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REL N

Education Week: Poll: Students Grade High School Down, College Up - 2 views

  • A majority say their school wasn't good at helping them choose a field of study, aiding them in finding the right college or vocational school or assisting them in coming up with ways to pay for more schooling.
  • getting students ready for work remains central to high schools' mission.
  • most young people say their school didn't do a good job of preparing them for work or helping them choose a future career.
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  • The one category where young people rated high schools best was preparing them for further education: 56 percent say their school did a good or excellent job at that.
  • 4 in 10 young people voice strong satisfaction with their high school education.
  • Dill, now 21, self-employed and living with her father in Arcadia, La., thinks high schools should offer juniors and seniors workshops on how to get a job, how to build a career and the many educational options besides a four-year degree.
  • Almost half of college attendees feel that the schools "get" them. That's significantly more than among those whose education stopped at high school; just 3 in 10 say the school system could identify with them.
  • Nonwhite students were more likely than whites to say their high school counselors helped them, and also gave their high schools better ratings for helping find money for college.
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    Thanks for sharing. This is true and in my case and majority of my peers. My success in going to college goes to my mentors!
REL N

Charles Kolb: Educational Success: America's New Industrial Policy - 1 views

  • And we need to approach our education investment as we approach infrastructure or industrial policy.
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      NOOOO! We need to better define the type of success we can achieve given that individuals are in different places at different times in their lives. We need to support people where they are and help them move forward in areas and at a pace that is right for them. If a 16-year old is able to perform well in a college program then that is where s/he should be. If a student is gifted in math and abhors and does poorly in history, then we should nurture her/his strengths and stop holding them to their social grade level in math and wasting their time and their passion drilling them in history. Ultimately, they will be happier, more productive, and more willing to contribute to society in a math-related endeavor.
  • "define success up." Our new industrial and competitiveness policy as a nation should be focused relentlessly on those talented young children and adolescents who show educational promise. We should double, perhaps triple, federal, state, and private sector resources that support gifted-and-talented programs in our schools. We should nurture this talent the same way some institutions nurture athletic talent. This approach is not elitism; it is smart commonsense.
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      Yeah... I think we all saw what happened when we had a leader who was proud of getting "C's" in college. And, then we are not really sure if a "C" actually meant a "D-" but was given to ensure social promotion. I would not go to a surgeon who either did not want to go to medical school or was not able to succeed in her/his training. That is not elitism. It is more than simply common sense. It is effective data-driven/evidence-based decision-making. A person might be terrific and funny and caring (and perhaps rich and attractive too) but they should not be given a role beyond their knowledge and capabilities.
  • If such an exam cannot be developed within six months, then perhaps we really have wasted a lot of time over the last 30 years. Algebra in New Hampshire is not different from algebra in California. Reading skills and reading-level assessments should be the same in each state. Grammar doesn't vary across state borders, and gravity tends to work the same way everywhere. The governors are well-positioned to lead a national discussion about what our high school graduates should know and be able to do -- and then devise a test that measures the success of our young people in mastering what they need to know to be successful. The National Governors Association is already doing excellent work in this area -- but it has to move faster.
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      f we stopped the gaming in elementary and middle school testing and relied on the teachers and administrators to implement effective local testing and take appropriate actions to ensure learning, we would have more resources (time, money, people) to develop appropriate and resonable assessments at the high school level. These must be based on higher order thinking and include essays, video-taped dialogues/presentations, and some simple answer tests. The evaluation should be done by humans outside the local area and care must be taken to ensure inter-rater reliability. This is done in other countries as well as in the states with the IB diploma programme. It is do-able and the graduates will be well prepared and confident that they can move forward. Our initial pass rates may not be as high as we would like, and we need to be prepared to accept that some students may take more than 12 years or choose to take a less rigorous set of exams; however, we will have a higher level of success overall and our students will be much better prepared as citizens and workers.
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  • We need to change our approach from preventing failure to promoting success.
  • In late December 2010, the Education Trust reported that nearly 25 percent of high school graduates taking the U.S. Army entrance exam cannot answer basic questions in math, science, and reading. Some of the questions were pretty basic: "If 2 plus x equals 4, what is the value of x?"
  • all children can learn, not all children are ready to learn at the same time. If some of our classrooms have disruptive students, these students should attend other classes until they become serious about learning.
  • And finally, we should learn from the French, who for decades have had a baccalaureate exam that is a prerequisite for advancing to post-secondary education. In France, the "bac" exam is typically taken by 17- and 18-year-olds, but if a student fails the exam, he or she can take it again -- even later in life. The "bac" serves two purposes: it sets a standard for what French high school graduates know and can do, and it serves as a moment of consequence for French young people: they cannot move forward until they have proved their proficiency.
  • In several states, where testing has been adopted, we find large discrepancies between how the states report their children's performance on "No Child Left Behind" tests and the often much lower performance found by the objective National Assessment of Educational Progress.
  • resources we've squandered. We need a more tough-minded and focused approach that identifies, nurtures, and rewards success
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    I'm not sure how I feel about this blog. Part of me says "Oh no!" while the other part says that we need to make education accessible but we would be better served to go with a more individualized approach. Right now it feels as though we often cater to the lowest common denominator which is not fair to anyone. Can we learn something from the operations concept of mass customization? Educators--feedback please!! I'd love to hear what your experience tells you r.e. these issues.
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    I am intrigued if not in full agreement with this piece by Kolb. He makes good points about a national baccaulaureate exam...it's true, algebra is algebra, grammar is grammar, in all 50 states. Some of our colleagues would disagree that we need primarily focus on the best and the brightest and that those who are not ready to learn should be sequestered until they are (paraphrasing here). He says, "We really aren't serious as a nation when it comes to education," but I think that we are fast approaching a time when (I hope) it becomes a primary focus of our political debate (from Candy).
Phil Riddle

Most New York Students Are Not College Ready - 0 views

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    In New York, students are deemed "college ready" when they score at or above a certain level on the high school Regents Exams (their version of the SOL's). I took a quick look at the high school biology exam from 2001(I admit-not a scientific analysis at all), and apparently fact memorization is what you need to be successful in college.
Linda Clinton

Getting Teacher Assessment Right: What Policymakers Can Learn From Research | National ... - 1 views

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    "Given the experience to date with an overwhelming focus on student achievement scores as a basis for high-stakes decisions, policymakers would do well to pause and carefully examine the issues that make teacher assessment so complex before implementing an assessment plan. To facilitate such examination, this brief reviews credible research exploring: the feasibility of combining formative assessment (a basis for professional growth) and summative assessment (a basis for high-stakes decisions like dismissal); the various tools that might be used to gather evidence of teacher effectiveness; and the various stakeholders who might play a role in a teacher assessment system. It also offers a brief overview of successful exemplars."
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    Teacher evaluation is a big topic of our upcoming negotiations. What concerns me most is that some administrators don't complete the triennial evaluations now; how are they going to complete annual evaluations on all staff? So many questions...
Phil Riddle

Low-achieving Va. high school turns crisis into challenge - 0 views

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    This article is just about one high school but it represents the confluence of the many factors that impact public education; NCLB, Race to the Top, reform initiatives, and the achievement gap.
Victoria Schnettler

The Pulse: Name that School, Trim That Deficit - 1 views

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    Doritos High School....is that where you would like to attend, where your high school memories will be formed? The push and allowance of corporate sponsorship of schools are a response to impending and repeated education budget cuts.
Victoria Schnettler

Fighting for a High School's Community Rights to be Heard - 0 views

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    Article on the frustration of a lack of real data and the real repercussions of it....and protests...gotta love the protests.
REL N

Jack Jennings: Get the Federal Government Out of Education? That Wasn't the Founding Fa... - 0 views

  • the answer isn't to eliminate federal involvement in education. That would be a wrong-headed move that ignores our country's history and would contribute to the decline of the United States. It's also a battle that has been fought and lost before because the stakes are simply too high.
  • Federal involvement began more than 225 years ago, even before George Washington was president, when Congress passed two laws -- the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 -- to create and maintain public schools in the expanding United States.
  • The specifics of federal land grants were outlined in each of the federal acts for admitting these states.
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  • the achievement gap narrowed between adolescent white and black students. And the percentage of children with disabilities who attended public school rose from only 20 percent in 1970 to 95 percent in 2007.
  • three-fourths of all college student aid comes from federal sources, whether through the tax code, direct grants or subsidized loans.
  • These indirect subsidies of education through the federal tax code total at least $21 billion for post-secondary education, and at least $17 billion for elementary and secondary education. These amounts are almost as significant as the direct grants made by the federal government to support education.
  • "Getting the federal government out of education" would endanger the progress made by -- among others -- children with disabilities, African-American children, and women and girls
  • The achievement gap between U.S. students and their international peers deprived the national economy of as much as $2.3 trillion in 2008, according to the McKinsey Quarterly.
  • How can the country raise academic achievement if 14,000 local school districts are each making their own decisions on most key aspects of education?
  • Over the course of American history, the national government has aimed to better educate the citizenry as a basis for democracy and economic prosperity. Today, our nation must act with greater, not less, unity to improve schools.
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    Those who can afford to pay for all private K-12 and college expenses for their children may not care if the Federal government is involved in our education system. All the rest of the country needs to take heed and acknowledge the need for continued and expanded federal involvement. Without sounding flippant... do you suppose that those who might be leading the charge to get the Federal government out of education and make draconian cuts in social programs under the guise that tax burdens are too high and individualism trumps social justice are the same millionaires and billionaires who fund the tea party et al.? Sadly, the "regular folk" who are falling for that rhetoric do not recognize that they are paving their own way to..... [let's just say poverty].
Roger Mancastroppa

Cash Incentives: Yet Another Way to Destroy Quality Education | Common Dreams - 0 views

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    "For beyond the shrinkage of school curriculums to fit the narrow boundaries of annual tests, along with the disappearance of recess and play, research in poorer schools has uncovered another most tragic outcome to high stakes testing: the effective elimination of care as the ethos that has bound together teacher and child for longer than there have been schools in America."
REL N

Michelle Rhee: Education reform huckster - War Room - Salon.com - 0 views

  • "American students have improved substantially, in some cases phenomenally. In general, the improvements have been greatest for African-American students, and among these, for the most disadvantaged. The improvements have been greatest for both black and white 4th and 8th graders in math. Improvements have been less great but still substantial for black 4th and 8th graders in reading and for black 12th graders in both math and reading."
  • it should be stipulated that nobody's yet found a means or motive for cheating on NAEP surveys.
  • An exposé by USA Today reveals that scores of high-performing Washington schools displayed "extraordinarily high numbers of erasures on standardized tests. The consistent pattern was that wrong answers were erased and changed to right ones."
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  • [a]mong the 96 schools that were then flagged for wrong-to-right erasures were eight of the 10 campuses where Rhee handed out so-called TEAM awards." A
REL N

E Pluribus Unum? : Education Next - 0 views

  • And that content should be married to national standards of “proficiency” in these subjects at these grade levels, and joined to national exams by which we determine how well and by whom this is being accomplished.
    • REL N
       
      It is interesting that VA has chosen to stay out of the Core Standards frey--not because the state Board of Ed doesn't agree with the concept but because they feel that VA's SOLs are superior and more rigorous than a national core might be. Interestingly the VA performance in the chart below hovers closer to the poor end of the spectrum... not the superior end.
  • attempting to avoid bias by including everyone’s biases only generates more problems.
  • I’d probably install Core Knowledge in the primary and middle grades and the International Baccalaureate (IB) in high schools.
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  • having these things vary from state to state produces mediocrity, cacophony, waste, duplication, and confusion (see Figure 1). Survey after survey makes clear that (if the question is asked correctly) parents favor national standards and tests. Instead of letting “That’s the first step toward a national curriculum” serve as a conversation stopper, let’s deploy it as a conversation starter. Let’s acknowledge that “curriculum,” loosely defined, is supposed to be aligned with standards and appraised by assessments.
  • Let me note, finally, that I’m unimpressed by Meier’s “habits of mind” alternative to content (see below). It’s wonderfully seductive, but the serious psychologists with whose work I’m acquainted (see, for example, “Reframing the Mind,” check the facts, Summer 2004) don’t put much stock in this Howard Gardner–originated proposition that youngsters can learn skills devoid of content. It’s the absence of essential core content from her view of schooling that lies at the heart of our curricular disagreement.
  • We boiled it down to five “habits of mind” that we claimed (somewhat pompously) underlay all the academic disciplines as well as the mental and social disciplines needed for living in a complex modern society: (1) How do you know what you know? What’s the nature of your evidence? How credible is it? Compared to what? (2) Are there other perspectives? What affects our points of view? How otherwise might this be seen? (3) Are there patterns there? A sequence? A theory of cause and effect? (4) Could it be otherwise? What would happen if? Supposing that x had not happened? and (5) Who cares? Why does it matter? As you can see, they blend into each other and, in a way, just define a mind state of skepticism and informed empathy. It suggests having to take seriously the idea that one might be wrong, and so could others. We added “habits of work” like meeting deadlines and being on time and “habits of the heart” like caring about one’s impact on others.
Georggetta Howie

Online Public/Private High School Courses - 0 views

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    This site is powerhouse site for online public and private education for K-12. There are 30 states participating including Virgnia and Washington, DC. Public online course are FREE, while private online course vary in tuition.
Roger Mancastroppa

School Administration in the Federal Republic of Germany and Its Implications for the U... - 0 views

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    Germans do not use lay governance - This paper presents findings of a study that explored the governance and administration of elementary and secondary schools in Bavaria, in the Federal Republic of Germany. The sample included 12 Bavarian schools--3 each of the following 4 types of schools--elementary (Grundschulen) and secondary (Gymnasien, Realschulen, and Hauptschulen). Data were gathered from interviews with school principals or headmasters and some administrative staff, observation, and document analysis. Findings showed that the selection process for teachers in Germany is much more rigorous than in the United States. Principals are experienced classroom teachers with proven ability who continue to teach. In addition, the entire district apparatus is missing; there are no superintendents, lay boards of education, and so forth. Bavarian schools appear to function extremely well within a framework of fairly tight external control, while enjoying strong professionalism among educators and freedom from the micromanagement that all too often plagues their American counterparts. Findings underscore the need for fundamental and systemic reform in the United States; high student achievement must be preceded by advances in teacher professionalism.
REL N

Education cuts coming, but fewer than GOP wanted - Washington Times - 1 views

  • Striving Readers, a program to boost literacy rates among middle- and high-school students, takes a $250 million hit,
  • some programs not only were spared but will get more money than the administration was looking for. The Teaching of Traditional American History, designed to help fund classes devoted to U.S. history, will lose $73 million from 2010 levels but will get $46 million more this year than the administration requested.
  • Adult education will be cut by $31 million
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  • But the GOP is looking for bigger cuts and wants to reduce Pell Grant spending to “pre-stimulus levels,” cutting the annual federal allocation by about half while blaming Democrats for doubling the size of the program since Mr. Obama took office.
Phil Riddle

Study Finds High Dropout Rates for Black Males in KIPP Schools - 0 views

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    This article both highlights some of the flaws in the KIPP model as well as goes into a discussion about methodology in evaluating programs.
Roger Mancastroppa

www.nova.edu/ssss/QR/QR8-2/horn.pdf - 0 views

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    "It was found that the state test has far-reaching effects on teaching, curriculum, school climate, students, parents, and school administration. The ideology of testing as a positive reform idea and the practice of testing as a constant and tangible threat, form the two poles of an experiential field that these educators encounter as figure and ground. The avoidance of failure and the threat of failure push these educators toward an ideological commitment to testing."
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