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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

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)
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.
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

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

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.
Laura Shaw

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
Laura Shaw

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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