Usable Knowledge: Measure for measures: What do standardized tests really tell us about... - 1 views
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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.
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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.
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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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What Happened to Obama's Passion? - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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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.
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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.
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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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Education Needs a Digital-Age Upgrade - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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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.
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better question is whether the form of learning and knowledge-making we are instilling in our children is useful to their future.”
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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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Can Teachers Alone Overcome Poverty? Steven Brill Thinks So | The Nation - 0 views
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economists Thomas Kane and Douglas Staiger, whose work on value-added teacher evaluation has powerfully influenced Bill Gates’s education philanthropy
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teacher effectiveness could overcome those disadvantages
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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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The Weekend Interview with Bill Gates: Was the $5 Billion Worth It? - WSJ.com - 0 views
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Since 2000, the foundation has poured some $5 billion into education grants and scholarships.
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One of the foundation's main initial interests was schools with fewer students.
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designed to—and did—promote less acting up in the classroom, better attendance and closer interaction with adults.
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Free Advisers Cost N.Y. Education Dept., Critics Say - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Those donors include Bill Gates ($892,000), who is leading the charge to evaluate teachers, principals and schools using students’ test scores
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National Association of Charter School Administrators ($50,000)
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Robbins Foundation ($500,000), which finance charter expansion
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Can the Middle Class Be Saved? - Magazine - The Atlantic - 0 views
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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.
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more important, cleavage in American society—the one between college graduates and everyone else.
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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.
Teachers Feeling 'Beat Down' As School Year Starts : NPR - 0 views
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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.
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"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.
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"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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Students of Virtual Schools Are Lagging in Proficiency - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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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
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“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.
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for-profit companies (K12 Inc. leads this sector, with 65,396
Another Legal Challenge to N.Y.C. Charter Schools - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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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
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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.
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lawsuit, brought by Leonie Haimson,
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Idaho Teachers Fight a Reliance on Computers - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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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.
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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.
Yong Zhao » Blog Archive » Ditch Testing (Part 5): Testing Has Not Improved E... - 0 views
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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.
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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.
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high-stakes testing
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Now We Are Six - The Hormone Surge of Middle Childhood - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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middle childhood
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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
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dihydroepiandrosterone, or DHEA
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Wakeup Call For The Gates Foundation: Think Bigger! - Steve Denning - RETHINK - Forbes - 0 views
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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.
Suzanne Tacheny Kubach: Let's "Save" What Matters Most: Students - 0 views
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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
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basic aim
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increase public funding through a campaign to roll back accountability
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Observing emotional interactions between teachers and students in elementary school cla... - 0 views
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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.
Children's A.D.D. Drugs Don't Work Long-Term - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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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.
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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.
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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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