Group items tagged

PARCC's policy will be that students earn the "college readiness" determination by performing at level 4 on a 5-level test

Reaching that level on the language arts part of the exam will mean that students have "demonstrated the academic knowledge, skills, and practices necessary" to skip remedial classes and go directly into entry-level, credit-bearing courses in "college English composition, literature, and technical courses requiring college-level reading and writing."

college-readiness scores on the test will be set in such a way that students who score at that level—level 4—will have a 75 percent chance of earning a grade of C or better in those college courses.

The promise of the Common Core is dying and teaching and learning are being distorted.  The well that should sustain the Core has been poisoned.

Whether or not learning the word ‘commission’ is appropriate for second graders could be debated—I personally think it is a bit over the top.  What is of deeper concern, however, is that during a time when 7 year olds should be listening to and making music, they are instead taking a vocabulary quiz.

The Common Core places an extraordinary emphasis on vocabulary development

At a certain point, probably before this decade is out, that parallel universe will reach a point of sophistication and credibility where the degrees—or whatever new word is invented to mean “evidence of your skills and knowledge”—it grants are taken seriously by employers. The online learning environments will be good enough, and access to broadband Internet wide enough, that you won’t need to be a math prodigy like Eren Bali to learn, get a credential, and attract the attention of global employers. Companies like OpenStudy, Kno, Quizlet, Chegg, Inigral, and Degreed will provide all manner of supportive services—study groups, e-books, flash cards, course notes, college-focused social networking, and many other fabulous, as-yet-un-invented things. Bali isn’t just the model of the new ed tech entrepreneur—he’s the new global student, too, finally able to transcend the happenstance of where he was born.

Colleges with strong brand names and other sources of revenue (e.g., government-sponsored research or acculturating the children of the ruling class) will emerge stronger than ever. Everyone else will scramble to survive as vestigial players.

As for accountability of teachers and administrators, Sahlberg shrugs. "There's no word for accountability in Finnish," he later told an audience at the Teachers College of Columbia University. "Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted."

The main driver of education policy is not competition between teachers and between schools, but cooperation.

Decades ago, when the Finnish school system was badly in need of reform, the goal of the program that Finland instituted, resulting in so much success today, was never excellence. It was equity.

If you think about how we use technology in our adult lives, it’s primarily a communication experience — email, WebEx, text messages and collaboration tools. It’s social, but we’re not letting these collaborative tools into the classroom.

If we don’t, we will lose their attention, and to some degree, their respect.

But they’ll do better by constructing meaning from it socially — not alone with a text

The 5th graders in Doug Hinkle's class at the DaVinci Academy in School District 20 are among the first elementary students in the country to be part of a "flipped" classroom.

Instead of spending 20 minutes each hour lecturing, Mr. Hinkle pre-records video podcasts to teach his lessons.

Removing the lectures from the school day frees up Hinkle to give more attention to individual students or small groups. If you were to drop into his class unannounced, it may seem a bit chaotic, but Hinkle says it's a controlled chaos.

Thus, the old pre-reqs are out: GPAs, transcripts, SATS.  In fact, Google is beginning to disregard academic educations altogether: they're just not a good predictor of success at the company. Says Bock, "After two or three years, your ability to perform at Google is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in school, because the skills you required in college are very different. You’re also fundamentally a different person. You learn and grow, you think about things differently." According to the Times, Google is putting its money where its mouth is: they've actually increased their hires with no college education—14% of some of its teams have never been to school, according to Bock. Instead, the emphasis is on hiring candidates who are leaders, and work well in teams. The only way to discover this, says Bock, is through "structured" behavior interviews that assess how a person makes decisions. The winning interviewees will be able to demonstrate that they are "consistent and fair in how [they] think about making decisions and that there’s an element of predictability." This is key to building trust among team members once hired, he explains. "If a leader is consistent, people on their teams experience tremendous freedom, because then they know that within certain parameters, they can do whatever they want. If your manager is all over the place, you’re never going to know what you can do, and you’re going to experience it as very restrictive."