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Jeff Bernstein

Evaluating Our Values - Teacher in a Strange Land - Education Week Teacher - 0 views

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    Articles are written every year bemoaning the fact that young Americans are woefully ignorant about civics. Here's a radical theory to consider: Young people don't know civics because we don't teach them civics! We made a decision in that moment with those twelve boys that practice with writing a brief constructed response was of higher value than becoming competent, prepared, participatory citizens. Does that decision mesh with your own values?
Jeff Bernstein

Sandra Day O'Connor: Closing America's civic education deficit - 0 views

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    Today, to mark the 224th anniversary of the signing of the Constitution, I and hundreds of others will gather at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia to remember a feat that projects the best of human potential to the far corners of the world. As we cheer our nation's creation, an important report will be issued: "Guardian of Democracy: The Civic Mission of Schools." It confirms what we suspected: We're failing our students on civics education, and, in the process, we are setting our country up for disaster.
Jeff Bernstein

Education Week: Scholars Put Civics in Same Category as Literacy, Math - 0 views

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    College-ready, career-ready … and citizenship-ready? Ten papers released by the American Enterprise Institute last week make the case that civics education is as critical as literacy and mathematics. They also explore what civics education should look like, how teachers can be prepared to create educated citizens, and future challenges and opportunities in the field.
Jeff Bernstein

Education historian Ravitch believes education support is a civic responsibility | The ... - 0 views

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    "Instead, she encourages educators, parents and lawmakers to think as citizens rather than consumers when it comes to education. Ravitch's vision for education reform starts at ground level with each person supporting public education as a civic responsibility."
Jeff Bernstein

Taking Charge of Choice: New Roles for New Leaders - 0 views

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    This paper examines the policy context of charter school adoption and implementation in Indianapolis -- the only city in the U.S. with independent mayoral authorizing authority. Our study identifies specific implications of this hybrid of mayoral control, including expanded civic capacity and innovation diffusion across Indianapolis area public school systems. This qualitative study utilizes over 30 in-depth interviews conducted with key stakeholders. Legislative, state, and school district documents and reports were analyzed for descriptive evidence of expanded civic capacity, school innovation, and charter/non-charter school competitive pressures. The case of Indianapolis reframes the mayoral role in education reform, and expands the institutional framework for charter school authorizing.
Jeff Bernstein

Sound the alarm! The "activists" are coming - 0 views

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    The "democratic engagement" faction within civics education has recently re-energized and is pressing hard on schools to push kids into activism. -- Chester Finn
Jeff Bernstein

Tearing Down The Symbols, Along With The Schools | Edwize - 0 views

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    Pre-Bloomberg, school names reflected the city's rich heritage of protest and social progress. Now, schools named after trade union leaders, civil rights leaders, democratic socialists, feminists and civic reformers have all had their names stripped from them, one by one, by the corporate reformers
Jeff Bernstein

Daily Kos: What Kids Aren't Learning - 0 views

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    Many of us who have strongly opposed what has been happening in public education is because we see its thrust precisely as creating a compliant work force dependent upon others for their income.  While middle class schools can continue to offer art and music and other "soft" subjects inner city and some rural schools are being deskilled, forced to concentrate on preparation for those subjects that are being tested.  At the same time, by cutting back on history and civics we do not provide those students with the knowledge that these battles have been fought before, and there was pushback then.
Jeff Bernstein

The Pattern on the Rug - Bridging Differences - Education Week - 1 views

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    There comes a time when you look at the rug on the floor, the one you've seen many times, and you see a pattern that you had never noticed before. You may have seen this squiggle or that flower, but you did not see the pattern into which the squiggles and flowers and trails of ivy combined. In American education, we can now discern the pattern on the rug. Consider the budget cuts to schools in the past four years. From the budget cuts come layoffs, rising class sizes, less time for the arts and physical education, less time for history, civics, foreign languages, and other non-tested subjects. Add on the mandates of No Child Left Behind, which demands 100 percent proficiency in math and reading and stigmatizes more than half the public schools in the nation as "failing" for not reaching an unattainable goal. Along comes the Obama administration with the Race to the Top, and the pattern on the rug gets clearer.
Jeff Bernstein

Ed Waivers, Junk Rating Systems & Misplaced Blame: Case 1 - New York State « ... - 0 views

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    "I hope over the next several months to compile a series of posts where I look at what states have done to achieve their executive granted waivers from federal legislation. Yeah… let's be clear here, that all of this starts with an executive decision to ignore outright, undermine intentionally and explicitly, federal legislation. Yeah… that legislation may have some significant issues. It might just suck entirely. Nonetheless, this precedent is a scary one both in concept and in practice. Even when I don't like the legislation in question, I'm really uncomfortable having someone unilaterally over-ride or undermine it. It makes me all the more uncomfortable when that unilateral disregard for existing law is being used in a coercive manner - using access to federal funding to coerce states to adopt reform strategies that the current administration happens to prefer. The precedent at the federal level that legislation perceived as inconvenient can and should simply be ignored seems to encourage state departments of education to ignore statutory and constitutional provisions within their states that might be perceived similarly as inconvenient. Setting all of those really important civics issues aside - WHICH WE CERTAINLY SHOULD NOT BE DOING - the policies being adopted under this illegal (technical term - since it's in direct contradiction to a statute, with full recognition that this statute exists) coercive framework are toxic, racially disparate and yet another example of misplaced blame."
Jeff Bernstein

Daily Kos: Democratic Education: Lifting the Veil - 0 views

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    Quick.  What comes to mind when you hear "Democratic Education?"  Pause… Okay, years ago the first thing coming to mind would be that there was at least a Civics class being taught in the school.  Later, I would add that there should be a student government.  Then I would have thought that an experiential piece should be included, like a mock presidential election or town hall meeting. Much later I came to understand that teaching about how our democracy works (even including a "mock" event or a student council with limited decision making) is a pale imitation of the lived experience of democracy.  And therein lies the rub.
Jeff Bernstein

All Things Education: School "Reform" in DC: Is the Problem Choice or What Compels Fami... - 0 views

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    After reading the New York times op-ed on school choice in DC, I asked some folks close to what's happening in education there for their thoughts. Mary Levy sent me what is written below and (with her permission), I decided to use it as a guest post. Mary Levy has analyzed DC Public School staffing, budget and expenditures, and monitored the progress of education reform for thirty years. She is a major source for fiscal, statistical and general information on DCPS for the media, government officials and non-profit, business and civic groups. She directed the Public Education Reform Project at the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights & Urban Affairs for 19 years, during which she played a major role in developing the District of Columbia's school funding systems, wrote numerous reports on DCPS, and participated in every major reform planning initiative. Previously, in private practice with Rauh, Lichtman, Levy & Turner, she did civil litigation in civil rights, labor law, and school finance, including major litigations in New York  and Maryland.
Jeff Bernstein

Joint Organizational Statement on No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act | FairTest - 0 views

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    The undersigned education, civil rights, religious, children's, disability, and civic organizations are committed to the No Child Left Behind Act's objectives of strong academic achievement for all children and closing the achievement gap. We believe that the federal government has a critical role to play in attaining these goals. We endorse the use of an accountability system that helps ensure all children, including children of color, from low-income families, with disabilities, and of limited English proficiency, are prepared to be successful, participating members of our democracy. While we all have different positions on various aspects of the law, based on concerns raised during the implementation of NCLB, we believe the following significant, constructive corrections are among those necessary to make the Act fair and effective.
Jeff Bernstein

Teaching Practices and Social Capital - 0 views

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    We use several data sets to consider the effect of teaching practices on student beliefs, as well as on organization of firms and institutions. In cross-country data, we show that teaching practices (such as copying from the board versus working on projects together) are strongly related to various dimensions of social capital, from beliefs in cooperation to institutional outcomes. We then use micro-data to investigate the influence of teaching practices on student beliefs about cooperation both with each other and with teachers, and students' involvement in civic life. A two-stage least square strategy provides evidence that teaching practices have an independent sizeable effect on student social capital. The relationship between teaching practices and student test performance is nonlinear. The evidence supports the idea that progressive education promotes social capital.
Jeff Bernstein

A Brief History of the Education Culture Wars: On Santorum's Legacy, the GOP and School... - 0 views

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    Judging by the applause lines at GOP campaign stops and debates this winter, a significant segment of the Republican electorate understands public education not as a crucial civic institution, nor as a potential path from poverty to the middle class, nor even as a means of individual betterment. Instead, this coalition of religious conservatives and extreme tax-cutters prefers to vilify public schools-and actually, pretty much any traditional educational institution, including liberal arts colleges-as potential corruptors of the nation's youth; as unwanted interlocutors in that most sacred relationship: the one between a child and her parent. It is a curious thing, because with some 90 percent of American children enrolled in public schools, there must be significant overlap between the consumers of public education and the approximately one-third of Americans who describe themselves as Tea Party-type conservatives. Never mind: It is clear that in the American political economy, there is nothing unusual about a voter hating and resenting a government program even while relying heavily upon it.
Jeff Bernstein

The Missing Link In Genuine School Reform - Teacher in a Strange Land - Education Week ... - 0 views

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    The big "reform" trucks have been rollin' down the education highway for nearly a decade now. Public school educators are used to faux reform's inconvenience and injustice by now--and some even accept endless testing, lockstep standards and curriculum, and systematic destruction of public schools as necessary for positive change. Parents and grandparents may like their children's schools and teachers, but have absorbed the incessant media drumbeat: public education has failed. Out with the old! Something Must Be Done! If--like me--you still believe that public education is a civic good, an idea perfectly resonant with democratic equality, you're probably wondering if there's anything that can stop the big "reform" trucks. Those massive, exceptionally well-funded "reform" trucks with their professional media budgets, paid commentary and slick political arms. I can tell you this: it won't be teachers alone who turn back the tide of "reform." Teachers have been backed into a corner, painted as unionists bent on their own security (whether they pay dues or not), unwilling to be "accountable." They have been replaced, willy-nilly, by untrained temps--without retaliatory strike-back from their national union leaders. They have been publicly humiliated by their own cities and media outlets, not to mention the Secretary of Education.
Jeff Bernstein

Education Week: The High Stakes of Teacher Evaluation - 0 views

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    But there is another case that teachers might make-a criticism that would level a blow to the radical overhaul of teacher evaluation, and, more importantly, one that just might help students learn. And the case is this: Achievement, as we measure it, is not really about achievement. As determined by multiple-choice tests-the dominant way that we measure it in the United States-achievement is not about how students can think or write or persuade. It is not about how they can perform experiments or produce original research. It is not about their prowess in art or civics or robotics. Instead, it is about memorized minutiae and good guesses. We accept this approach to measurement only because it is so common. And it is common not because it actually measures achievement, but because it is time-efficient and cost-effective. -iStockphoto.com/Nuno Silva Simply put, we're using the wrong instrument. Evaluating teachers through multiple-choice-based tests of student learning is like using the rules of Go Fish to assess poker skill.
Jeff Bernstein

What Is the Goal of School Reform? - Michael B. Katz and Mike Rose - 0 views

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    "One of the problems with current reform is that there does not seem to be an elaborated philosophy of education or theory of learning underlying the current reform movement. There is an implied philosophy and it is a basic economic/human capital one: Education is necessary for individual economic advantage and for national economic stability. This focus is legitimate but incomplete, for it narrows the purpose of education in a democracy, which should also include intellectual, social, civic, and ethical development. The theory of learning embedded in an accountability system based on standardized testing is a simplified behaviorist one. Learning is pretty much the acquisition of discrete bits of information measured quantitatively by a standardized test. Teaching is likewise reduced to a knowledge delivery system based on the mastery of a set of teaching techniques."
Jeff Bernstein

Bloomberg to Use Own Funds in Plan to Aid Minority Youth - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    The administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, in a blunt acknowledgment that thousands of young black and Latino men are cut off from New York's civic, educational and economic life, plans to spend nearly $130 million on far-reaching measures to improve their circumstances.
Jeff Bernstein

The corporate lobby and public education - The Answer Sheet - The Washington Post - 0 views

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    The public education system - the nation's most important civic institution - is not a business and shouldn't be run like one.
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