Students, you are adults in my class
September 2, 2010 By Leave a Comment
On Community College Spotlight, a veteran professor shares his first-day welcome to students: You are adults in this class. Act like adults.
Also, two major for-profit education companies are denying enrollment to high school drop-outs, even if they're able to pass a basic-skills test. These students are twice as likely to default on student loans as high school graduates or GED holders.
K-8 beats middle school in study
September 2, 2010 By 3 Comments
Students in K-8 schools do better than students who move from elementary to a stand-alone middle school, according to a Columbia University study published in Education Next. The study followed New York City students from third through eighth grade.
In the year students moved to middle school -- sixth or seventh grade -- math and English scores fell substantially compared to K-8 counterparts. Their achievement continued to decline through eighth grade.
The gap isn't explained by spending or by class size, researchers Jonah Rockoff and Benjamin Lockwood write. Cohort size -- the number of students in the same grade -- was a factor. The K-8 schools averaged 75 students in the same grade; the middle schools averaged more than 200.
Developmental psychologists have shown that adolescent children commonly exhibit traits such as negativity, low self-esteem, and an inability to judge the risks and consequences of their actions, which may make them especially difficult to educate in large groups. The combining of multiple elementary schools and their students also disrupts a student’s immediate peer group. And middle schools often serve a more diverse student population than many students encountered in elementary school.Rockoff and Lockwood aren't sure why the transition to a larger middle school is so difficult. But they believe New York City children aren't much different from students elsewhere. After interviewing the study’s lead author, Columbia Business School professor Jonah Rockoff, Martin West observes that Americans rate their local middle schools far lower than elementaries in the EdNext-PEPG Survey. "Rockoff and Lockwood’s research suggests that parents are onto something – and that the emerging trend toward shuttering middle schools and replacing them with K-8s is an encouraging development."
Punctuation haiku
September 2, 2010 By Leave a Comment
In honor of National Punctuation Day, which is Sept. 24, Jeff Rubin is sponsoring a punctuation haiku contest. Send haiku to Jeff@NationalPunctuationDay.com by Sept. 30 to be considered for prizes.
Here are some sample haikus:
Serial comma. What is your philosophy? To use or not to? Exclamation points And question marks together? Only in comics. The apostrophe: Found on both sides of letters. The right side and wrong.Here are some other ideas on how to celebrate National Punctuation Day.
LA teachers respond to ratings
September 1, 2010 By 3 Comments
Los Angeles teachers rated on effectiveness by the LA Times respond to the value-added evaluations. Some teachers are pleased to be recognized as effective; others feel their hard work and commitment has been disrespected.
Here's a link to all the teacher responses.
Many teachers do not understand value-added analysis: They think they're being judged on students' scores, not on whether students performed as well in their class as they did in previous years.
A few teachers raised real issues: The data may ignore team teaching, the availability of tutoring or the presence of exceptionally disruptive students who make it much harder for their classmates to progress. Teachers with very high-scoring students may not be able to show improvement.
Many paths to a job
September 1, 2010 By Leave a Comment
On Community Spotlight: Students think they need a four-year college degree to get a decent job, but it ain't necessarily so.
Also: A Manpower report sees a global shortage of skilled trades workers.
Jobs, jobs, jobs
September 1, 2010 By 8 Comments
Preparing students for jobs "should be front and center in the thinking of educators," writes Camille Paglia in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
The idea that college is a contemplative realm of humanistic inquiry, removed from vulgar material needs, is nonsense. The humanities have been gutted by four decades of pretentious postmodernist theory and insular identity politics.Paglia is a professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where students can work with their hands as "ceramicists, weavers, woodworkers, metal smiths, jazz drummers." They're a lot happier than students with "trendy, word-centered educations," she writes.
Jobs, jobs, jobs: We need a sweeping revalorization of the trades. The pressuring of middle-class young people into officebound, paper-pushing jobs is cruelly shortsighted. Concrete manual skills, once gained through the master-apprentice alliance in guilds, build a secure identity. Our present educational system defers credentialing and maturity for too long. When middle-class graduates in their mid-20s are just stepping on the bottom rung of the professional career ladder, many of their working-class peers are already self-supporting and married with young children. . . . educators whose salaries are paid by hopeful parents have an obligation to think in practical terms about the destinies of their charges. That may mean a radical stripping down of course offerings, with all teachers responsible for a core curriculum. But every four-year college or university should forge a reciprocal relationship with regional trade schools.A word-centered education worked fine for me. My only manual skill is touch-typing. But many young people are wasting a lot of time and money in college because their real goal is not to get an education but to get job credentials. Often they end up with a lot of debt and no degree. Walter Russell Mead predicts tough times ahead, even for the college-educated, but advises a traditional liberal arts education.
Top education books of the decade
September 1, 2010 By 2 Comments
In honor of its 10th anniversary, Education Next is conducting a readers' poll to determine the best education books of the decade. Forty-one books are listed, including my book, Our School; The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea and the Charter School That Beat the Odds. Readers can vote for their three favorites.
Diane Ravitch's The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education is way out in front.
Duncan invited staff to Sharpton rally
August 31, 2010 By 4 Comments
Education Secretary Arne Duncan invited 4,000 department employees to attend the Rev. Al Sharpton's "Reclaim the Dream" rally, organized to counter Glenn Beck's and Sarah Palin's "Restoring Honor" rally at the Lincoln Memorial, reports the Washington Examiner.
Although the e-mail does not violate the Hatch Act, which forbids federal employees from participating in political campaigns, Education Department workers should feel uneasy, said David Boaz, executive vice president of the libertarian Cato Institute. "It sends a signal that activity on behalf of one side of a political debate is expected within a department. It's highly inappropriate ... even in the absence of a direct threat," Boaz said. "If we think of a Bush cabinet official sending an e-mail to civil servants asking them to attend a Glenn Beck rally, there would be a lot of outrage over that."Brookings Institution director Russ Whitehurst, a Department of Education program director from 2001 to 2008, said, "Only political appointees would have been made aware of such an event and encouraged to attend." Sharpton's event, held on the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, featured praise of President Obama and jabs at the Tea Party, the Examiner reports.
"[Conservatives] think we showed up [to vote for Barack Obama] in 2008 and that we won't show up again. But we know how to sucker-punch, and we're coming out again in 2010," Sharpton said.In his remarks, Duncan called education "the civil rights issue of our generation." Education Department spokeswoman Sandra Abrevaya defended Duncan's decision to speak at the rally and ask department employees to attend. "This was a back-to-school event," she said. Right. President Obama will give his second annual Back to School speech on Tuesday, Sept. 14. It will be available for broadcast in schools and online. Last year's speech raised a lot of fuss, culminating in a big fizzle as Obama told students to work hard in school.
Evaluating teachers
August 31, 2010 By 4 Comments
While the debate rages about value-added analysis of Los Angeles' teachers, NPR looks at how value-added data is used in North Carolina's Winston-Salem/Forsyth County School District. The district began using the data three years ago, notes Robert Siegel, the host. The information is not made public, explains Superintendent Donald Martin
Dr. MARTIN: . . . if you're red, your students are performing two standard errors below your -- sort of comparable counterparts. If you're yellow, you're right in the average performance. And if you're green, you're two standard errors above. And if a teacher has one red, you know, their first year, then we literally just have a - it's like a growth conference with them. They have a personal, you know, individual plan. We talk to them about what are they going to do differently next year. Then in the second year, if there's two reds in a row, the teacher has consecutive reds, then we have a trigger for what we call a plan of assistance. And that plan of assistance may involve going to training. It may involve sending in some central office folks to work with that person and to really work on, you know, a very formal plan that's now, you know - could trigger dismissal at the end of the year if it is unsuccessful.Principals rarely are surprised by which teachers are red or green, Martin says. But, without data, teacher evaluations suffer from "a Lake Wobegon issue. Everybody is above average." Administrators are to blame for failing to be honest about teacher effectiveness. Value-added data is available only for a fraction of teachers, writes Sara Mead on Policy Notebook. She's concerned about the validity of classroom observations.
There is currently no value-added data for kindergarten and early elementary teachers, teachers in non-core subjects, or high school teachers in most places. My brother-in-law, who teaches middle school band and drama, and sister, who teaches high school composition and literature, do not have value-added data.When available, value-added data should be used to "inform teacher evaluations," Mead writes, but the larger issue is developing ways to evaluate all teachers. For example, the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) measures the extent to which teachers are teaching in ways linked to improved student outcomes. Mead is concerned "that the observational rubrics many districts and states will put into place under their proposed evaluation systems have not yet been validated." While an Economic Policy Institute report urges caution in relying on value-added data, others say the alternative ways to assess teachers, such as classroom observations, are much less reliable than value-added, notes Teacher Beat. "I think people are right to point out the potential flaws of [value-added modeling], but it should be compared against what we have, not some nirvana that doesn't exist," said Daniel Goldhaber, a professor at the University of Washington in Bothell. In response to teacher feedback, Houston Superintendent Terry Grier has told principals to collaborate with teachers on an individual plan setting out each teacher's goals for the year and how the principal will help the teacher meet them. The Houston Federation of Teachers sees this as a nefarious plot to make teachers look bad, writes Rick Hess. HFT is telling teachers not to admit to any performance weaknesses or allow test scores to be used to judge their success. There's a lot of fear out there. Update: Here's the New York Times' value-added story.
The future of digital learning
August 31, 2010 By Leave a Comment
How can technology help students learn? National Journal's Education Experts look at the "digital learning gap."
The recently launched Digital Learning Council and other groups are working to translate powerful ideas about technology and education to powerful results in the classroom. A minority of schools, such as School of One, are already taking advantage of technology to provide innovative instruction models.Digital learning will "boost persistence and performance" and make public education more efficient, writes Tom Vander Ark.
Virtual options will double in enrollment in the next few years, but most students will learn in blended settings that combine the best of multiple learning modalities. Blended learning hold the promise of extending quality affordable secondary education to more than 500 million young people worldwide.Sherman Dorn is skeptical. Technology is not a silver bullet, he warns.
The reality is that the appropriate and inventive use of technology in education is as much of a tough slog as anything else in a classroom. . . . In addition, I worry about “technological individualization” becoming one more boondoggle that diverts scarce resources to vendors who are far better at marketing than at programming or education. Experienced teachers around the country are already familiar with district administrators and governing boards who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on bells-and-whistles programs that would supposedly save hundreds of hours of time… and ended up being useless."Technology should be in the service of solid instruction and not the other way around," Dorn concludes. On Education Next, Mark Bauerlein critiques "the century-old child-centered premises at the root of the techno-pedagogy vision," in response to Connie Yowell, a digital learning enthusiast.
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