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JeBr CaWi

Why Michelle Rhee Isn't Done With School Reform - Newsweek - 1 views

www.newsweek.com/...t-done-with-school-reform.html

School Reform

shared by JeBr CaWi on 14 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • The common thread in all of these communications was that these courageous people felt alone in battling the bureaucracy. They want help and advocates. There are enough people out there who understand and believe that kids deserve better, but until now, there has been no organization for them. We’ll ask people across the country to join StudentsFirst—we’re hoping to sign up 1 million members and raise $1 billion in our first year.
  • ruth is that despite a handful of successful reforms, the state of American education is pitiful, and getting worse. Spending on schools has more than doubled in the last three decades, but the increased resources haven’t produced better results. The U.S. is currently 21st, 23rd, and 25th among 30 developed nations in science, reading, and math, respectively. The children in our schools today will be the first generation of Americans who will be less educated than the previous generation.
  • We believe every family can choose an excellent school—attending a great school should be a matter of fact, not luck. We’ll fight against ineffective instructional programs and bureaucracy so that public dollars go where they make the biggest difference: to effective instructional programs. Parent and family involvement are key to increased student achievement, but the entire community must be engaged in the effort to improve our schools.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • t’ll be a powerful, nationwide movement.
  • In the end, the changes that we needed to make meant that some teachers and principals would lose their jobs in a punishing economy. I don’t know if there was any good way to do that.
  • Education is no different. We have textbook manufacturers, teachers’ unions, and even food vendors that work hard to dictate and determine policy. The public-employee unions in D.C., including the teachers’ union, spent huge sums of money to defeat Fenty. In fact, the new chapter president has said his No. 1 priority is job security for teachers, but there is no big organized interest group that defends and promotes the interests of children.
  • stly, we can’t shy away from conflict. I was at Harvard the other day, and someone asked about a statement that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and others have made that public-school reform is the civil-rights issue of our generation.
  • We can be respectful about it. But this is the time to stand up and say what you believe, not sweep the issues under the rug so that we can feel good about getting along. There’s nothing more worthwhile than fighting for children. And I’m not done fighting.
  • he purpose of the teachers’ union is to protect the privileges, priorities, and pay of their members. And they’re doing a great job of that.
  • hat’s why I’ve decided to start StudentsFirst, a national movement to transform public education in our country. We need a new voice to change the balance of power in public education. Our mission is to defend and promote the interests of children so that America has the best education system in the world.
  • he timing couldn’t have been more ironic. The new movie Waiting for Superman—which aimed to generate public passion for school reform the way An Inconvenient Truth had for climate change—premiered in Washington the night after the election.
  • While I had to make many structural changes—overhauling the system for evaluating teachers and principals, adopting new reading and math programs, making sure textbooks got delivered on time—I believed the hardest thing would be changing the culture.
  • We had to raise the expectations that people had about what was possible for our kids.
  • ut from my point of view, waiting meant that another year was going by when kids were not getting the education they deserved.
  • JeBr CaWi on 14 Dec 10
     
    D.C School Reform
JeBr CaWi

Report: Racial inequalities persist online - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

Socioeconomic Status Race

shared by JeBr CaWi on 11 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • "An African-American household at the same income level and with the same education level as a white household is still less likely to have broadband access and use the internet," said Rebecca Blank, one of the report's authors and the undersecretary for economic affairs at the Department of Commerce.
  • hen income and education are taken out of the equation, white people still are more likely than black people to have high-speed internet at home, by a factor of 10 percentage points. The gap between white and Hispanic homes is higher still -- at 14 percentage points.
  • A lot of people assume these disparities are due just to income and education, but there seems to be more going on than that," West said. "It's not clear exactly what explains those differences, but the numbers suggests it's not just income that creates the digital divide."
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • "The nature of that divide is changing as internet access goes from something that just occurs at home or on a big screen with a dedicated high-speed connection to something that's much more mobile and much more transient -- something that stays with you wherever you are," he said
  • "We need to address these inequities so all Americans can gain the advantages of the digital revolution," he said. "You don't want people left behind.
JeBr CaWi

Will Richardson's Wiki - connective writing - 0 views

weblogged.wikispaces.com/connective+writing

Will Richardson writing

shared by JeBr CaWi on 23 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • 1. Writing that is inspired by reading and is therefore a response to an idea or a set of ideas or conversations. RSS
  • JeBr CaWi on 23 Oct 10
     
    This is just to remind us that there are a myriad of resources here...
sunyprof

video storytelling - 1 views

Searching video storytelling

narrative digital storytelling

started by sunyprof on 28 Nov 10 no follow-up yet
JeBr CaWi

CITE Journal - Language Arts - 0 views

www.citejournal.org/...article2.cfm

shared by JeBr CaWi on 21 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • situated practice, overt instruction, critical framing, and transformed practice
  • Our course goals include developing in our students the capacity to look beyond the literal meaning of text and media  and embrace their complexities.
  • a different emphasis
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • The assignment positions teacher candidates as producers rather than as consumers of knowledge in the form of technology products and prompts them to think about literacy in broader terms.
  • We want our students to observe what is present and what is missing; to evaluate the text’s complete meaning and the author’s intent; and to focus on issues of fairness, equity, and social justice.
  • New media offer performative affordances that cater to a variety of modes of expression and multiple ways of knowing, such as gestural, aural, visual, and spatial, as well as linguistic
  • Multiple literacies allow students a wider range of spaces for their voices, and the digital media also allow them to write and create for an extended audience. The digital stories are more often shared with family and friends than are print-based texts.  
  • the medium forced them to think about what they wanted to say before they could really start
  • The performative potential of digital media, with its access to wider audiences, provides students with more opportunities to have their voices heard on a more level playing field.
  • After each recording I had the students listen to it and allowed them to re-record if they wanted to, an important part of the editing process.
  • storytelling and story writing, plot development, personal voice, opinion, persuasive writing,
  • some of them are reticent to addresses issues of gender, equity, and social justice with students in the early years.  They argue that children should be allowed to “just be innocent” or that such topics are best left until the children are older so that they will understand better or be able to “handle it” more maturely. 
  • Hilary was not one of those students; she recognized that power relationships begin long before students enter school.  For Hilary, using digital media was an effective way to get her students thinking about responsibility, fairness, respect, and caring, among other things.  This is another element of critical literacy.
  • but rather than just giving their students time to work on the computer, our graduates understand the importance of using critical media literacy skills to  enhance students’ creativity, thinking, learning, and awareness of how each of us are situated in the world.
  • literacy teaching in a digital age needs to be reimagined and that we must “reconsider taken-for-granted assumptions, goals, and practices” (Selber, 2004, p. 23). 
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