Cognitive Interfund Transfer

The new way of thinking is that the point of school is to facilitate the transition from childhood to adulthood. That means designing schools based on research from the field of human development, not on research on how to raise test scores.

Academic content is important—it’s really important!—and it’s best learned by kids who are pursuing material that interests them, who are surrounded by adults they trust, who are intrinsically motivated to learn, who are mature and responsible, and who have a sense of autonomy over their education.

the first focus of school should be on creating an environment grounded in sound principles of human development. Academic learning then becomes a powerful by-product of that environment.

As educators, we must respond proactively to these real dangers children face in using social networking and read/write web resources. But unfortunately the knee-jerk reaction has been to block all social networking resources – blogs, wikis, YouTube, Flickr, and virtual worlds.

afety comes from education, not blocking. Even if social networking sites are effectively blocked in schools, most students will still get access to them

Principals have always been hired to administer schools. Superintendents expect their principals to set priorities consistent with district goals, use data for decision making, plan and schedule work of the school, oversee the budget and many other managerial tasks—including punctual submission of reports to the central office. Currently, efforts by some

fair ways of assessing classroom effectiveness that include test scores but go far beyond these limited numbers. Such sane efforts, however, get forgotten in the wake of wave after wave of anti-teacher union tirades.

In doing so, they have narrowed the role of schools to being an arm of the economy reinforcing the fiction that all U.S. schools, not just urban ones, are lousy and that “effective” teachers and schools can solve poverty, put every kid into college, and end the skills gap with international competitors.

) schools need to contribute to the communities they are a part of and 2) improving educational services, or maintaining the level of current services, with fewer resources.

Pew and the Knight Foundation in a new study has said the web has finally overtaken newspapers as the primary source of news.

The tablet played a role and was growing rapidly in adoption; about seven percent of Americans had an iPad or another tablet in January, twice as many as those who had one in September.

Policy recommendation: Immediately implement a new teacher evaluation system based 50% on student assessment data. Prohibit the use of experience or degree level as a basis for compensation.

Policy recommendation:  Set in place a strategy to turn over all host district schools, across all grade levels to the charter operator.

Conclusions & Implications: The strongest correlate of true teaching effectiveness was the estimate of teacher contribution to student achievement on the same test a year later. However, this correlation was only modest (.30). All other measures including effectiveness measures based on alternative tests and student, parent and administrator perceptions of teacher effectiveness were less correlated with the original value-added estimate, thus raising questions about the usefulness of any of these other measures. Because the value-added measure turns out to be the best predictor of itself in a subsequent year, this estimate alone trumps all others in terms of usefulness for making decisions regarding teacher retention (especially in times of staffing reduction) and should also be considered a primary factor in compensation decisions. Note that while it may appear that school administrators, students and their parents have highly consistent views regarding which teachers are more and less effective (note the higher correlations across administrator ratings of teachers, and student and parent ratings), we consider these findings unimportant because none of these perception-based ratings were as correlated with the original value-added estimate as the value-added estimate was with itself (which of course, is the TRUE measure of effectiveness).