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Bradford Saron

School Funding Myths & Stepping Outside the "New Normal" « School Finance 101 - 0 views

  • Reformy myth #1: That every state has done its part and more, to pour money into high need, especially poor urban districts. It hasn’t worked, mainly because teachers are lazy and overpaid and not judged on effectiveness, measured by value-added scores. So, now is the time to slash the budgets of those high need districts, where all of the state aid is flowing, and fire the worst teachers. And, it will only help, not hurt.
  • Reformy myth #2: The only aid to be cut, the aid that should be cut, and the aid that must be cut in the name of the public good, is aid to high need, large urban districts in particular. The argument appears to be that handing down state aid cuts as a flat percent of state aid is the definition of “shared sacrifice.” And the garbage analysis of district Return on Investment by the Center for American Progress, of course, validates that high need urban districts tend to be least efficient anyway. Therefore, levying the largest cuts on those districts is entirely appropriate.
    • Bradford Saron
       
      "Shared sacrifice" sounds very familiar right now. In reality, in Wisconsin we've the only public field under a revenue limit and under a qualified offer directive, so the problems that Wisconsin is dealing with is not because of education. We've already been the ones "sacrificing," through revenue caps and the QEO. 
  • Reformy myth #3: The general public is fed up and don’t want to waste any more of their hard earned tax dollars on public schools. They are fed up with greedy teachers with gold plated benefits and fed up with high paid administrators. They don’t care about small class sizes and…well… are just fed up with all of this taxing and spending on public schools that stink. As a result, the only answer is to cut that spending and simultaneously make schools better.
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  • Reformy myth #4: None of this school funding stuff matters anyway. It doesn’t matter what the overall level of funding is and it doesn’t matter how that funding is distributed. As evidence of this truthiness, reformers point to 30+ years of huge spending growth coupled with massive class size reduction and they argue… flat NAEP scores, low international performance and flat SAT scores. Therefore, if we simply cut funding back to 1980 levels (adjusted only for the CPI) and fire bad teachers, we can achieve the same level of outcomes for one heck of a lot less money.
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    Does anyone have any myths for Wisconsin?
Vince Breunig

Effects of Inequality and Poverty vs. Teachers and Schooling on America's Youth - 0 views

  • What does it take to get politicians and the general public to abandon misleading ideas, such as, “Anyone who tries can pull themselves up by the bootstraps,” or that “Teachers are the most important factor in determining the achievement of our youth”? Many ordinary citizens and politicians believe these statements to be true, even though life and research informs us that such statements are usually not true.
  • till further discouraging news for those who advocate testing as a way to reform schools comes from the PISA assessments (The Program for International Student Assessment). Nations with high-stakes testing have generally gone down in scores from 2000 to 2003, and then again by 2006. Finland, on the other hand, which has no high-stakes testing, and an accountability system that relies on teacher judgment and school level professionalism much more than tests, has shown growth over these three PISA administrations (Sahlberg, 2011).
  • Now, in the USA, our parents are a greater determiner of our income in life than either our weight or our height.
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  • what the best and wisest parents want for their children should be what we want for all children. Thus, that same kind of opportunity to catch up in school should not be denied to youth who come from poorer families
  • citizens calling for school reform without thinking about economic and social reforms are probably being foolish. The likelihood of affecting school achievement positively is more likely to be found in economic and social reforms, in the second bill of rights, than it is in NCLB, the common core of standards, early childhood and many assessments after that, value-added assessments, and the like. More than educational policies are needed to improve education.
  • I think everyone in the USA, of any political party, understands that poverty hurts families and affects student performance at the schools their children attend. But the bigger problem for our political leaders and citizens to recognize is that inequality hurts everyone in society, the wealthy and the poor alike. History teaches us that when income inequalities are large, they are tolerated by the poor for only so long. Then there is an eruption, and it is often bloody! Both logic and research suggest that economic policies that reduce income inequality throughout the United States are quite likely to improve education a lot, but even more than that, such policies might once again establish this nation as a beacon on a hill, and not merely a light that shines for some, but not for all of our citizens.
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    What does it take to get politicians and the general public to abandon misleading ideas, such as, "Anyone who tries can pull themselves up by the bootstraps," or that "Teachers are the most important factor in determining the achievement of our youth"? Many ordinary citizens and politicians believe these statements to be true, even though life and research informs us that such statements are usually not true. citizens calling for school reform without thinking about economic and social reforms are probably being foolish. The likelihood of affecting school achievement positively is more likely to be found in economic and social reforms, in the second bill of rights, than it is in NCLB, the common core of standards, early childhood and many assessments after that, value-added assessments, and the like. More than educational policies are needed to improve education.
Bradford Saron

Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice - 2 views

  • A steady diet of pundit Thomas Friedman, publisher Rupert Murdoch, and press releases from the Business Roundtable would convince most readers that CEO decisions in managing their businesses, technological choices, swings in financial markets, and global boom-and-bust cycles had little to do with the U.S. economy. While putting onto public schools the solution for economic downturns, rather than business executives, is a loony non-sequitur, it is a victory in shifting blame from corporate leaders’ flawed decisions to the shoulders of educators
    • Bradford Saron
       
      Wow. What a powerful comment.
  • It is also a myth that all U.S. schools are broken. Surely,most urban schools are low-performing and in many cases have earned the label of “dropout factories.” Washington, D.C, for example, would be a poster child for such districts. Moreover, although islands of excellence in urban districts do exist (including D.C.), they are seldom stable over time. Where the myth-making enters is when urban schools are conflated with all U.S. schools. Not only I but many others have pointed out that the U.S. has a three-tiered system of schooling where the top two tiers have mostly “successful” schools by current standards. The bottom tier contains failing urban schools. Thus, all U.S. schools are not failures by any standard.
    • Bradford Saron
       
      I have been looking for a good way to say this for two years. Cuban just did. 
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    One could add that public education got no credit during the boom times of the 1990s.
Bradford Saron

Social Media & Public Relations - 5 Reports - Online Marketing Blog - 3 views

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    Must read. 
Bradford Saron

Ravitch: The toll of school reform on public education - The Answer Sheet - The Washing... - 1 views

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    Via @mcleod, this is a must-read for school administrators and educators alike. 
Bradford Saron

Innovation Excellence | Using the Disney Method - 0 views

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    Neat concept. What would this look like through the lens of public schools? 
Bradford Saron

Chris Hedges: Why the United States Is Destroying Its Education System - Chris Hedges' ... - 0 views

  • A nation that destroys its systems of education, degrades its public information, guts its public libraries and turns its airwaves into vehicles for cheap, mindless amusement becomes deaf, dumb and blind. It prizes test scores above critical thinking and literacy. It celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state. It funnels them into a caste system of drones and systems managers. It transforms a democratic state into a feudal system of corporate masters and serfs.
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    Via @mcleod
Curt Rees

Vollmer's List | Jamie Vollmer - 1 views

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    Increasing burden placed on America's public schools
Bradford Saron

Anti-cyberbullying 101: soon required at your public school? - 1 views

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    Great overview of Cyber-bullying resources.
Bradford Saron

The Wisconsin Vision - 4 views

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    This is the report published by the Wisconsin School Administrators' Alliance in the summer of 2010 (I think). Check out the part on A Visionary Tale on page 9. Hat-tip to Mary Bowen-Eggebraaten for forwarding this piece on to me.
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    Very nice. AND, as the report indicates, leadership and community need to be included. This means you need the school board to play a role. They are the conduit to the community. Public education has been down the transformation road before. In some ways we are not inventing anything new here. John Dewey championed experiential learning as the public education system developed a century ago. Progressive educators tried in the 1930s and 1960s to introduce experiential learning into the system. The grammar of schooling, the deep structure, the notion of "real school" all pull the system back into the status quo. We need to remain cognizant of these dynamics and consider how to address them if we want to see the promise of the ideas contained in this report become a reality. You have to connect the ideas outlined in this report to the notion of collective impact. I think this idea is key to seeing a different outcome: http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/2197/
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    I want to be clear: I am a supporter of the ideas contained in the Wisconsin Vision report. I also want to be sure we take a realists view of how to make it happen. I do not want to see this effort and the ideas of CESAs 1 and 6, wind up in the history books like past transformation efforts.
Bradford Saron

Still searching for that pot of gold « School Finance 101 - 0 views

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    This is really interesting. The article talks about the irresponsible fiscal approach of states toward public schools and the perception of how much revenue we require to operate effectively. 
Bradford Saron

Openleaks? Brusselsleaks? Tradeleaks? The market's getting crowded | Media | guardian.c... - 1 views

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    Indeed, this is not about education, but it is about the age of the disaggregation of power and mass transparency. To a large extent, because of open records laws, we've been dealing with public decision making for some time. Do you think this new trend with accelerate our movement toward total transparency? Have you ever seen Michigan's Budget and Salary Compensation Transparency Reporting Law? 
Bradford Saron

Public Relations Matters | Connected Principals - 0 views

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    For those of you WSPRA members. 
Bradford Saron

Confessions of an Aca/Fan: Archives: Introduction to Communications Technologies - 0 views

  • Henry Jenkins COMM 202 Introduction to Communications Technology This course is intended as an introduction to the ways new and emerging communications technologies impact our culture. While the primary focus will be on digital and mobile technologies and practices (contemporary new media), the course will also consider a range of older media when they were new - including print culture, cinema, television, recorded sound, photography, and the telephone. The course is divided into three broad units: Understanding Technological Change is intended to offer broad conceptual frameworks for thinking about the relations between technology and culture. Reinventing... takes as its starting point the ways that the emergence of digital, networked, and mobile communications technology has impacted pre-existing media forms. Rethinking... examines a range of institutions and practices as they are re-imagined in response to the introduction of new communications technologies. Taken as a whole, this class will introduce students to: Core issues concerning the study of communications technologies The process of media in transition The ways that new media impact existing media and institutions Core digital platforms (YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, Twitter, eBay, Flickr, Second Life, etc.) and the ways they are reshaping our everyday lives.
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    Here is Henry Jenkins' (a leader in the edtech think-tank style publications) new class on technology.
Bradford Saron

The Political Power of Social Media | Foreign Affairs - 0 views

  • The event marked the first time that social media had helped force out a national leader.
  • How does the ubiquity of social media affect U.S. interests, and how should U.S. policy respond to it?
  • social media have become coordinating tools for nearly all of the world's political movements, just as most of the world's authoritarian governments (and, alarmingly, an increasing number of democratic ones) are trying to limit access to it.
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  • New media conducive to fostering participation can indeed increase the freedoms Clinton outlined, just as the printing press, the postal service, the telegraph, and the telephone did before.
  • Despite this basic truth -- that communicative freedom is good for political freedom -- the instrumental mode of Internet statecraft is still problematic.
  • THE THEATER OF COLLAPSE
  • Opinions are first transmitted by the media, and then they get echoed by friends, family members, and colleagues. It is in this second, social step that political opinions are formed. This is the step in which the Internet in general, and social media in particular, can make a difference. As with the printing press, the Internet spreads not just media consumption but media production as well -- it allows people to privately and publicly articulate and debate a welter of conflicting views.
  • This condition of shared awareness -- which is increasingly evident in all modern states -- creates what is commonly called "the dictator's dilemma" but that might more accurately be described by the phrase coined by the media theorist Briggs: "the conservative dilemma," so named because it applies not only to autocrats but also to democratic governments and to religious and business leaders. The dilemma is created by new media that increase public access to speech or assembly; with the spread of such media, whether photocopiers or Web browsers, a state accustomed to having a monopoly on public speech finds itself called to account for anomalies between its view of events and the public's. The two responses to the conservative dilemma are censorship and propaganda. But neither of these is as effective a source of control as the enforced silence of the citizens. The state will censor critics or produce propaganda as it needs to, but both of those actions have higher costs than simply not having any critics to silence or reply to in the first place. But if a government were to shut down Internet access or ban cell phones, it would risk radicalizing otherwise pro-regime citizens or harming the economy.
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    The power of being digitally social, this is an example in the political arena. This is also what Clay Shirky is talking about in a Cognitive Surplus. This is the power of people collaborating and sharing without consideration of cost, distance, time, copyright, law, etc. Do we want to teach children how to ethically participate in this type of environment? Or, just let them go without any skills or discipline?
Mike Beighley

Yong Zhao » Blog Archive » A Nation At Risk: Edited by Yong Zhao - 3 views

  • The real risk America faces is the insane policies and scapegoating practices in education. So I decided to edit the document. I have replaced what I think misleading and misconceived phrases, sentences, and paragraphs with what I believe to be correct. The italics are what I added.
  • If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the insane policies that threaten democracy, turn American children into robotic test takers, narrow and homogenize our children’s education, reward grant writing skills instead of helping the needy children and stimulate innovation (e.g., Race to the Top), value testing over teaching, and scapegoat teachers that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.
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    Great read. 
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    IS this where we are headed if politics continues to be a primary factor in our public schools?
Bradford Saron

What do international tests really show about U.S. student performance? | Economic Poli... - 2 views

  • Secretary Duncan said, U.S. educational reform policy is motivated by a belief that the U.S. educational system is particularly failing disadvantaged children. Yet an analysis of international test score levels and trends shows that in important ways disadvantaged U.S. children perform better, relative to children in comparable nations, than do middle-class and advantaged children. More careful analysis of these levels and trends may lead policymakers to reconsider their assumption that almost all improvement efforts should be directed to the education of disadvantaged children and few such efforts to the education of middle-class and advantaged children
  • A re-estimated U.S. average PISA score that adjusted for a student population in the United States that is more disadvantaged than populations in otherwise similar post-industrial countries, and for the over-sampling of students from the most-disadvantaged schools in a recent U.S. international assessment sample, finds that the U.S. average score in both reading and mathematics would be higher than official reports indicate (in the case of mathematics, substantially higher).
  • Disadvantaged and lower-middle-class U.S. students perform better (and in most cases, substantially better) than comparable students in similar post-industrial countries in reading. In math, disadvantaged and lower-middle-class U.S. students perform about the same as comparable students in similar post-industrial countries.
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  • This re-estimate would also improve the U.S. place in the international ranking of all OECD countries, bringing the U.S. average score to sixth in reading and 13th in math. Conventional ranking reports based on PISA, which make no adjustments for social class composition or for sampling errors, and which rank countries irrespective of whether score differences are large enough to be meaningful, report that the U.S. average score is 14th in reading and 25th in math.
  • To make judgments only on the basis of national average scores, on only one test, at only one point in time, without comparing trends on different tests that purport to measure the same thing, and without disaggregation by social class groups, is the worst possible choice. But, unfortunately, this is how most policymakers and analysts approach the field.
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    A must read. 
Bradford Saron

Educational Leadership:Technology-Rich Learning:Students First, Not Stuff - 1 views

  • But it's not about the tools. It's not about layering expensive technology on top of the traditional curriculum. Instead, it's about addressing the new needs of modern learners in entirely new ways. And once we understand that it's about learning, our questions reframe themselves in terms of the ecological shifts we need to make: What do we mean by learning? What does it mean to be literate in a networked, connected world? What does it mean to be educated? What do students need to know and be able to do to be successful in their futures? Educators must lead inclusive conversations in their communities around such questions to better inform decisions about technology and change.
  • Right now, the web requires us to reconsider the ecology of schools, not just the technologies we use in them. We must start long-term, broad, inclusive conversations about what teaching, learning, and being educated mean in light of the new technologies we now have available to us. Just like business, politics, journalism, music, and a host of other long-standing institutions that the web has rocked at their foundations, education will be and is being changed. To understand the implications fully, we need to start with the questions that focus on our students—and not just on the stuff.
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    Yup!
Bradford Saron

Reforming Chinese Education: What China Is Trying to Learn from America | Solutions - 0 views

  • Some educators have come to the conclusion that China’s outstanding academic success, as indicated by test scores, may be what is holding it back. Now, China is searching for better education models elsewhere. Although the government does not publicly endorse American education as the model, the public seems eager to embrace what is viewed as a more liberal and creative system—ironically, at a time when many in the United States are gazing enviously at the discipline and order of the Chinese system, and the No Child Left Behind Act has brought a new focus on testing.
  • For thousands of years, dynasties of emperors (with a few exceptions) followed the Confucian tradition of conformity, hierarchy, and respect for authority, and the Communist government continued this tradition by seeking to maintain control over all aspects of life. The result has been a highly disciplined but docile workforce. Fostering creativity suggests freedom, and though that prospect can be glimpsed in education reforms, the reality may still lie someway off.
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    A must read from Yong Zhao. 
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