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Marc Patton

minnesota writing project : center for writing : university of minnesota - 1 views

writing.umn.edu/mwp

Teacher_Resources Language_Arts

shared by Marc Patton on 29 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Marc Patton on 29 Jun 12
     
    The Minnesota Writing Project aims to improve K-college literacy in Minnesota. Housed within the Center for Writing at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, MWP is the local site of the National Writing Project, an authorized provider of No Child Left Behind.
Roland Gesthuizen

Ravitch: No Child Left Behind and the damage done - The Answer Sheet - The Washington Post - 59 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...gIQAR4gxoP_blog.html

NCLB blog USA testing performance schoolperformance

shared by Roland Gesthuizen on 30 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • with the active support of the Obama administration, the NCLB wrecking ball has become a means of promoting privatization and community fragmentation
  • NCLB cannot be fixed. It has failed. It has imposed a sterile and mean-spirited regime on the schools. It represents the dead hand of conformity and regulation from afar. It is time to abandon the status quo of test-based accountability and seek fresh and innovative thinking to support and strengthen our nation's schools.
  • Roland Gesthuizen on 30 Jun 12
     
    "This was written by education historian Diane Ravitch for her Bridging Differences blog, which she co-authors with Deborah Meier on the Education Week website. Ravitch and Meier exchange letters about what matters most in education. Ravitch, a research professor at New York University, is the author of the bestselling "The Death and Life of the Great American School System," an important critique of the flaws in the modern school reform movement that she just updated."
Sydney Lacey

The ABCs Of Saving A Failing School : NPR - 19 views

www.npr.org/...story.php

restructuring schools NPR radio news NCLB turnaround education

shared by Sydney Lacey on 07 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Sydney Lacey on 07 Jul 10
     
    First in a series of NPR reports on School Makeovers. Transcript and link to audio of broadcast. "If a school is consistently failing and kids aren't learning, shut it down. Start over with new teachers and administrators willing to do something dramatically different. Closing failing schools and turning them around has been in vogue since No Child Left Behind, and now the Obama Administration is embracing the idea. It's even offering millions of dollars to school districts to help them do it."
Mr. Carver

What Arne Duncan Thinks of No Child Left Behind - US News and World Report - 0 views

www.usnews.com/...s-of-no-child-left-behind.html

shared by Mr. Carver on 10 Feb 09 - Cached
  • creating better student assessments, and improving teacher quality
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 10 Feb 09
       
      Well, sure - but the devil's in the detail, as always. If better assessment means fewer standardized tests, then I'm sure we're all for it, right? And if improving teacher quality means giving teachers more time and space and less bureaucracy, then great. But I suspect he may not mean what I wish he meant.
  • dummy those standards down
  • rebrand
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 10 Feb 09
       
      Because rebranding changes everything, right?
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • the problem by developing better tests.
    • Mr. Carver
      Mr. Carver on 02 Apr 09
       
      So apparently they are not going to revise much, just change the company writing the tests.
Florence Dujardin

Revisiting Professional Learning Communities to Increase College Readiness - 17 views

edr.sagepub.com/...175.abstract

communities_of_practice learning

shared by Florence Dujardin on 02 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Florence Dujardin on 02 Jun 11
     
    For over a decade, professional learning communities (PLCs) have been touted as an effective way to build upon the knowledge and skills of experienced teachers, yet much of the evidence base is derived from self-reports by practitioners. Although several generations of school reform (the standards movement, No Child Left Behind, and now the Common Core State Standards) have cited improving teacher effectiveness as key to improving student achievement, little change has occurred in the nature of professional development. This article argues that professional development generally, and PLCs in particular, would benefit from the insights gleaned from the extensive literature on teacher expertise that focuses on how well teachers understand the content they teach and how well they understand how students learn that content.
Sarah Schaller Welsh

Freakonomics » What Should Be Done About Standardized Tests? A Freakonomics Q... - 42 views

www.freakonomics.com/...ed-tests-a-freakonomics-quorum

education

shared by Sarah Schaller Welsh on 08 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Gaston Caperton
  • Standardized tests have much in common with French fries. Both of them differ in composition as well as quality. French fries are available in numerous incarnations, including straight, curly, skins-on, skins-off, and, in recent years, with sweet potatoes. Regarding quality, of course, the taste of French fries can range substantially – from sublime to soggy. It’s really the same with standardized tests.
  • Take the No Child Left Behind Act, for instance, a federal accountability law requiring scads of standardized tests to be used in evaluating schools. Do you know that almost all of the standardized tests now being employed to judge school quality are unable to distinguish between well taught and badly taught students?
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • all schools – kindergarten through college – should employ exit exams allowing us to determine what students have actually learned. We owe it to our students to make sure that they’ve been properly taught.
  • Then there are the questions of what to do with the results. I have actually sat through an extended discussion of how we could use regression analysis to parse out the contribution different teachers made to a group of students’ performance on a set of standardized tests. The answer was, yes it was possible, and could in fact be used to award merit pay increases. But nobody left the room feeling very comfortable that there would be any gain in what we knew made for good teaching.
  • Roughly half of the nation’s students are taking tests under NCLB that are completely free of open-ended questions.
  • educators have a strong incentive to “teach to the test.” In this case, that means teaching low level skills at the expense of the more demanding material that everyone says students need to master in today’s complicated world.
  • But is it fair to give students what amounts to a counterfeit passport to college or work? And do such tests spur high school teachers and principals to aim high with their students? To both questions, the answer is, “No.” In most states today, high school exit tests serve the same role as the standardized tests mandated by NCLB: they try to jack up the floor of student achievement in the nation’s schools. The best high school exit tests would be end-of-course exams akin to the “comprehensive” exams that many colleges and universities require students to pass in their majors before graduation – tests, that is, that would raise the ceiling of student achievement.
  • High-stakes testing has narrowed and dumbed down curricula; eliminated time spent on untested subjects like social studies, art, and even recess; turned classrooms into little more than test preparation centers; reduced high school graduation rates; and driven good teachers from the profession. Those are all reasons why FairTest and other experts advocate a sharp reduction in public school standardized testing and a halt to exit exams.
  • igh school grade
  • point average is a better predictor of college success than either the SAT or the ACT.
Sara Thompson

Testing the Teachers - NYTimes.com - 79 views

www.nytimes.com/...ooks-testing-the-teachers.html

education assessment teaching learning essay

shared by Sara Thompson on 20 Apr 12 - No Cached
    • Sara Thompson
      Sara Thompson on 20 Apr 12
       
      assessment, yes; testing, no. There are plenty of other forms of providing data, such as portfolios. 
  • There has to be a better way to get data so schools themselves can figure out how they’re doing in comparison with their peers.
    • Sara Thompson
      Sara Thompson on 20 Apr 12
       
      Does he actually think No Child Left Behind WORKS???
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • If you go to the Web page of the Association of American Colleges and Universities and click on “assessment,” you will find a dazzling array of experiments that institutions are running to figure out how to measure learning.
  • Some schools like Bowling Green and Portland State are doing portfolio assessments — which measure the quality of student papers and improvement over time. Some, like Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, use capstone assessment, creating a culminating project in which the students display their skills in a way that can be compared and measured.
  • The challenge is not getting educators to embrace the idea of assessment. It’s mobilizing them to actually enact it in a way that’s real and transparent to outsiders.
  • Sara Thompson on 20 Apr 12
     
    There's an atmosphere of grand fragility hanging over America's colleges. The grandeur comes from the surging application rates, the international renown, the fancy new dining and athletic facilities. The fragility comes from the fact that colleges are charging more money, but it's not clear how much actual benefit they are providing.
Joshua Williams

What We Learn From School Tests - Room for Debate Blog - NYTimes.com - 1 views

roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/...hat-we-learn-from-school-tests

achievement gap reform testing learning

shared by Joshua Williams on 29 Apr 09 - Cached
  • The relentless gaze on high-stakes tests and the culture spawned by No Child Left Behind is blinding us to the educational demands of the 21st century.
  • But first we need a national conversation on what the 21st century will require of our ever more diverse student population. There’s no doubt that an education that promotes life-long cognitive, behavioral and relational engagement with a complex and interconnected world is key. This means we’ll need intellectually curious and cognitively flexible workers comfortable with ambiguity, able to synthesize knowledge within and across disciplines and work collaboratively in diverse groups.
  • Moving forward, we need to go beyond the mastery of facts and rules. Instead, we should nurture interpersonal sensibilities in children and teenagers so that they learn to work in groups, within and across disciplines and cultures. In short, we need to educate, not test.
Ann Darling

NAEP Gets It One-Third Right -- THE Journal - 15 views

thejournal.com/...our-space.aspx

shared by Ann Darling on 24 Oct 09 - Cached
  • gets, the more the debate will stir and positive things can come of all this.
  • 9 Gail Desler California I look forward to following this discussion! Currently many school districts have the same keyboarding + MS Office requirement for tech proficiency shared above by Interested Parent. I think to continue with that model well into the 21st century is really the train wreck waiting to happen. I've read through the NAEP draft. as well as some of their referenced documents from ISTE, http://www.21stcenturyskills.org/ DOT , and the http://www.ncte.org/positions/statements/2 DOT 1stcentdefinition and am hopeful that the NAEP framework will promote the integration of technology literacy across the curriculum. Thanks for starting the conversation.
  • Wed, Sep 9, 2009 Dick Schutz http://ssrn.com/author=1199505 The framework defines technology as "any modification of the natural or designed world done to fulfill human needs or desires." I can't think of any human action that wouldn't fall under that definition The definition of technological literacy is "the capacity to use, understand, and evaluate technology as well as to apply concepts and processes to solve problems and reach one’s goals. It encompasses the three areas of Technology and Society, Design and Systems, and Information and Communications Technology." That's pretty much universal expertise. This is to be measured with a 50 minute test starting at Grade 4. The specs for the tests at Grades 8 and 12 merely get more detailed and more abstract. By the time this gets run through the Item Response Theory wringer we'll have results that are sensitive to racial/SES differences but not to instructional differences. I'll look forward to your forthcoming explanations of how this came to happen.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The problem? Namely, this: With no established federal definition of technological literacy, most states have chosen to follow the National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) established by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), and to create their curricula and assessments accordingly.
  • gical literacy that is very different from anything any state or No Child Left Behind (NCLB) envisioned. From the draft document: "In recent decades the meaning of technological literacy has taken on three quite different… forms in the United States. These are the science, technology, and society approach, the technology education approach, and the information and communications technology approach. In recognition of the importance, educational value, and interdependence of these three approaches, this framework includes all three under its broad definition of technological literacy."
  • Geoffrey H. Fletcher is the editorial director of 1105 Media's Education Group. He can be reached at gfletcher@1105media.com. Comments
joel008

Criterion-referenced assessment - 36 views

www.unm.edu/...criterion.html

learning online education assessment testing high stakes normative criterion no child left behind

shared by joel008 on 25 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • joel008 on 25 Oct 15
     
    Criterion & norm-reference testing
Roland O'Daniel

Ending America's 'race to the bottom' - International Herald Tribune - 0 views

www.iht.com/...ededucation.php

IHT opinion education

shared by Roland O'Daniel on 14 Mar 09 - Cached
  • sophisticated examinations that better measure problem-solving and critical thinking.
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 14 Mar 09
       
      Good. Devil in the detail, as always, of course.
    • Roland O'Daniel
      Roland O'Daniel on 15 Mar 09
       
      Interestingly, KY is looking to get rid of their sophisticated examinations because of political pressure, lack of comparibility, and $. In the 90s KY was a leader in attempting to change assessment and accountability, but for a plethora of reasons has fallen back in line. Not trying to be negative, but recognize the difficulty in the challenge and hope he's up to it.
  • Once charter schools have opened, it becomes politically difficult to close them, even in cases where they are bad or worse than their traditional counterparts.
    • Roland O'Daniel
      Roland O'Daniel on 15 Mar 09
       
      Ed, great example of how not to structure the change. Open more charter schools, make them have a 5 year evaluation plan, have an accountability plan in place that allows the school to stay true to their ideal, make changes that they feel will help them achieve their goals, even allow them additional time if results warrant, and then HOLD THEM ACCOUNTABLE. If they can't show they haven't at least held their own, then close them, but make that part of the evaluation plan from the beginning. The rub of that plan is that you can't hold them accountable at a level that you aren't going to hold everybody else to. What about traditional schools that aren't working, what do you do with those schools? Isn't that one of the big knocks on NCLB that they are 'being taken over' because of some testing system?
  • Congress will need to broaden and sustain those reforms in the upcoming reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act.
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 14 Mar 09
       
      Why reauthorize? Why not tear it up and write something better?
    • Roland O'Daniel
      Roland O'Daniel on 15 Mar 09
       
      I disagree with tearing it up and starting over, isn't that what we do in education? Try something it doesn't work (for lots of reasons, including lack of implementation), and move on to the next shiny thing. Why not analyze the program, identify the aspects that have shown efficacy, identify the aspects that haven't achieved their goals, make changes that are informed and researchable, put them in place and hold people accountable for implementing. I think NCLB was well intentioned and represented the best thinking of a group of people (in education as in many areas i don't think you can say it represents the best thinking of everyone). I just don't like the idea of letting everyone off the hook by starting over. I believe it reinforces the concept that I don't have to worry about this project because it too will pass.
Jason Schmidt

The Associated Press: Schools urge parents not to take kids to work - 11 views

www.google.com/...230Bxn6-Upff18dn_BUJwD9F88UHO0

shared by Jason Schmidt on 22 Apr 10 - Cached
  • At schools where standardized tests aren't being given that day, the exams may be looming. Student test scores have become increasingly important to public schools since the 2002 No Child Left Behind law was enacted, linking standardized test results to federal funding
    • Jason Schmidt
      Jason Schmidt on 22 Apr 10
       
      Is this statement really accurate? How much would/could kids' test scores be affected by missing one day of school?
  • But McKecuen, from the Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Foundation, said the event gives students a chance to see the connection between what they learn in school and the skills they will need as adults. He said it also can spark children's interest in careers they might not have considered or known about.
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