Group items tagged

Children with autism accounted for almost one third of a comprehensive sample of published court decisions concerning the core concepts of free appropriate public education (FAPE) and least restrictive environment (LRE) under the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act. The other major, and more significant, finding was that when comparing this litigation percentage with the autism percentage in the special education population for the period 1993 to 2006, the ratio was approximately 10 : 1. The reasons for this disproportionality, or overrepresentation of children with autism in FAPE/LRE litigation, are complex. Special education leaders need to pay particular attention to establishing effective communications and trust building with parents of students with autism and to optimize the use of various approaches of alternative dispute resolution.

The outcry over past co-locations has encouraged parents and faculty members of soon-to-be co-located public schools in Harlem, as well as local pastors,elected officials and NAACP representatives, to voice their outrage. "The potential for conflict is greater when communities feel decisions are being made out of the blue without them being at the table, and decisions are made quickly and by criteria that is obscure," said Jeffrey Henig, a professor of political science and education at Columbia University. He added that minority neighborhoods such as Harlem do not trust charter schools because their expansion tends to fuel fears about gentrification.

My new book, When Can You Trust the Experts: How to Tell Good Science from Bad in Education is now available. (There's a link for a free download of Chapter 1 on this page.) I wrote the book out of frustration with a particular problem: the word "research" has become meaningless in education. Every product is claimed to be research-based. But we all know that can't be the case. How are teachers and administrators supposed to know which claims are valid?

"Recent days has seen a nasty tweet fight break out, as Mayor Bloomberg's proxies - Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson, StudentsFirst honcho and former Bloomberg Albany lobbyist Micah Lasher, and former television anchor Campbell Brown - have used the 140 character forum to launch a vicious slander that the UFT protects sexual predators, defending their return to the classroom.  Their argument is that since arbitrators who decide dismissal hearings against tenured teachers are jointly selected by the Department of Education and the UFT, they split the difference in decisions and do not fire teachers who have engaged in sexual misconduct or sexually inappropriate behavior. The only solution, they argue, is to overturn tenure and give the DoE the power of judge, jury and executioner. The UFT has a position of zero tolerance on sexual misconduct, and we have negotiated in our contract the strongest penalties for sexual misconduct in any collective bargaining agreement in the state of New York. If an adult violates the trust that is at the heart of the educator-student relationship with an act of sexual misconduct or with sexually inappropriate behavior, dismissal is the only appropriate response."

"As a society, one of our most important shared responsibilities is the one we take to raise children who are ready to become productive, engaged members of our communities. It's up to all of us to keep them safe, healthy and whole, so they can do the hard work of learning and meeting their full potential. Keeping kids safe and healthy requires trust and cooperation among the adults in each child's life, as well as vigilance among the members of the broader community. This is why we have laws and policies against child abuse and neglect, as well as policies and practices that aim to prevent-or in the awful cases when that fails, to report and prosecute-such abuse. This is a serious issue, which is why it's incredibly offensive and dangerous for it to be politicized and trivialized, as has happened over the past few days. Last week, former journalist Campbell Brown published an incendiary op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, falsely accusing unions of failing to protect children."

When Barack Obama ascended to the Presidency, he was fired up with a desire to improve America's schools, which he felt were falling behind those of other advanced countries. He decided to bring "the best minds in the country" in to help them with this task- CEO's of successful businesses, heads of major foundations, young executives from management consulting firms- to figure out a strategy to transform America's schools, especially those in low performing districts. He promised them full support of his Administration when they finally came up with effective strategies including the use of federal funding to persuade, and if necessary, compel local districts to implement them Notably missing in this brain trust were representatives of America's teachers and school administrators, but their absence was not accidental.

Imagine for a moment that data isn't becoming a dirty word. Let's imagine that when done correctly, and with integrity, data can provide useful information about students. Jonathan Cohen from the National School Climate Center once said, "Educators are now used to data being used as a hammer rather than a flashlight." What if we took some time to turn that around and made the data a flashlight instead of a hammer? Yes, it would take a collaborative and trusting relationship between administrators and teachers. Those educators reading the data would have to read the data with an open mind, even if it was telling them something they may not want to hear. Those numbers represent the lives of our students. Using data requires many important conversations. First and foremost, when we have those conversations, we need to see the faces of the students.

As a veteran teacher, I cringe when I hear politicians say that current evaluations do not include student learning as a factor. When my principal observes my class, he will witness student learning in many forms. For example, he might see me call on a student who has been struggling. Perhaps that student will not be able to answer the question perfectly, but he will be able to do it far better than he would have at the beginning of the period. My principal is a veteran and knows learning when he sees it. I trust his judgment. The new evaluations hinge on a flawed notion of student progress. This will lead to their downfall.

Even people who don't agree with a court's decision to release data rating individual teachers in New York City public schools probably took a peak at the scores for teachers at schools near where they live. How couldn't they? Everyone loves to look at rankings. The problem is: the numbers, like many numbers released by New York City, appear to be incredibly unreliable.

New York City voters strongly disapprove of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's handling of the public schools, and are much more likely to trust the teachers' union than the mayor to advocate for students, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday morning. But voters also support many of Mr. Bloomberg's most recent education proposals, even though they have been opposed or questioned by the United Federation of Teachers. The poll found, for example, that voters support the mayor's desire to use teacher performance, not seniority, as the key factor when layoffs are required. They also favor his proposals to increase salaries for the highest-performing teachers and to make it easier to remove teachers who are chronically underperforming.

How do you get people who hate each other learn to resolve their differences democratically? How do you get them to believe in ballots not bullets? What if the answer is "public schools" and the evidence for it is in our own history during the first half of the twentieth century? In the years spanning about 1890-1930, two institutions-public schools and the foreign language press-helped generate this trust among the massive wave of eastern and southern European immigrants who came to the U.S. during that time. This is not a traditional "melting pot" story but rather an examination of a dynamic educational process.

"My "golden age" in New York, the one that allowed a variety of experiments in trust to flourish, happened not by accident and not just because of a few good administrators. It was possible because of a short-lived sea change in the national political conversation. It came because for a while there was a public commitment to wage a war on poverty and on behalf of racial equality."

This is the intro to links to the following articles: A Dangerous Obsession Linda Darling-Hammond Avoiding the Poverty Issue Paul Thomas Costly, But Worth It Marcus Winters Wasting More Money Molly Putnam One Factor Among Many Kevin Carey Trust Principals, Not Tests Michael Petrilli Too Much For Tests to Bear Clara Hemphill

Bill Gates says that his $5 billion experiment in education has not failed. Gates also claims that he trusts in science. That prompted me to reread the National Academy of Sciences' analysis of the failure of test-driven accountability.

A real estate investment trust that works mostly in the megaplex movie-theater business is quickly learning that the charter-school industry is a smart place to put its money these days.

Jeff Pfeffer and I had a piece appear today in The New York Times "Preoccupations" column called "Trust the Evidence, Not Your Instincts."  We are pleased with the points it makes and how it reads, but as is inevitable given the space constraints in newspapers, the final version is a bit shorter than the piece we submitted. In particular, we wish there had been space to include our point that, not only has linking incentives to standardized test scores been generally ineffective, a nasty side effect is that such programs often drive teachers and administrators to cheat (giving students the right answers or erasing wrong answers and replacing them with right answers).

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.)

Last week, a group of around 25 education advocacy organizations, including influential players such as Democrats for Education Reform and The Education Trust, released a "statement of principles" on the role of teacher quality in the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). The statement, which is addressed to the chairs and ranking members of the Senate and House committees handling the reauthorization, lays out some guidelines for teacher-focused policy in ESEA (a draft of the full legislation was released this week; summary here).

"Ms. Goldstein's book is meticulously fair and disarmingly balanced, serving up historical commentary instead of a searing philippic. A hate-read is nigh impossible. (Trust me, I tried.) While Ms. Goldstein is sympathetic to the unionized public-school teacher, she also thinks the profession is hamstrung by a defensive selfishness, harboring too fine a memory for ancient wounds. The book skips nimbly from history to on-the-ground reporting to policy prescription, never falling on its face. "

There are three subjects that have fascinated me since I began teaching. All three now seem like a luxury to find someone to talk about it with.