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How to Improve Public Online Education: Report Offers a Model - Government - The Chroni... - 18 views

  • var createCookie = function (name,value,days) { if (days) { var date = new Date(); date.setTime(date.getTime()+(days*24*60*60*1000)); var expires = "; expires="+date.toGMTString(); } else var expires = ""; document.cookie = name+"="+value+expires+"; path=/"; } var readCookie = function (name) { var nameEQ = name + "="; var ca = document.cookie.split(';'); for(var i=0;i < ca.length;i++) { var c = ca[i]; while (c.charAt(0)==' ') c = c.substring(1,c.length); if (c.indexOf(nameEQ) == 0) return c.substring(nameEQ.length,c.length); } return null; } var eraseCookie = function (name) { createCookie(name,"",-1); } = Premium Content Welcome, James | Log Out | My Account | Subscribe Now Tuesday, April 23, 2013Subscribe Today Home News Opinion &amp; Ideas Facts &amp; Figures Blogs Jobs Advice Forums Events Store Faculty Administration Technology Community Colleges Global Special Reports People Current Issue Archives Government HomeNewsAdministrationGovernment function check() { if (document.getElementById("searchInput").value == '' ) { alert('Please enter search terms'); return false; } else return true; } $().ready(function() { if($('.comment_count') && $('div.comment').size() > 0) { $('.comment_count').html('(' + $('div.comment').size() +')') } $('#email-popup').jqm({onShow:chronShow, onHide:chronHide, trigger: 'a.show-email', modal: 'true'}); $('#share-popup').jqm({onShow:chronShow, onHide:chronHide, trigger: 'a.show-share', modal: 'true'}); }); E-mail function openAccordion() { $('#dropSection > h3').addClass("open"); $(".dropB").css('display', 'block'); } function printPage() { window.print(); } $(document).ready(function() { $('.print-btn').click(function(){ printPage(); }); }); Print Comments (3) Share April 22, 2013 How to Improve Public Online Education: Report Offers a Model By Charles Huckabee Public colleges and universities, which educate the bulk of all American college students, have been slower than their counterparts in the for-profit sector to embrace the potential of online learning to offer pathways to degrees. A new report from the New America Foundation suggests a series of policies that states and public higher-education systems could adopt to do some catching up. The report, "State U Online," by Rachel Fishman, a policy analyst with the foundation, analyzes where public online-education efforts stand now and finds that access to high-quality, low-cost online courses varies widely from state to state. Those efforts fall along a continuum of organizational levels, says the report. At the low end of the spectrum, course availability, pricing, transferability of credit, and other issues are all determined at the institutional level, by colleges, departments, or individual professors, resulting in a patchwork collection of online courses that's difficult for stud
  • patchwork collection of online courses that's difficult for students to navigate.
  • they can improve their online-education efforts to help students find streamlined, affordable pathways to a degree.
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  • "Taken together, these steps result in something that looks less like an unorganized collection of Internet-based classes, and more like a true public university."
  • I am always miffed at the people within Higher Ed who recognize that nothing about pedagogy has changed in 50 years except computers and PowerPoint but they still rationalize that nothing needs changed or fixed.
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SLAVERY | The Handbook of Texas Online| Texas State Historical Association (TSHA) - 26 views

  • SLAVERY. Texas was the last frontier of slavery in the United States. In fewer than fifty years, from 1821 to 1865, the "Peculiar Institution," as Southerners called it, spread over the eastern two-fifths of the state. The rate of growth accelerated rapidly during the 1840s and 1850s. The rich soil of Texas held much of the future of slavery, and Texans knew it. James S. Mayfield undoubtedly spoke for many when he told the Constitutional Convention of 1845 that "the true policy and prosperity of this country depend upon the maintenance" of slavery. Slavery as an institution of significance in Texas began in Stephen F. Austin's colony. The original empresario commission given Moses Austin by Spanish authorities in 1821 did not mention slaves, but when Stephen Austin was recognized as heir to his father's contract later that year, it was agreed that settlers could receive eighty acres of land for each bondsman brought to Texas. Enough of Austin's original 300 families brought slaves with them that a census of his colony in 1825 showed 443 in a total population of 1,800. The independence of Mexico cast doubt on the future of the institution in Texas. From 1821 until 1836 both the national government in Mexico City and the state government of Coahuila and Texas threatened to restrict or destroy black servitude. Neither government adopted any consistent or effective policy to prevent slavery in Texas; nevertheless, their threats worried slaveholders and possibly retarded the immigration of planters from the Old South. In 1836 Texas had an estimated population of 38,470, only 5,000 of whom were slaves.
  • SLAVERY . Texas was the last frontier of slavery in the United States. In fewer than fifty years, from 1821 to 1865, the "Peculiar Institution," as Southerners called it, spread over the eastern two-fifths of the state. The rate of growth accelerated rapidly during the 1840s and 1850s. The rich soil of Texas held much of the future of slavery, and Texans knew it. James S. Mayfield undoubtedly spoke for many when he told the Constitutional Convention of 1845 that "the true policy and prosperity of this country depend upon the maintenance" of slavery. Slavery as an institution of significance in Texas began in Stephen F. Austin 's colony. The original empresario commission given Moses Austin by Spanish authorities in 1821 did not mention slaves, but when Stephen Austin was recognized as heir to his father's contract later that year, it was agreed that settlers could receive eighty acres of land for each bondsman brought to Texas. Enough of Austin's original 300 families brought slaves with them that a census of his colony in 1825 showed 443 in a total population of 1,800. The independence of Mexico cast doubt on the future of the institution in Texas. From 1821 until 1836 both the national government in Mexico City and the state government of Coahuila and Texas threatened to restrict or destroy black servitude. Neither government adopted any consistent or effective policy to prevent slavery in Texas; nevertheless, their threats worried slaveholders and possibly retarded the immigration of planters from the Old South. In 1836 Texas had an estimated population of 38,470, only 5,000 of whom were slaves
  • States. In fewer than fifty years, from 1821 to 1865, the "Peculiar Institution," as Southerners called it, spread over the eastern two-fifths of the state. The rate of growth accelerated rapidly during the 1840s and 1850s. The rich soil of Texas held much of the future of slavery, and Texans knew it. James S. Mayfield undoubtedly spoke for many when he told the Constitutional Convention of 1845 that "the true policy and prosperity of this country depend upon the maintenance" of slavery. Slavery as an institution of significance in Texas began in Stephen F. Austin 's colony
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    The issue of Slavery in Texas before, during and post Texas Revolution and the establishment of a new government.
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The Progressive Movement and the Transformation of American Politics | The Heritage Fou... - 33 views

  • Government had to be limited both because it was dangerous if it got too powerful and because it was not supposed to provide for the highest things in life.
  • In Progressivism, the domestic policy of government had two main concerns. First, government must protect the poor and other victims of capitalism through redistribution of resources, anti-trust laws, government control over the details of commerce and production: i.e., dictating at what prices things must be sold, methods of manufacture, government participation in the banking system, and so on. Second, government must become involved in the "spiritual" development of its citizens -- not, of course, through promotion of religion, but through protecting the environment ("conservation"), education (understood as education to personal creativity), and spiritual uplift through subsidy and promotion of the arts and culture.
  • Progressives therefore embraced a much more active and indeed imperialistic foreign policy than the Founders did.
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  • The trend to turn power over to multinational organizations also begins in this period, as may be seen in Wilson's plan for a League of Nations, under whose rules America would have delegated control over the deployment of its own armed forces to that body.
  • The Progressives wanted to sweep away what they regarded as this amateurism in politics. They had confidence that modern science had superseded the perspective of the liberally educated statesman. Only those educated in the top universities, preferably in the social sciences, were thought to be capable of governing.
  • Government, it was thought, needed to be led by those who see where history is going, who understand the ever-evolving idea of human dignity.
  • Politics in the sense of favoritism and self-interest would disappear and be replaced by the universal rule of enlightened bureaucracy.
  • Today's liberals, or the teachers of today's liberals, learned to reject the principles of the founding from their teachers, the Progressives.
  • That is the disparagement of nature and the celebration of human will, the idea that everything of value in life is created by man's choice, not by nature or necessity.
  • Liberal domestic policy follows the same principle. It tends to elevate the "other" to moral superiority over against those whom the Founders would have called the decent and the honorable, the men of wisdom and virtue. The more a person is lacking, the greater is his or her moral claim on society. The deaf, the blind, the disabled, the stupid, the improvident, the ignorant, and even (in a 1984 speech of presidential candidate Walter Mondale) the sad -- those who are lowest are extolled as the sacred other.
  • The first great battle for the American soul was settled in the Civil War. The second battle for America's soul, initiated over a century ago, is still raging. The choice for the Founders' constitutionalism or the Progressive-liberal administrative state is yet to be fully resolved.
  • The Progressive system managed to gain a foothold in American politics only when it made major compromises with the Founders' constitutionalism.
  • Sober liberal friends of the Great Society would later admit that a central reason for its failure was precisely the fact that it was an expertise-driven engineering project, which had never sought the support or even the acquiescence of popular majorities.
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    I hope you know better than to use any resource from such a biased source in the classroom without one from the opposite side, say the Brookings Institution in this case. I found your posting of this article from this anti- free thought organization that is a puppet of big business and the far right on an education site plain wrong.
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    Well, the truth is I did not intend to share this bookmark with Diigo Education, but somehow it was posted in the group. I had intended it only for myself as part of research I am doing.
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Hate Speech and Hate Crime | Advocacy, Legislation &amp; Issues - 3 views

  • There is no legal definition of "hate speech" under U.S. law, just as there is no legal definition for evil ideas, rudeness, unpatriotic speech, or any other kind of speech that people might condemn. Generally, however, hate speech is any form of expression through which speakers intend to vilify, humiliate, or incite hatred against a group or a class of persons on the basis of race, religion, skin color sexual identity, gender identity, ethnicity, disability, or national origin. 1 In the United States, hate speech is protected by the First Amendment. Courts extend this protection on the grounds that the First Amendment requires the government to strictly protect robust debate on matters of public concern even when such debate devolves into distasteful, offensive, or hateful speech that causes others to feel grief, anger, or fear. (The Supreme Court's decision in Snyder v. Phelps provides an example of this legal reasoning.) Under current First Amendment jurisprudence, hate speech can only be criminalized when it directly incites imminent criminal activity or consists of specific threats of violence targeted against a person or group. Hate Crime For the purposes of collecting statistics, the FBI has defined a hate crime as a “criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity,” including skin color and national origin.&nbsp; Hate crimes are overt acts that can include acts of violence against persons or property, violation or deprivation of civil rights, certain "true threats," or acts of intimidation, or conspiracy to commit these crimes. The Supreme Court has upheld laws that either criminalize these acts or impose a harsher punishment when it can be proven that the defendant targeted the victim because of the victim's race, ethnicity, identity, or beliefs.&nbsp; A hate crime is more than than offensive speech or conduct; it is specific criminal behavior that ranges from property crimes like vandalism and arson to acts of intimidation, assault, and murder.&nbsp; Victims of hate crimes can include institutions, religious organizations and government entities as well as individuals.
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    "Hate Speech There is no legal definition of "hate speech" under U.S. law, just as there is no legal definition for evil ideas, rudeness, unpatriotic speech, or any other kind of speech that people might condemn. Generally, however, hate speech is any form of expression through which speakers intend to vilify, humiliate, or incite hatred against a group or a class of persons on the basis of race, religion, skin color sexual identity, gender identity, ethnicity, disability, or national origin. 1 In the United States, hate speech is protected by the First Amendment. Courts extend this protection on the grounds that the First Amendment requires the government to strictly protect robust debate on matters of public concern even when such debate devolves into distasteful, offensive, or hateful speech that causes others to feel grief, anger, or fear. (The Supreme Court's decision in Snyder v. Phelps provides an example of this legal reasoning.) Under current First Amendment jurisprudence, hate speech can only be criminalized when it directly incites imminent criminal activity or consists of specific threats of violence targeted against a person or group. Hate Crime For the purposes of collecting statistics, the FBI has defined a hate crime as a "criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender's bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity," including skin color and national origin.  Hate crimes are overt acts that can include acts of violence against persons or property, violation or deprivation of civil rights, certain "true threats," or acts of intimidation, or conspiracy to commit these crimes. The Supreme Court has upheld laws that either criminalize these acts or impose a harsher punishment when it can be proven that the defendant targeted the victim because of the victim's race, ethnicity, identity, or beliefs.  A hate crime is more than than offensive speech
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Raise the bar with national exam for teachers - chicagotribune.com - 53 views

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    Editorial about a recommendation by the AFT Pres to develop a professional certification for teachers.  It's about time...
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    About time for what? For standardized tests to ruin the teaching profession like it has ruined our kids? For the government to control, from the top down, what education departments teach their students? Looks like a HUGE power grab and a very bad way for a Union, who professes to stand against standardized tests to act! Shame on them! Go to Fairtest.org to find out more about the scam of standardized testing. If you think a standardized test can improve education, you must also think you can fatten a calf by weighing it!
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    Michelle is right. More standardized testing is not the answer for anything, least of all teacher certification. Come on, Steven .. use your critical thinking skills. Don't encourage the bean counters and bureaucrats who are so enamored of things that can be measured and filed into neat categories. The most valuable things cannot be measured in any "objective" way. To focus on what's measurable is to focus on what's shallow.
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    Mark & Michelle, thank you for your comments. When I posted this I knew the words "standardized test" would be a flashpoint. It is for me too. With nearly 40 years in the classroom, teaching a creative art (music) to all different levels (kindergarten through college and well beyond), I have often railed against reducing any education, any student, to a number. Very little in what I have taught can be measured with a pencil-and-paper test. What I see here is different than this. It is the union that she is saying should be the "gate-keeper" to our profession, rather than some generic government standard test. Yes, tests would be a part of the certification, but from what I read, so would much more, including actual classroom work. The certification would be similar to the AMA for physicians or the Bar for attorneys. These are certifications designed and administered by the profession - not the government - and validate a candidate's readiness to practice. Yes, I too am strongly against the government, or any organization outside of our profession, to certify, to validate, a teacher's ability to do the job. But we have to admit there is a problem with teacher certification and validation. There are people who simply should not be in the classroom (haven't we all seen them?). It is very difficult to remove folks who are dragging the respect for our profession down. Yes, there is remediation. Yes, it should be a difficult process to remove someone in order to protect against administrative abuses. But what is talked about here is the profession policing itself - something that the teacher's unions, in general, have steadfastly refused to do. What the AFT Pres is suggesting is that the best thing we can do to raise the status of teaching as a profession is to take action ourselves to make it happen. Really, if we in the profession do not do this, then it will be imposed from those outside who do not know what we do, how we do it and why we do it.
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    You are still talking about a standardized test. Let's face it--doctors have to have specific knowledge to do their job. Whether or not they are creative or engaging is not as important as their knowledge base. The same with lawyers--knowledge of the law is essential, and everything else is secondary. However, in teaching, although educational theory and knowledge of their subject area is important (and already tested, by the way) the most essential aspect of teaching is how you can creatively engage students, interact with parents and peers, and stay organized and motivated. These things CAN'T BE TESTED. Right now, teachers already go through extensive training, evaluation, and continuing education. Do you REALLY think that a standardized test will really improve teaching? I know a lot of university professors who can easily pass a test, but few of them can teach worth beans.
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Shared Governance Is a Myth - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 14 views

  • It takes years of rank and the bitter­sweet experience of extensive committee service to realize that faculty influence on the operation of the university is an illusion, and that shared governance is a myth.
  • Committees report to administrative officers who are at liberty to accept, reject, or substantially alter faculty recommendations.
  • One would think that faculty senates exercise jurisdiction over a range of college life and policy. In reality, the right of many senates does not extend beyond making recommendations to the president, who is under no obligation to accept them.
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  • A more probable source of this way of doing business is the residue of an old ideal of the university. Such survivals of previous practices are not unusual in social life. Physicians, for example, experience a struggle between two competing understandings of their field: the prevalent view that treating patients is a business, and the residue of the old ideal that it is a calling. Ministers live the same ambiguity. Faculty committees constitute the respect that today's university pays to the old notion that it is a community of students and scholars. The impotence of the committees is acknowledgment that at this time in history, institutions of higher education are business ventures, in certain ways similar to factories.
  • If education is primarily a business, managers hire the faculty. If universities are communities of students and scholars, faculty members hire the managers.
  • The growing disempowerment of the faculty is accelerated by the distance of governing boards from campus processes.
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Occupy Your Brain - 111 views

  • One of the most profound changes that occurs when modern schooling is introduced into traditional societies around the world is a radical shift in the locus of power and control over learning from children, families, and communities to ever more centralized systems of authority.
  • Once learning is institutionalized under a central authority, both freedom for the individual and respect for the local are radically curtailed.&nbsp; The child in a classroom generally finds herself in a situation where she may not move, speak, laugh, sing, eat, drink, read, think her own thoughts, or even&nbsp; use the toilet without explicit permission from an authority figure.
  • In what should be considered a chilling development, there are murmurings of the idea of creating global standards for education – in other words, the creation of a single centralized authority dictating what every child on the planet must learn.
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  • In “developed” societies, we are so accustomed to centralized control over learning that it has become functionally invisible to us, and most people accept it as natural, inevitable, and consistent with the principles of freedom and democracy. &nbsp; We assume that this central authority, because it is associated with something that seems like an unequivocal good – “education” – must itself be fundamentally good, a sort of benevolent dictatorship of the intellect.&nbsp;
  • We endorse strict legal codes which render this process compulsory, and in a truly Orwellian twist, many of us now view it as a fundamental human right to be legally compelled to learn what a higher authority tells us to learn.
  • And yet the idea of centrally-controlled education is as problematic as the idea of centrally-controlled media – and for exactly the same reasons.
  • The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect all forms of communication, information-sharing, knowledge, opinion and belief – what the Supreme Court has termed “the sphere of intellect and spirit” – from government control.
  • by the mid-19th century, with Indians still to conquer and waves of immigrants to assimilate, the temptation to find a way to manage the minds of an increasingly diverse and independent-minded population became too great to resist, and the idea of the Common School was born.
  • We would keep our freedom of speech and press, but first we would all be well-schooled by those in power.
  • A deeply democratic idea — the free and equal education of every child — was wedded to a deeply anti-democratic idea — that this education would be controlled from the top down by state-appointed educrats.
  • The fundamental point of the Occupy Wall Street movement is that the apparatus of democratic government has been completely bought and paid for by a tiny number of grotesquely wealthy individuals, corporations, and lobbying groups.&nbsp; Our votes no longer matter.&nbsp; Our wishes no longer count.&nbsp; Our power as citizens has been sold to the highest bidder.
  • Our kids are so drowned in disconnected information that it becomes quite random what they do and don’t remember, and they’re so overburdened with endless homework and tests that they have little time or energy to pay attention to what’s happening in the world around them.
  • If in ten years we can create Wikipedia out of thin air, what could we create if we trusted our children, our teachers, our parents, our neighbors, to generate community learning webs that are open, alive, and responsive to individual needs and aspirations?&nbsp; What could we create if instead of trying to “scale up” every innovation into a monolithic bureaucracy we “scaled down” to allow local and individual control, freedom, experimentation, and diversity?
  • The most academically “gifted” students excel at obedience, instinctively shaping their thinking to the prescribed curriculum and unconsciously framing out of their awareness ideas that won’t earn the praise of their superiors.&nbsp; Those who resist sitting still for this process are marginalized, labeled as less intelligent or even as mildly brain-damaged, and, increasingly, drugged into compliance.
  • the very root, the very essence, of any theory of democratic liberty is a basic trust in the fundamental intelligence of the ordinary person. &nbsp; Democracy rests on the premise that the ordinary person — the waitress, the carpenter, the shopkeeper — is competent to make her own judgments about matters of domestic policy, international affairs, taxes, justice, peace, and war, and that the government must abide by the decisions of ordinary people, not vice versa.&nbsp; Of course that’s not the way our system really works, and never has been. &nbsp; But most of us recall at some deep level of our beings that any vision of a just world relies on this fundamental respect for the common sense of the ordinary human being.
  • This is what we spend our childhood in school unlearning.&nbsp;
  • If before we reach the age of majority we must submit our brains for twelve years of evaluation and control by government experts, are we then truly free to exercise our vote according to the dictates of our own common sense and conscience?&nbsp; Do we even know what our own common sense is anymore?
  • We live in a country where a serious candidate for the Presidency is unaware that China has nuclear weapons, where half the population does not understand that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, where nobody pays attention as Congress dismantles the securities regulations that limit the power of the banks, where 45% of American high school students graduate without knowing that the First Amendment of the Constitution guarantees freedom of the press. &nbsp; At what point do we begin to ask ourselves if we are trying to control quality in the wrong way?
  • Human beings, collaborating with one another in voluntary relationships, communicating and checking and counter-checking and elaborating and expanding on one another’s knowledge and intelligence, have created a collective public resource more vast and more alive than anything that has ever existed on the planet.
  • But this is not a paeon to technology; this is about what human intelligence is capable of when people are free to interact in open, horizontal, non-hierarchical networks of communication and collaboration.
  • Positive social change has occurred not through top-down, hierarchically controlled organizations, but through what the Berkana Institute calls “emergence,” where people begin networking and forming voluntary communities of practice. When the goal is to maximize the functioning of human intelligence, you need to activate the unique skills, talents, and knowledge bases of diverse individuals, not put everybody through a uniform mill to produce uniform results.&nbsp;
  • You need a non-punitive structure that encourages collaboration rather than competition, risk-taking rather than mistake-avoidance, and innovation rather than repetition of known quantities.
  • if we really want to return power to the 99% in a lasting, stable, sustainable way, we need to begin the work of creating open, egalitarian, horizontal networks of learning in our communities.
  • They are taught to focus on competing with each other and gaming the system rather than on gaining a deep understanding of the way power flows through their world.
  • And what could we create, what ecological problems could we solve, what despair might we alleviate, if instead of imposing our rigid curriculum and the destructive economy it serves on the entire world, we embraced as part of our vast collective intelligence the wisdom and knowledge of the world’s thousands of sustainable indigenous cultures?
  • They knew this about their situation: nobody was on their side.&nbsp; Certainly not the moneyed classes and the economic system, and not the government, either.&nbsp; So if they were going to change anything, it had to come out of themselves.
  • As our climate heats up, as mountaintops are removed from Orissa to West Virginia, as the oceans fill with plastic and soils become too contaminated to grow food, as the economy crumbles and children go hungry and the 0.001% grows so concentrated, so powerful, so wealthy that democracy becomes impossible, it’s time to ask ourselves; who’s educating us?&nbsp; To what end?&nbsp; The Adivasis are occupying their forests and mountains as our children are occupying our cities and parks.&nbsp; But they understand that the first thing they must take back is their common sense.&nbsp;
  • They must occupy their brains.
  • Isn’t it time for us to do the same?
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    Carol Black, creator of the documentary, "Schooling the World" discusses the conflicting ideas of centralized control of education and standardization against the so-called freedom to think independently--"what the Supreme Court has termed 'the sphere of intellect and spirit" (Black, 2012). Root questions: "who's educating us? to what end?" (Black, 2012).
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    This is a must read. Carol Black echoes here many of the ideas of Paulo Freire, John Taylor Gatto and the like.
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CBI: Change is possible - but we must be clearer about what we ask schools to develop i... - 1 views

    • Sirkku Nikamaa-Linder
       
      Question: What are the goals set out on the political level? What does Gove want to achieve?
  • lacks
  • guardrails
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  • which makes transformational change
  • ifficult
  • In Finland, the goals of education are explicitly linked to competitiveness, research and innovation.
  • nowhere in the UK do they really drive the terms under which schools are assessed.
  • In England, the government has defined its approach as being based on curriculum rigour.
  • This lack of a comprehensive statement of the achievement we are looking for schools to deliver is a key failing.
  • best schools
  • areas of high disadvantage
  • define the outcome they need
  • in the face of the complex and inconsistent demands the system places on them.
    • Sirkku Nikamaa-Linder
       
      Clear indication that the system as a whole is not supporting a generally accepted set of goals. Instead, the schools are trying to achieve a goal they see as important at worst while fighting the systemic demands.
  • One such school leader told us they had taken a conscious decision with one group of young people to focus on five key subjects and some life skills, knowing that the accountability system would score them down for it, as it expected eight qualifications from all students at that time.
  • Our system should reward schools making brave decisions which focus on boosting long-term outcomes for pupils, not punish them.
  • It should be able to survive changes of government and provide the test against which policy changes and school actions are judged
  • shine the light on whether the system is truly addressing the needs of all students, rather than just the few required to meet a government target.
  • Focus on raising the ambition and attainment for every child as far as their abilities permit
  • guide young people effectively on their choice of enabling subjects…
  • thos and culture that build the social skills also essential to progress in life and work, and allow them time to focus on this
  • Have a school accountability and assessment framework that supports these goals rather than defining them.
  • social literacy
  • a range of core subjects
  • ncluding critically maths, English, the sciences
  • effective use and understanding of computer science.
  • ‘enabling subjects’
  • humanities, languages, arts, technical and practically-based subjects
  • equip a young person to move on
  • o university, or to an apprenticeship or vocational qualification
  • a set of behaviours and attitudes,
  • An exclusive focus on subjects for study would fail to equip young people with these, though rigour in the curriculum does help
  • ‘employability skills’
  • Behaviours can only be developed over time, through the entire path of a young person’s life and their progress through the school system.
  • right context at school
  • A supportive culture, pastoral care and the right ethos are all needed to make the difference.
  • a long tail of pupils failing to achieve the desired outcomes can no longer be accepted.
  • enable all of our young citizens to reach the desired standards.
  • conflicting expectations placed on schools.
  • renewed system should be able to judge performance against the goals based on more complex metrics.
  • judgement
  • on overall culture and ethos, teaching and governance
  • group of data points, including testing but also outcomes data.
  • Development of a clear, widely-owned and stable statement of the outcome that all schools are asked to deliver.
  • beyond the merely academic, into the behaviours and attitudes schools should foster
  • basis on which we judge all new policy ideas, schools, and the structures we set up to monitor them
  • Ofsted
  • asked to steward the delivery of these outcomes
  • resourcing these bodies to develop an approach based on a wider range of measures and assessments than are currently in use,
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Belief and Lazy Consensus: Focusing on Governance - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of Highe... - 31 views

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    the desire not to seem like a crank; misconceiving of the work of the university as "service" rather than governance; deciding to focus on your disciplinary colleagues elsewhere (or online) instead of your institution; a healthy human hatred of meetings-all of these add up to a sort of despair that the faculty can make a difference.
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Camp Trains Future Cybersecurity Experts - 0 views

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    According to the Government Accountability Office, cyberattacks on federal agencies jumped more than 400 percent from 2006 to 2009. And U.S. security officials say the country's defenses aren't keeping up. By one estimate, the United States needs up to 30,000 cybersecurity specialists to protect the government and large corporations. Now there are only about 1,000.
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ASU - Service Learning USL210 - 5 views

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    COURSE OBJECTIVES: This is a graded internship that allows you to integrate your own coursework with a hands-on service learning experience. The central objective of this course is to provide students with community experiences and reflection opportunities that examine community needs, the importance of civic engagement, and social justice issues affecting ethnic minorities and marginalized populations in contemporary American society. Students dedicate 70 hours at a pre-approved site (including Title I K-12 schools, youth programs, health services, social services, environmental programs, government agencies, etc.) directly serving a population in need or supporting activities that contribute to the greater good of our community. A weekly seminar, course readings, discussions, and reflection assignments facilitate critical thinking and a deeper understanding of cultural diversity, citizenship, and how to contribute to positive social change in our community. The course is also designed to provide "real-world" experiences that exercise academic skills and knowledge applicable to each student‟s program of study and career exploration. STUDENT LEARNING OBJECTIVES: Student will be introduced to essential skills associated with their baccalaureate studies to actively serve the local community. While completing this in-depth study of cultural diversity, citizenship and social justice issues facing our community, students will gain an understanding of the value of Social Embeddedness and the importance of incorporating civic engagement into their collegiate careers, as they strive to become civically engaged students. Students will be introduced to inequalities, discrimination, and other community issues facing ethnic minorities and marginalized populations, as well as the correlation with greater societal issues. INTERNSHIP RESPONSIBILITIES:  Service hours - 70 hours of community outreach (spread throughout the semester in which you are enrolled in the course)
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Charters of Freedom - The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution, The Bill of Ri... - 45 views

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    The site is a government site that has official documents. We are interested in the first documents of our country. The little squares at teh top take you to different documents created when this country was trying to become free from England as well as how our government, laws and procedures were formed after we became independent. 
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Call for Submissions - US Dept of Labor Employment and Training Administration - 27 views

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    See also statement by Labor Dept (http://www.dol.gov/opa/media/press/eta/eta20101436.htm) and White House (http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/01/20/new-job-training-and-education-grants-program-launched) and Chronicle article at http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/2-billion-federal-program-could-be-windfall-for-open-online-learning/29167 $2-Billion Federal Program Could Be 'Windfall' for Open Online Learning January 22, 2011, 9:49 am By Marc Parry "The Obama administration is encouraging the development of high-quality immersive online-learning environments. It suggests courses with simulations, with constant feedback, and with interactive software that can tailor instruction and tutoring to individual students. It likes courses that students can use to teach themselves. And it demands open access to everything: "All online and technology-enabled courses must permit free public use and distribution, including the ability to re-use course modules, via an online repository for learning materials to be established by the federal government.... That's because the government is requiring that all work supported by the grants be made available under what's known as a "Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License," which Mr. Green described as 'one of the most open content licenses that exists.'"
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Hiding the Sausage - 60 views

    • Joanne Sobolik
       
      Shouldn't the legislators be the ones who are writing the policy?
  • “Really, it’s not that much different than the way things have already worked for a while,” says Brad Ashwell, Florida Public Interest Research Group’s democracy and consumer advocate. “It’s the same thing as it always was, only now they have more top-down planning, more corporate structure around.”
    • Joanne Sobolik
       
      The speaker sees no problem with this--and I can thus infer that he believes corporate America should be running America.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • If nobody knows exactly what path the money is taking, it’s unlikely that it’s headed in the direction of the public interest.
    • Joanne Sobolik
       
      Yet many people believe these policies will benefit them.
  • “As a voter, it bothers me to think that if I’m talking to my lawmaker, or sending him a letter – or maybe I’ve been organized with 100 people in my community – that they’re going to overlook that in favor of some corporate vehicle for corporations to get what they want,” Ashwell says.
  • “As a voter, it bothers me to think that if I’m talking to my lawmaker, or sending him a letter – or maybe I’ve been organized with 100 people in my community – that they’re going to overlook that in favor of some corporate vehicle for corporations to get what they want,” Ashwell says.
  • “As a voter, it bothers me to think that if I’m talking to my lawmaker, or sending him a letter – or maybe I’ve been organized with 100 people in my community – that they’re going to overlook that in favor of some corporate vehicle for corporations to get what they want,” Ashwell says.
  • the stage is being set for a corporation-owned future, parcel by parcel.
  • ALEC, she says, is dangerous. “They own the government. I knew that they owned a certain amount, that there were certain contributions and certain leaders they owned, but I didn’t realize to what degree,” she says. “Now I’m frightened because they really own a great deal of our government from state to state. I’m not anti-corporation, but I am anti them taking over the government.”
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    Expose on ALEC
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Ecoballot - 70 views

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    Online paperless voting system for schools. Good for school board elections, student government elections, and teaching government / civics class.
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Lateline - 29/10/2012: PMs plan for every child to learn an Asian language - 14 views

    • Julia Gardiner
       
      The rationale or thinking behind introducing languages early in primary school
  • Gillard Government's Asian Century white paper sets an aspiration for Australia to rank as the world's 10th biggest economy by 2025, capitalising on the rapid economic growth in the region.
  • education will be the key and wants all school students to study an Asian language.
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • funded
  • where all the new teachers might come from
  • where all the new teachers might come from.
  • the gold standard
    • Julia Gardiner
       
       The gold standard =any excellent example of something, like how Olympians are the gold standard for athletes
  • If you understand through the learning of language how people think, how they construct meaning, what is important to them culturally, then I think that gives us better insights into the people that we're going to be working with in the future and negotiating with.
  • The Prime Minister says she'll force the curriculum changes by tying them to Commonwealth funding to state and private schools.
    • Julia Gardiner
       
      Is this  good policy making? Some would  consider  it 'blackmail'!
  • Broadly, teachers and education experts have welcomed the plan, but question where the money is going to come from.
  • catchcry of the Hawke and Keating governments
    • Julia Gardiner
       
      The Hawke-Keating Government refers to the Federal Government of Australia from 11 March 1983 to 11 March 1996. It was a Labour government
  • Currently across all levels of schooling there's around 18 per cent of our young people who are studying one of the four priority Asian languages: Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian and Korean. And that diminishes to fewer than 6 per cent by the time they get to Year 12.
    • Julia Gardiner
       
      How do we encourage students to  continue  learning an Asian language into the final years  of high school and  eyond?
  • say we simply don't have enough Asian language teachers to deliver the Prime Minister's vision and for the last decade the numbers of graduates have been declining.
  • hat's happened because universities have been under these budget constraints and when they've made decisions about what to cut, they cut courses with low enrolments and there goes the languages.
  • JEANNIE REA, PRESIDENT, NATIONAL TERTIARY EDUCATION UNION
    • Julia Gardiner
       
      Suggested reasons for the decline in language graduates and therefore  in language teachers. 
  • will help.JULIA GILLARD: We live in an age of different learning possibilities and choices. What we can do through the National Broadband Network, what we can do through having the world's first online national curriculum, which is what the Australian curriculum is, means we can get a deeper penetration of language, literacy and learning.
  • e Prime Minister acknowledges the shortages, but says technology
  • will help.
    • Julia Gardiner
       
      This argument t can be debated.  It would suggest that technology in itself will be a solution!
  • we need to be looking very carefully at what sort of encouragement and incentives we can provide to students so they continue doing a language, go on and major in a language in university and then go on to teach in the area.
  • JEANNIE REA:
    • Julia Gardiner
       
      What type of incentive scan be offered/
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    The Prime Minister wants all school students to study an Asian language to secure Australia's future in the Asian Century.
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    Completely deluded. Even here in Singapore, surrounded supposedly by chinese speakers the international schools are not getting it right and success stories are unusual ...
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5 Free educational resources from the U.S. Government (Part 1) - 149 views

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    Check out these 5 terrific (and free) educational resources from the U.S. government.
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Keith Hughes - YouTube - 54 views

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    Video lesson producer (since 2007) and former Social Studies teacher, Keith Hughes, has produced a new series of videos for students of U.S. History and Government. The new series provides one minute overviews of big topics in history and government. See his other videos, as well.
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Ariz State Univ - Service Learning syllabus (USL410 Indep Placement) - 7 views

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    COURSE OBJECTIVES: This is a graded internship that allows you to integrate your own coursework with a hands-on service learning experience. The central objective of this course is to provide students with community experiences and reflection opportunities that examine community needs, the importance of civic engagement, and social justice issues affecting ethnic minorities and marginalized populations in contemporary American society. Students dedicate 70 hours at a pre-approved site (including Title I K-12 schools, youth programs, health services, social services, environmental programs, government agencies, etc.) directly serving a population in need or supporting activities that contribute to the greater good of our community. A weekly seminar, course readings, discussions, and reflection assignments facilitate critical thinking and a deeper understanding of cultural diversity, citizenship, and how to contribute to positive social change in our community. The course is also designed to provide "real-world" experiences that exercise academic skills and knowledge applicable to each student‟s program of study and career exploration. STUDENT LEARNING OBJECTIVES: Student will be introduced to essential skills associated with their baccalaureate studies to actively serve the local community. While completing this in-depth study of cultural diversity, citizenship and social justice issues facing our community, students will gain an understanding of the value of Social Embeddedness and the importance of incorporating civic engagement into their collegiate careers, as they strive to become civically engaged students. Students will be introduced to inequalities, discrimination, and other community issues facing ethnic minorities and marginalized populations, as well as the correlation with greater societal issues. INTERNSHIP RESPONSIBILITIES:  Service hours - 70 hours of community outreach (spread throughout the semester in which you are enrolled in the course)
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Learning Never Stops: Huge Collection of Free Government Resources for Education - 6 views

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    Animations, primary documents, photograph collections, videos, maps, articles, and the lists goes on and its all FREE.
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