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Laura Shaw

'Parent Trigger' Law Over Failing Schools Raises Debate - TIME - 1 views

www.time.com/...0,8599,2077564,00.html

ParentTrigger ParentEmpowerment law

shared by Laura Shaw on 25 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • failing schools can already be shut down by school districts under the No Child Left Behind law
  • parent trigger simply takes the option provided to the school board and hands the power to the parents
  • Gloria Romero, the former California state senator
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • parent trigger was conceived in 2009 by Ben Austin, a former deputy mayor of Los Angeles and a policy consultant at Green Dot Public Schools, a charter-school organization
  • Green Dot provided the initial funding for Parent Revolution, though as of 2010 it no longer received funds from the group. It now receives the largest share of its funds from the Wasserman, Walton and Gates foundations.
Laura Shaw

The Weekend Interview with Bill Gates: Was the $5 Billion Worth It? - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...3554904576461571362279948.html

CorporateReform

shared by Laura Shaw on 25 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Since 2000, the foundation has poured some $5 billion into education grants and scholarships.
  • One of the foundation's main initial interests was schools with fewer students.
  • designed to—and did—promote less acting up in the classroom, better attendance and closer interaction with adults.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • overall impact of the intervention, particularly the measure we care most about—whether you go to college—it didn't move the needle much
  • Instead of trying to buy systemic reform with school-level investments, a new goal is to leverage private money in a way that redirects how public education dollars are spent.
  • next to nothing is spent on education research
  • schools of education are not about research. So we come into this thinking that we should fund the research."
  • Of late, the foundation has been working on a personnel system that can reliably measure teacher effectiveness. Teachers have long been shown to influence students' education more than any other school factor, including class size and per-pupil spending. So the objective is to determine scientifically what a good instructor does.
  • Instead, the Gates Foundation's five-year, $335-million project examines whether aspects of effective teaching—classroom management, clear objectives, diagnosing and correcting common student errors—can be systematically measured. The effort involves collecting and studying videos of more than 13,000 lessons taught by 3,000 elementary school teachers in seven urban school districts.
  • he'll have a tough sell with teachers unions, which give lip service to more-stringent teacher evaluations but prefer existing pay and promotion schemes based on seniority—even though they often end up matching the least experienced teachers with the most challenging students.
  • Mr. Gates's foundation strongly supports a uniform core curriculum for schools
  • sees common standards as a money-saver at a time when many states are facing budget shortfalls. "In terms of mathematics textbooks, why can't you have the scale of a national market?
    • Laura Shaw
      Laura Shaw on 25 Jul 11
       
      Monopoly??
  • "Behind this core curriculum are some very deep insights. American textbooks were twice as thick as Asian textbooks. In American math classes, we teach a lot of concepts poorly over many years. In the Asian systems they teach you very few concepts very well over a few years." Nor does he see the need for competition among state standards.
  • Mr. Gates is particularly fond of the KIPP charter network and its focus on serving inner-city neighborhoods
  • Mr. Gates is less enamored of school vouchers.
  • honestly, if we thought there would be broad acceptance in some locales and long-term commitment to do them, they have some very positive characteristics."
  • "We haven't chosen to get behind [vouchers] in a big way, as we have with personnel systems or charters, because the negativity about them is very, very high."
  • Gates Foundation's approach to education reform—more evolution, less disruption
Laura Shaw

Suzanne Tacheny Kubach: Let's "Save" What Matters Most: Students - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...-what-matters-mo_b_912857.html

PIE Kubach SOSMarch

shared by Laura Shaw on 30 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • The SOS campaign seems more about catharsis, with vague and mostly platitudinous principles, rather than a strategy offering a specific, alternative vision for school improvement
  • basic aim
  • increase public funding through a campaign to roll back accountability
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  • streams excuses for the status quo
  • teachers near the top of the quality distribution
  • Hanushek's data refutes the claim that schools are powerless to overcome family circumstances
  • if a student has three years in a row of great teaching, that experience will overcome the average achievement deficit between low-income kids and their more well-off peers
  • Most of the policies that govern teachers and teaching treat all teachers as if they are the same. (For more on this, read The Widget Effect.)
  • backers of this rally don't want parents or the public to have the kinds of data that enable parents or school leaders to distinguish who these great teachers are
  • rally's only really specific principle calls for an end to the use of student assessment for any decisions of consequence
  • effective testing and data enable school leaders to identify what's not working so they can make sure that students and teachers get the support and resources they need to succeed
  • Children in this country have a right to a quality education -- but the public schools don't have a right to every child!
  • We use information to expose achievement gaps and other systematic inequities that work against that promise so that action can be taken to fix those problems before they destroy kids lives.
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