Group items tagged

It's long been said that public education must achieve both public and private aims. The public, which foots the bill, has an interest in a well-educated populace. Parents-schools' primary clients-want a strong foundation for their own children. Much of the time these two interests are in perfect alignment. But what happens when they're not?

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.

In my last post, I was considering how ineffective it is to rely on numbers, scores, policies, sanctions, or rewards to bring about the results we want in education.  At my most optimistic, I believe that education stakeholders all want the same things - though some people have a hard time articulating what they want without relying on test scores as a proxy for achievement or learning.  Still, for the sake of argument, let's leave motives out of this discussion.

The increasing availability of longitudinal student achievement data has heightened interest among researchers, educators and policy makers in using these data to evaluate educational inputs, as well as for school and possibly teacher accountability. Researchers have developed elaborate "value-added models" of these longitudinal data  to estimate the effects of educational inputs (e.g., teachers or schools) on student achievement while using prior achievement to adjust for nonrandom assignment of students to schools and classes. Achallenge to such modeling efforts is the extensive numbers of students with incomplete records and the tendency for those students to be lower achieving. These conditions create the potential for results to be sensitive to violations of the assumption that data are missing atrandom, which is commonly used when estimating model parameters. The current study extends recent value-added modeling approaches for longitudinal student achievement data Lockwood et

After years of consistently low graduation and attendance rates at its two main high schools, the Camden School District is turning to a private company for help.

Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools by Steven Brill Simon and Schuster, 478 pp., $28.00                                                   As Bad as They Say? Three Decades of Teaching in the Bronx by Janet Grossbach Mayer Empire State Editions, 166 pp., $16.95 (paper)                                                  

It had to happen sooner or later. The World Economic Forum recently ranked the U.S. No. 5 in economic competitiveness. Although the Geneva-based organization based its decision specifically on huge deficits and declining faith in government, it won't be long before public schools are implicated.

The public schools are being punished for the achievement gap, which they did not create and cannot close. Mr. Gibboney urges educators to rise up and fight to protect public education and democracy, which will both collapse if our society refuses to take the steps necessary to eliminate poverty.

The weekend New York Times brought a special supplement, "Learn Something NEW: The New York Times Knowledge Network Fall 2011 Online Course Catalog." I saw it at a friend's house, because, as readers know from an earlier blog, I had canceled my subscription because of what I consider the company's unscrupulous educational practices. Apparently, the Times decided to continue marketing its brand in any way it can, despite my objections.

Class Warfare: that's the title Steven Brill gave to his recent book on the state of American education. With such a title, one might think that that Brill's book would investigate how the deep class divisions between America's wealthy class and our poor and working class, a gap that has grown immensely over the last four decades, has harmed our schools and our students. After all, educational research has shown that greatest challenge our schools face is the grinding effect of poverty on so many of the students we teach.

As for the poor academic performance of low-income and minority students in the U.S., there are many reasons for this -- most beyond the control of schools. There is no doubt that children from troubled communities and families, in which few people have completed high school, much less college, are a challenge to educate. So let's be clear: parents and family background matter -- a lot! So much so that today, sadly, demography is destiny for most children.

This message from Commissioner King looks more in-depth at the Common Core, data-driven instruction, educator practice, and network teams.

In the U.S. people-yes, I include myself here-making decisions about important issues such as buying a home, picking a school for a five year-old or deciding on a college often give more weight to those features carrying numbers with them rather than qualitative features without numbers.

Monmouth University polling director Patrick Murray offered this response to my criticism of how he described tenure in a recent poll of New Jersey public opinion (see my brief reply and Bruce Baker's as well).

"I believe that one of the reasons my framework has become so widely accepted is that it gives voice to what all educators know, that teaching is very complex work, it's a thinking person's job and you cannot follow a cookbook." Charlotte Danielson

This paper is designed to help policymakers and accountability professionals wrestle with the challenges of using student performance information as a component of educator evaluations when yearly state standardized tests are not available.