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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.”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • 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

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
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • 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

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

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.
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

Idaho Teachers Fight a Reliance on Computers - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...t-a-reliance-on-computers.html

technology classrooms teacher

shared by Laura Shaw on 04 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • teachers have been in open revolt. They marched on the capital last spring, when the legislation was under consideration. They complain that lawmakers listened less to them than to heavy lobbying by technology companies, including Intel and Apple.
  • Gov. C. L. Otter, known as Butch, and Tom Luna, the schools superintendent, who have championed the plan, said teachers had been misled by their union into believing the changes were a step toward replacing them with computers.
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

Teachers Feeling 'Beat Down' As School Year Starts : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...eat-down-as-school-year-starts

NPR TeacherEvaluation

shared by Laura Shaw on 11 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • The consensus though is that the Obama administration's education policies are no less prescriptive or punitive than the much maligned No Child Left Behind law. And high stakes tests are undermining quality instruction and good teachers, especially if test results are used to evaluate teachers or decide how much they should be paid.
  • "The notion that education reform could get wrapped up so closely with attempts to eliminate collective bargaining has made it very difficult to have this conversation all over the country," Williams say.
  • "The reason that these debates are happening now is because of the economy. You see policymakers seeing that this crisis is an opportunity to fix some things that have been broken for a long time," Petrilli says.
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  • at the beginning of the year, Petrilli says, 14 states mandated that layoffs be based on seniority, not effectiveness. The other huge issue that doesn't get nearly as much attention is the teacher pension crisis.
Laura Shaw

Gates Puts the Focus on Teaching - NYTimes.com - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...uts-the-focus-on-teaching.html

gates teaching

shared by Laura Shaw on 28 May 12 - No Cached
  • All along, Gates says, he had been asking questions about teacher effectiveness. How do you measure it? What are the skills that make a teacher great? “It was mind-blowing how little it had been studied,
  • True education reform requires engaging all of the country’s teachers.
Laura Shaw

Interventions Shown to Aid Executive Function Development in Children 4 to 12 Years Old - 1 views

www.sciencemag.org/...959.full

Diamond ExecutiveFunction

shared by Laura Shaw on 22 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Montessori (36) curriculum does not mention EFs, but what Montessorians mean by “normalization” includes having good EFs. Normalization is a shift from disorder, impulsivity, and inattention to self-discipline, independence, orderliness, and peacefulness (37). Montessori classrooms have only one of any material, so children learn to wait until another child is finished. Several Montessori activities are essentially walking meditation (Fig. 3).
  • As in Tools, the teacher carefully observes each child (when a child is ready for a new challenge, the teacher presents one), and whole-group activities are infrequent; learning is hands-on, often with ≥2 children working together. In Tools, children take turns instructing or checking one another. Cross-age tutoring occurs in Montessori mixed 3-year age groups. Such child-to-child teaching has been found repeatedly to produce better (often dramatically better) outcomes than teacher-led instruction (38–40).
  • Children chosen by lottery to enter a Montessori public school approved by the Association Montessori Internationale (AMI) were compared to those also in the lottery but not chosen, at the end of kindergarten (age 5) and the end of grade 6 (age 12) (41). At age 5, Montessori children showed better EFs than peers attending other schools. They performed better in reading and math and showed more concern for fairness and justice. No group difference was found in delay of gratification. At age 12, on the only measure related to EFs, Montessori children showed more creativity in essay writing than controls. They also reported feeling more of a sense of community at school.
Laura Shaw

Yong Zhao » Blog Archive » Ditch Testing (Part 5): Testing Has Not Improved E... - 0 views

zhaolearning.com/...ducation-despite-all-the-costs

YongZhao Testing Atlanta Cheating

shared by Laura Shaw on 25 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Arne Duncan’s proposal to “reward excellence” and push to directly connect teacher and principal evaluation and their income will only increase the stakes in testing, and will likely provide more incentives for cheating.
  • we may see high performing schools participate in cheating in the future because they now have a reason to want to score well to be rewarded for “being excellent while before they only have to pass to avoid failure, which their students already do.
  • high-stakes testing
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  • we have to abandon it
  • broader issues of high stakes testing
  • its costs are too high and the benefits too little.
  • since 2002, the federal Department of Education has provided $400 million every year to states for implementing NCLB assessments—which amounts to $4 billion over 10 years. But that’s just the federal portion for NCLB required tests. The actual cost is much higher.
  • These billions of dollars have also led to other costs that cannot be measured. They have been used to direct resources in schools to preparing for tests and managing reporting, for example. This means schools have lost opportunities to consider other forms of activities that may be more beneficial to their students.
  • most serious and well-documented costs are the loss of opportunities for students to have access to a broad range of educational experiences as well as the opportunity to develop the ability and skills that truly matter in the 21st century such creativity and global competence.
Laura Shaw

Wakeup Call For The Gates Foundation: Think Bigger! - Steve Denning - RETHINK - Forbes - 0 views

blogs.forbes.com/...-gates-foundation-think-bigger

gates neweducation denning Forbes Corporate

shared by Laura Shaw on 29 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Schools practicing this new culture of learning don’t t have to be invented. As pointed out by my colleague, Daniel Petter-Lipstein, the new culture of learning takes place in thousands of Montessori classrooms every day, as noted in his marvelous article, “Superwoman Was Already Here“ “The Montessori method cares far more about the inquiry process and less about the results of those inquiries, believing that children will eventually master–with the guidance of their teachers and the engaged use of the hands-on Montessori materials which control for error–the expected answers and results that are the focus of most traditional classroom activity.” Ironically, Bill Gates himself is a product of the Montessori system, so he should be intimately familiar with it.
Laura Shaw

Reading Between the Lines | The Nation - 2 views

www.thenation.com/...reading-between-lines

TheNation NCLB money testing

shared by Laura Shaw on 15 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • a political party that once called for the abolition of the Education Department has radically enhanced the federal presence in public schools. After repeating the mantra of local control and states' rights for a generation, the GOP now intrudes on both.
  • original aspirations for an American public school system
  • public schools were necessary to fashion a common national culture out of a far-flung and often immigrant population, and to prepare young people to be reflective and critical citizens in a democratic society. The emphasis was on self-governance through self-respect; a sense of cultural ownership through participation; and ultimately, freedom from tyranny through rational deliberation.
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  • One of the reform movement's founding documents is Reinventing Education: Entrepreneurship in America's Public Schools, by Lou Gerstner, chairman of IBM. Gerstner describes schoolchildren as human capital, teachers as sellers in a marketplace and the public school system as a monopoly
  • among those who style themselves "compassionate conservatives," education has become a sentimental and, all things considered, cheap way to talk about equalizing opportunity without committing to substantial income redistribution
  • "Child-centered" education, "progressive" education or "whole language"--each has been singled out as a social menace that can be vanquished only by applying a more rational, results-oriented and business-minded approach to public education.
Laura Shaw

Free Advisers Cost N.Y. Education Dept., Critics Say - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ducation-dept-critics-say.html

NewYork Regents

shared by Laura Shaw on 15 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Those donors include Bill Gates ($892,000), who is leading the charge to evaluate teachers, principals and schools using students’ test scores
  • National Association of Charter School Administrators ($50,000)
  • Robbins Foundation ($500,000), which finance charter expansion
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  • Tortora Sillcox Family Foundation ($500,000)
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