Group items tagged

Michigan state Republicans said this week they are preparing a package of bills to privatize public school teaching -- eliciting concerns about working conditions and trading academic quality for cost effectiveness.

As millions of students prepare to go back to school, budget cuts are resulting in teacher layoffs and larger classes across the country. This comes as the drive towards more standardized testing increases despite a string of cheating scandals in New York, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and other cities. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan also recently unveiled a controversial plan to use waivers to rewrite parts of the nation's signature federal education law, No Child Left Behind. We speak to New York City public school teacher Brian Jones and Diane Ravitch, the former Assistant Secretary of Education and counselor to Education Secretary Lamar Alexander under President George H. W. Bush, who has since this post dramatically changed her position on education policy. She is the author of "The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education."

I blogged yesterday on Cory Koedel's eye-opening research regarding the inflated grades awarded to undergraduate education majors. In response, several colleagues from the world of teacher preparation have asked what I'd have them do. Not wanting to seem unhelpful, here are a couple suggestions to get things started. (That said, I trust those involved in teacher ed, if they put their minds to it, can readily come up with many more and better.)

A number of charter school networks have begun to train teachers, a phenomenon that adds an interesting wrinkle to the teacher-preparation debate.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system, a growing, ethnically diverse district in south-central North Carolina, has won the prestigious Broad Prize for this year. The award was announced here Tuesday by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. "Charlotte-Mecklenburg is a model for innovation in urban education," he said in remarks prepared before the announcement.

Forty-nine million or so American children have returned to public school classrooms that are, according to many critics, ever more boring. Preparation for increasingly high-stakes tests has reduced time for social studies and science. Austerity state and federal budgets are decimating already hobbled music, art, library and physical education budgets.

An organization called "The Third Way" released a report last week, in which they present descriptive data on what they call "middle class schools." The primary conclusion of their analysis is that "middle class schools" aren't "making the grade," and that they are "falling short on their most basic 21st century mission: To prepare kids to get a college degree." They also argue that "middle class schools" are largely ignored in our debate and policymaking, and we need a "second phase of school reform" in order to address this deficit. The Wall Street Journal swallowed the report whole, running a story presenting Third Way's findings under the headline "Middle class schools fail to make the grade."

'Education is about preparing young people to make the world better than it is' is by Pedro Noguera. Here's what he wrote about parent engagement.

Perhaps the greatest current impediment to better schools is our meager understanding of the most high-leverage actions and elements that ensure large, swift improvements to learning. If implemented, they would have an immediate effect on student learning and on college and career preparation.

The Woonsocket Education Department believes that Rhode Island's new formula for funding education does not go far enough to meet the challenges of the state's urban communities and is joined by Pawtucket in a lawsuit to address the system.

This paper contributes importantly to the growing literature on the training of special education teachers and how it translates into classroom practice and student achievement. The authors examine the impact of pre-service preparation and in-service formal and informal training on the ability of teachers to promote academic achievement among students with disabilities. Using student-level longitudinal data from Florida over a five-year span the authors estimate value-added models of student achievement. There is little support for the efficacy of in-service professional development courses focusing on special education. However, teachers with advanced degrees are more effective in boosting the math achievement of students with disabilities than are those with only a baccalaureate degree. Also pre-service preparation in special education has statistically significant and quantitatively substantial effects on the ability of teachers of special education courses to promote gains in achievement for students with disabilities, especially in reading. Certification in special education, an undergraduate major in special education, and the amount of special education coursework in college are all positively correlated with the performance of teachers in special education reading courses.

There will be no courses at the Relay Graduate School of Education, the first standalone college of teacher preparation to open in New York State for nearly 100 years. Instead, there will be some 60 modules, each focused on a different teaching technique. There will be no campus, because it is old-think to believe a building makes a school. Instead, the graduate students will be mentored primarily at the schools where they teach. And there will be no lectures. Direct instruction, as such experiences will be called, should not take place for more than 15 or 20 minutes at a time. After that, students should discuss ideas with one another or reflect on their own.

This report describes a symposium conducted by New York State Education Department on September 13, 2011 in the Huxley Museum Theater at the Cultural Education Center in Albany.  It includes a paper prepared by the State Education Department on fiscal challenges facing school districts, presentations by education researchers Marguerite Roza and Stephen Frank about rethinking education resource use for greater student achievement and a summary of the session.  

State Education Commissioner John B. King, Jr. told school superintendents from across the state that the education reforms adopted by the New York State Board of Regents will help make high school graduates in New York "college- and career- ready."  King, speaking at the New York State Council of School Superintendents 2011 Fall Leadership Summit in Saratoga Springs, said too many of New York State public high school graduates are not prepared for college and work.  He noted that roughly 40 percent of students entering community colleges across the state have to take remedial classes.

The teachers union is threatening to curb its efforts toward new teacher evaluations if the Department of Education doesn't remind principals again that the old evaluation system is still in place. The threat comes at the end of an angry letter sent by UFT Secretary Michael Mendel sent to the DOE yesterday. In the letter, Mendel says that UFT members report some principals are preparing to use the Danielson Framework, an evaluation model that the DOE favors, to rate teachers - even though the union hasn't agreed to the change.

Alice Mercer asked: What are the major critiques of standardized tests and what are alternatives to them? My bias is pretty obvious if you look at the title of my related "The Best..." list -- The Best Posts On How To Prepare For Standardized Tests (And Why They're Bad). However, there are far more articulate critics than me out there, and two of the most well-known and most respected -- David C. Berliner and Yong Zhao -- agreed to respond to Alice's question.

Rupert Murdoch's attempt to corner the education market is not going to go smoothly, it appears. On Thursday, Joel Klein, vice president of Murdoch's News Corp., which owns Fox News, appeared on a panel discussion about school board governance at Jeb Bush's Excellence in Education summit in San Francisco. Klein was at the conference in his role as the former long-serving chancellor of the New York City school system. But there was no getting around his current position. Klein was testy when I asked him about the protesters preparing to descend on the hotel to greet his boss on Friday morning, when Murdoch is scheduled to speak. And he didn't escape his panel discussion without having to face more questions about News Corp.'s education ventures.

With teacher quality repeatedly cited as the most important schooling factor influencing student achievement, there has been increased interest in examining the efficacy of teacher training programs. This paper presents research examining the variation between and impact that individual teacher training institutions in Washington state have on the effectiveness of teachers they train. Using administrative data linking teachers' initial endorsements to student achievement on state reading and math tests, we find the majority of teacher training programs produce teachers who are no more or less effective than teachers who trained out-of-state. However, we do find a number of cases where there are statistically significant differences between estimates of training program effects for teachers who were credentialed at various in-state programs. These findings are robust to a variety of different model specifications.

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.

"Most of our educational traditions have something to offer, even if they include extremes against which we must be on guard. The latest batch of enthusiasms can all be placed within the context of an old conversation about what and how to teach. Though we need not reject them out of hand, we must at least question the thinking of our current gurus and of the most influential among those who would presume to shape the way we teach here in the States. Indeed, it is our duty to ask how well they advance the chief end of education-at least public education, which is to prepare our youth to take on the responsibilities of citizenship. Everything else is secondary."