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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.
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What Happened to Obama's Passion? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...appened-to-obamas-passion.html NYTimes.com obama blog
shared by Laura Shaw on 08 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Instead of indicting the people whose recklessness wrecked the economy, he put them in charge of it. He never explained that decision to the public — a failure in storytelling as extraordinary as the failure in judgment behind it.
  • He would have had to stare down those who had wrecked the economy, and he would have had to tolerate their hatred if not welcome it. But the arc of his temperament just didn’t bend that far.
  • he backed away from his advisers who proposed a big stimulus, and then diluted it with tax cuts that had already been shown to be inert. The result, as predicted in advance, was a half-stimulus that half-stimulated the economy.
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  • the average American had no idea what Democrats were trying to accomplish by deficit spending because no one bothered to explain it to them with the repetition and evocative imagery that our brains require to make an idea, particularly a paradoxical one, “stick.”
  • at this point, I have no idea what Barack Obama — and by extension the party he leads — believes on virtually any issue.
  • THE real conundrum is why the president seems so compelled to take both sides of every issue, encouraging voters to project whatever they want on him, and hoping they won’t realize which hand is holding the rabbit.
  • The most charitable explanation is that he and his advisers have succumbed to a view of electoral success to which many Democrats succumb — that “centrist” voters like “centrist” politicians.
  • A second possibility is that he is simply not up to the task by virtue of his lack of experience and a character defect that might not have been so debilitating at some other time in history.
  • A somewhat less charitable explanation is that we are a nation that is being held hostage not just by an extremist Republican Party but also by a president who either does not know what he believes or is willing to take whatever position he thinks will lead to his re-election.
  • When he wants to be, the president is a brilliant and moving speaker, but his stories virtually always lack one element: the villain who caused the problem, who is always left out, described in impersonal terms, or described in passive voice, as if the cause of others’ misery has no agency and hence no culpability.
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Education Needs a Digital-Age Upgrade - NYTimes.com - 0 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...on-needs-a-digital-age-upgrade Digitallearning Davidson comment
shared by Laura Shaw on 08 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • According to Cathy N. Davidson, co-director of the annual MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competitions, fully 65 percent of today’s grade-school kids may end up doing work that hasn’t been invented yet.
  • better question is whether the form of learning and knowledge-making we are instilling in our children is useful to their future.”
  • What she recommends, in fact, looks much more like a classical education than it does the industrial-era holdover system that still informs our unrenovated classrooms.
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  • we can’t keep preparing students for a world that doesn’t exist.
  • The contemporary American classroom, with its grades and deference to the clock, is an inheritance from the late 19th century.
  • The industrial-era classroom, as a training ground for future factory workers, was retooled to teach tasks, obedience, hierarchy and schedules.
  • Ms. Davidson cites the elite Socratic system of questions and answers, the agrarian method of problem-solving and the apprenticeship program of imitating a master.
  • It’s possible that any of these educational approaches would be more appropriate to the digital era than the one we have now.
  • Her recommendations center on one of the most astounding revelations of the digital age:
  • Even academically reticent students publish work prolifically, subject it to critique and improve it on the Internet.
  • A classroom suited to today’s students should deemphasize solitary piecework. It should facilitate the kind of collaboration that helps individuals compensate for their blindnesses, instead of cultivating them
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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.
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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
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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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Can the Middle Class Be Saved? - Magazine - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...2 TheAtlantic economics
shared by Laura Shaw on 09 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Nearly 2 million people started college in 2002—1,630 of them at Harvard—but among them only Mark Zuckerberg is worth more than $10 billion today; the rise of the super-elite is not a product of educational differences. In part, it is a natural outcome of widening markets and technological revolution, which are creating much bigger winners much faster than ever before—a result that’s not even close to being fully played out, and one reinforced strongly by the political influence that great wealth brings.
  • more important, cleavage in American society—the one between college graduates and everyone else.
  • The true center of American society has always been its nonprofessionals—high-school graduates who didn’t go on to get a bachelor’s degree make up 58 percent of the adult population. And as manufacturing jobs and semiskilled office positions disappear, much of this vast, nonprofessional middle class is drifting downward.
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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.
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Students of Virtual Schools Are Lagging in Proficiency - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...re-lagging-in-proficiency.html technology onlinelearning
shared by Laura Shaw on 06 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • About 116,000 students were educated in 93 virtual schools — those where instruction is entirely or mainly provided over the Internet — run by private management companies in the 2010-11 school year, up 43 percent
  • “E.M.O.’s” — educational management organizations, a term coined by Wall Street in the 1990s — now operate 35 percent of all charter schools, enrolling 42 percent of all charter school students, according to the report.
  • for-profit companies (K12 Inc. leads this sector, with 65,396
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Another Legal Challenge to N.Y.C. Charter Schools - NYTimes.com - 0 views

cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/...e-to-the-citys-charter-schools NewYork Charter ClassSizeMatters Haimson lawsuit
shared by Laura Shaw on 25 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • About two-thirds of the approximately 125 charter schools in New York City are in public school buildings. The city generally provides the space for a nominal fee, such as a token $1 a year
  • With all those freebies, charter school students in public school buildings got about $650 more per student in public money and in-kind services in 2010 than traditional public school students, according to the Independent Budget Office.
  • lawsuit, brought by Leonie Haimson,
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  • federal government will provide New York State with $113 million in grants over five years to increase “public school choice options,”
  • money will provide start-up financing for new charter schools, particularly those for high-needs students; support the replication and expansion of charter schools that are already successful; and help to turn around the state’s worst public schools
  • Regents Chancellor Merryl H. Tisch
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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.
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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.
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Now We Are Six - The Hormone Surge of Middle Childhood - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...surge-of-middle-childhood.html childdevelopment
shared by Laura Shaw on 28 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • middle childhood
  • is a time of great cognitive creativity and ambition, when the brain has pretty much reached its adult size and can focus on threading together its private intranet service
  • dihydroepiandrosterone, or DHEA
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  • Middle childhood is when the parts of the brain most closely associated with being human finally come online: our ability to control our impulses, to reason, to focus, to plan for the future.
  • every group examined recognizes middle childhood as a developmental watershed, when children emerge from the shadows of dependency and start taking their place in the wider world
  • The growth of the skeleton, by contrast, slows from the vertiginous pace of early childhood, and though there is a mild growth spurt at age 6 or 7, as well as a bit of chubbying up during the so-called adiposity rebound of middle childhood, much of the remaining skeletal growth awaits the superspurt of puberty.
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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.
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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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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.
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Children's A.D.D. Drugs Don't Work Long-Term - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...drugs-dont-work-long-term.html ADHD ressearch
shared by Laura Shaw on 02 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Of course the brains of children with behavior problems will show anomalies on brain scans. It could not be otherwise. Behavior and the brain are intertwined.
  • If these children are not paying attention because of lack of motivation or an underdeveloped capacity to regulate their behavior, their brain scans are certain to be anomalous.
  • However brain functioning is measured, these studies tell us nothing about whether the observed anomalies were present at birth or whether they resulted from trauma, chronic stress or other early-childhood experiences. One of the most profound findings in behavioral neuroscience in recent years has been the clear evidence that the developing brain is shaped by experience.
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  • By late adolescence, 50 percent of our sample qualified for some psychiatric diagnosis. Almost half displayed behavior problems at school on at least one occasion, and 24 percent dropped out by 12th grade; 14 percent met criteria for A.D.D. in either first or sixth grade.
  • patterns of parental intrusiveness that involve stimulation for which the baby is not prepared. For example, a 6-month-old baby is playing, and the parent picks it up quickly from behind and plunges it in the bath. Or a 3-year-old is becoming frustrated in solving a problem, and a parent taunts or ridicules.
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