSD could create a process to free teachers and schools from the bureaucracy, and make it so bureaucratic it could never be used." They all note that Deasy's board support has been diminished with the loss of a supporter and an increasingly uncertain 4-3 majority, and that PSC became a lame duck once Deasy arrived (in the sense that superintendents tend to pick new priorities rather than implement their predecessors'). All will be forgiven, I suppose, if Deasy can win an amazing and transformative contract, or teachers band together to do amazing things in their buildings. But as of this moment no one's exactly clear how this agreement is a step in the right direction. Said another LA reform insider who didn't want to be named, "This is not the John Deasy I know."
Paul Fanlund of The Capital Times makes two great points in his portrait of Diana Hess, the co-author, along with Paula MvAvoy, of The Political Classroom. Teaching students how to engage in class discussions is an educational best practice that really works. Secondly, it might be an antidote to the venom that Fanlund has witnessed since Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker declared political war on workers, teachers, and unions. Based on ten years of observing teachers nurture the respectful exchange of ideas, Hess shows why those methods help students learn. Hess also argues that schools must be ideologically diverse because "that's how we educate citizens." This is doubly important in the age of "the Big Sort," where Americans have segregated themselves into enclaves of the like-minded. She argues that parents who want schools to reflect their own ideological views should "rethink why they have their kids in school." I would add that the same applies to education "reformers." Too many accountability hawks only value educators who share their own vision of school "reform." But even if data-driven instruction were to become more effective in passing on information to students, do we really want graduates that do not know how to interpret, and reinterpret, evidence?-JT (@drjohnthompson)Image via.
Unemployment rates and median earnings for 2010 BLS CPS via Chart Porn. Student loan payments are not figured in, far as I can tell.
NBC's Rehema Ellis follows up on that recent NYT story about the Silivcon Valley Waldorf School with a visit to the school and some interviews with the educators there (Calif. school picks blackboards over iPads):
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The school they're profiling is private and expensive but there are a handful of public Waldorfs nationwide (more Waldorfs than Montessoris, if I remember correctly). The segment immediately following shows a regular public schools where educators are scrambling to add technology (including a shout out for Promethean).
U.S. Education Department Finds Salary Gap in Poor Schools NYT: More state and local dollars are spent on salaries in higher-income areas, the federal Department of Education found.
Schools add Internet etiquette, safety to coursework USA Today: Schools across the USA are adding coursework focused on Internet privacy, cyberbullying and electronic plagiarism.
Report Finds Chicago Charter Schools Struggling EdWeek: New research suggests many charters in Chicago are performing no better than traditional neighborhood schools and some are actually doing much worse.
In Texas, Keeping Kids In School And Out Of Court NPR: Instead of being sent to the principal's office for things like truancy or dress code violations, young people in Texas are "ticketed" by school police and sent to court with misdemeanor charges.
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