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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.
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  • 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

Superstar teachers | Harvard Gazette - 2 views

news.harvard.edu/...superstar-teachers

teaching teachers HVA research

shared by Laura Shaw on 28 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • high value-added (HVA) teachers — those that do the best job of raising students’ scores on standardized tests.
  • while the new research may identify HVA teachers, it’s still not clear what constitutes good teaching.
  • There’s one predictor of value-added, which is teacher experience. In the first couple of years, teachers’ value-added goes up quite a bit. Beside that, people who have more-advanced degrees, [have] higher SAT scores, graduated from a better college, are certified versus uncertified — none of these things are strong predictors of value-added.”
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  • improving the quality of teaching will have substantial returns for the economy and even decrease poverty. The question is how to go about it.
Laura Shaw

Observing emotional interactions between teachers and students in elementary school cla... - 0 views

www.freepatentsonline.com/...249684447.html

emotionalclimate emotionaldevelopment elementary research

shared by Laura Shaw on 02 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Laura Shaw on 02 Aug 11
     
    The investigation focused on how teachers manage emotional events and, in particular, what positive strategies they use while doing so. A total of 60 hours of observation took place in the classrooms of six teachers who had been nominated for having exceptional positive classroom environments. These observations were reduced to prominent themes: (1) fostering classroom relationships, (2) setting and managing emotional guidelines, (3) being emotionally aware, and (4) managing emotional situations. The study provided support for Harvey and Evans' (2003) model of the classroom emotional climate.
Laura Shaw

Usable Knowledge: Measure for measures: What do standardized tests really tell us about... - 1 views

www.uknow.gse.harvard.edu/...video-DD315-608-2.html

testing research

shared by Laura Shaw on 16 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • the misconception that matters the most is the notion somehow a good test measures all of what’s important.
  • you sample from this big domain of achievement a modest number of things that allow you to predict the whole. That’s all a test is
  • its value is only as a tool for estimating what kids really know about the whole.
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  • if the pressure becomes too severe, then people game the system.
  • The answer to the current problems we’re seeing is not, in my view, stop holding schools accountable for teaching kids. It’s, find a better way to do it, one that has fewer side effects.
  • Breaking people into these bins — below basic, basic, proficient, advanced — has, in my view, been one of the worst decisions we made in testing in decades.
  • it’s a very insensitive way to report performance.
Laura Shaw

Usable Knowledge: Measure for measures: What do standardized tests really tell us about... - 1 views

www.uknow.gse.harvard.edu/...video-DD315-608-1.html

testing research

shared by Laura Shaw on 16 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • The problem is that as people have become increasingly focused on the tests that matter, the tests for which people are held accountable, scores on those tests have often become misleading, sometimes wildly misleading. And that’s ironically undermined what we can say with confidence about how much kids actually know and can do.
  • nobody is spending a lot of time prepping kids specifically for that test. So when scores go up on one of those tests, we have a fair degree of confidence that kids really know more.
  • look for the big picture. Make comparisons to countries that make sense to compare us to, but don’t pay attention to small differences, because you can’t trust them.
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  • there is no international average, other than the average of the countries that happened to participate that time.
Laura Shaw

What Influence Do Peers Have on Preschoolers' Language Skills? | NewAmerica.net - 0 views

earlyed.newamerica.net/...choolers_language_skills-61978

ECE research

shared by Laura Shaw on 03 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • Laura Shaw on 03 Jan 12
     
    "...evidence that by virtue of limiting enrollment in public preschools to low-income students, classrooms tended to have high proportions of students with low skill levels, since economically-disadvantaged children often enter school with lower language abilities than their higher-income classmates."
Laura Shaw

What's Wrong With the Teenage Mind? - WSJ.com - 2 views

online.wsj.com/...3806504577181351486558984.html

research adolescence

shared by Laura Shaw on 31 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • Becoming an adult means leaving the world of your parents and starting to make your way toward the future that you will share with your peers. Puberty not only turns on the motivational and emotional system with new force, it also turns it away from the family and toward the world of equals.
  • emotion and motivation
  • control
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  • Children have lots of chances to practice the skills that they need to accomplish their goals as adults, and so to become expert planners and actors.
Laura Shaw

Where private foundations award education cash - The Answer Sheet - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...gIQA0M0mYI_blog.html

Foundations money

shared by Laura Shaw on 25 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • philanthropists doled out $684 million in private grants from 2000-08 to organizations involved in reforming the teaching profession.
  • biggest chunk of the money — 38 percent — went to teacher recruitment
  • 22 percent was spent on professional development
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  • 14 percent on teacher preparation
  • less than 10 percent for everything else
  • University of Georgia researchers who did the analysis
  • Teach for America
  • $213,444,431, or 31 percent of the total
  • doesn’t include at least $150 million it received from foundations and the U.S. government in the past year, which is outside the scope of the report
  • 2. Academy for Educational Development, $59,063,000 3. Northwest Educational Service District 189, $45,012,830 4. Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, $21,561,106 5. The New Teacher Project, $17,955,680 6. University of California at Santa Cruz, New Teacher Center, $16,642,730 7. Teacher Advancement Program, $15,480,625 8. National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, $12,401,350 9. Philadelphia Foundation, $10,000,000 10. Teachers Network, $9,441,402
  • 1. Carnegie Corp. of New York, $81,969,575 2. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, $78,167,363 3. Annenberg Foundation, $36,725,000 4. Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, $25,401,978 5. Broad Foundation, $24,554,869 6. Joyce Foundation, $23,773,256 7. Lilly Endowment, Inc. $21,224,576 8. Milken Family Foundation, $20,700,625 9. Ford Foundation, $17,581,716 10. Stuart Foundation, $14,459,666
  • What is different today, the report notes, is the “convergence between the philanthropic sector and federal policymakers,” which is a polite way of saying that Duncan’s Education Department has the same agenda as many of the philanthropists (and Duncan has in fact hired key aides from the philanthropic community), which is a polite way of saying that, in the opinion of many, Duncan’s department is in the thrall of billionaires who are using their wealth to set and direct the country’s education reform agenda.
Laura Shaw

Can Teachers Alone Overcome Poverty? Steven Brill Thinks So | The Nation - 0 views

www.thenation.com/...poverty-steven-brill-thinks-so

poverty EdReformers

shared by Laura Shaw on 12 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • economists Thomas Kane and Douglas Staiger, whose work on value-added teacher evaluation has powerfully influenced Bill Gates’s education philanthropy
  • teacher effectiveness could overcome those disadvantages
  • One-fifth of the middle schoolers in Providence, Rhode Island, for example, entered kindergarten in 2003 suffering from some level of lead poisoning, which disproportionately affects the poor and is associated with intellectual delays and behavioral problems such as ADHD. “It is now understood that there is no safe level of lead in the human body,” writes education researcher David Berliner, “and that lead at any level has an impact on IQ.”
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  • Food insecurity is similarly correlated with cognitive delays
  • When children attend school inadequately nourished, their bodies conserve the limited food energy that is available. Energy is first reserved for critical organ functions. If sufficient energy remains, it then is allocated for growth. The last priority is for social activity and learning. As a result, undernourished children become more apathetic and have impaired cognitive capacity. Letting schoolchildren go hungry means that the nation’s investments in public education are jeopardized by childhood malnutrition.
  • Acknowledging connections between the economy, poverty, health and brain function is not an attempt to “excuse” failing school bureaucracies and classroom teachers; rather, it is a necessary prerequisite for authentic school reform, which must be based on a realistic assessment of the whole child—not just a child’s test scores
  • Although Brill, by the end of Class Warfare, comes to recognize the limits of the education reform movement he so admires, he somehow maintains his commitment to the idea that teachers can completely overcome poverty. There’s a reason, I think, why this ideology is so attractive to many of the wealthy charter school founders and donors Brill profiles, from hedge funder Whitney Tilson to investment manager and banking heir Boykin Curry. If the United States could somehow guarantee poor people a fair shot at the American dream through shifting education policies alone, then perhaps we wouldn’t have to feel so damn bad about inequality—about low tax rates and loopholes that benefit the superrich and prevent us from expanding access to childcare and food stamps; about private primary and secondary schools that cost as much annually as an Ivy League college, and provide similar benefits; about moving to a different neighborhood, or to the suburbs, to avoid sending our children to school with kids who are not like them.
Laura Shaw

SOCIAL PROGRAMS THAT WORK » - Perry Preschool Project - 1 views

evidencebasedprograms.org/wordpress

research preschool Perry

shared by Laura Shaw on 18 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • curriculum emphasized active learning, in which the children engaged in activities that (i) involved decision making and problem solving, and (ii) were planned, carried out, and reviewed by the children themselves, with support from adults
Laura Shaw

Kids today really are less creative, study says - parenting - TODAY.com - 3 views

today.msnbc.msn.com/...y-are-less-creative-study-says

creativity testing NCLB research

shared by Laura Shaw on 13 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • creativity declines in adulthood as we become more aware of the notions of right and wrong answers, she said.
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