Group items tagged

A judge ruled Wednesday that the New York State Board of Regents overreached in its interpretation of a new law on teacher evaluations, offering a victory to the state teachers' union.

Decision to release Teacher Data Reports on NYC teachers.

It is unfortunate that the day after a court decision held that NY teachers should be evaluated by use of multiple assessments, with student scores on state standardized tests only one minor factor, today, the appellate court said that the DOE could release the teacher data reports to the public, based only on these same test scores. 

State Education Commissioner John B. King, Jr. today announced that American Institutes for Research (AIR) has been awarded a contract to develop methodologies and measures for the student growth component of the State's new teacher and principal evaluation system.  The goal, according to Commissioner King, is to ensure New York has a state-of-the-art approach to developing fair and reliable assessments of educators' contributions to their students' growth in learning.

Teachers who leave the profession after their third or fourth year tend to be less effective in that final year of teaching compared to professionals who stayed on, according to a provocative new study appearing in the August/September issue of Educational Researcher.

This summer, I attended my 50th high school reunion. My wife called my attention to the school's motto: Verum, Pulchrum, Bonum. I had no recollection that my school was devoted to "truth, beauty, goodness." Yet, 40 years after I graduated, I argued, in The Disciplined Mind, that the purpose of education, beyond acquisition of basic literacy, is to inculcate in students a sense of what is true and what is false; what is beautiful and what is boring or repugnant; what is good and what is evil. Our sense of truth comes from the scholarly disciplines-science, history, mathematics. Our sense of beauty comes from the arts and nature. Our sense of morality comes from reflection on the actions of human beings-historical figures, fictional characters, and contemporaries.

It has been nearly 50 years since Michael Harrington wrote The Other America, pulling the curtain back on invisible poverty within the United States. If he were writing today, Harrington would find the same populations he described then: young, marginally educated people who drift in and out of low-pay, dead-end jobs, and older displaced workers, unable to find work as industries transform and shops close. But he would find more of them, especially the young, their situation worsened by further economic restructuring and globalization. And while the poor he wrote about were invisible in a time of abundance, ours are visible in a terrible recession, although invisible in most public policy. In fact, the poor are drifting further into the dark underbelly of American capitalism.

When Frederick J. Kelly invented the multiple-choice test in 1914, he was addressing a national crisis. The ranks of students attending secondary school had swollen from 200,000 in 1890 to more than 1.5 millionas immigrants streamed onto American shores, and as new laws made two years of high school compulsory for everyone and not simply a desirable option for the college bound. World War I added to the problem, creating a teacher shortage with men fighting abroad and women working in factories at home.

Having a shared vision and accountability, local buy-in, and strong partnerships are essential to scaling up a community schools model, reports an interactive online guide from the Coalition for Community Schools, released today.

Our educational system, historically a major engine for equal opportunity and a pathway to the American Dream, is under severe stress. Along with it, the working- and middle-class and immigrant dream of rising out of economic anxiety is evaporating, as our public education system, from preschools through public universities, has lost broad support. This is evidenced by declining state commitments to public education-relative to health-care and prison expenditure-by property-tax caps in communities and states that affect the quality of schools, and by expenditure cuts rather than tax increases at the federal level of the kind we just witnessed in the debt-ceiling agreements. We make decisions and deals like these at our peril.

We can't say how many high school principals get calls from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, particularly when he knows he'll be speaking with a critic of his policies. We do know that he got an earful when he called the principal of South Side High School in New York, Carol Burris (one of the authors of this article).

Enough debating No Child Left Behind and charter schools, writes guest columnist Rudy Crew. He argues politicians should put forth a sustainable vision that stimulates business, arts, philanthropic and university communities to influence math and literacy skills improvement

For over a decade, Ohio law has dictated where charter schools can open. Expansion was unlimited in Lucas County (the "pilot district" for charters) and in the "Ohio 8" urban districts (Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo, and Youngstown). But, in any given year, charters could open up in any other district that was classified as a "challenged district," as measured by whether the district received a state "report card" rating of "academic watch" or "academic emergency." This is a performance-based standard.

The difficult business of devising a method to tie teacher evaluations to student test scores is on display in New York, where a judge ruled this week that the state Board of Regents overstepped the boundaries set by a new law, in crafting such a system.

The week before schools opened in Miami-Dade County. As teachers scrambled to put last-minute finishing touches on their classrooms and tweak their lesson plans, and pored over their rosters of students (in many cases much longer than last year's), they were stopped cold in their tracks at faculty meetings across the county. Principals, with the aid of a video presentation produced and distributed by the school district, broke the bad news

In recent weeks the debate over the future of public education in America has flared up again, this time with the publication of the new book "Class Warfare," by Steven Brill, the founder of American Lawyer magazine. Brill's advocacy of "reform" has sparked different strands of criticism from the New York Times, New York University's Diane Ravitch and the Nation's Dana Goldstein. But behind the high-profile back and forth over specific policies and prescriptions lies a story that has less to do with ideas than with money, less to do with facts than with an ideological subtext that has been quietly baked into the very terms of the national education discussion.

Public education was built on the philosophy articulated by Horace Mann, the Massachusetts reformer who pioneered the Common School: a system "one and the same for both rich and poor" with "all citizens on the same footing of equality before the law of land." Today, that vision of equality is in jeopardy.

D.C. schools officials have made their most significant modification yet to the IMPACT teacher evaluation system, one that allows educators who score consistently in the highly-effective range to skip the final three of their five annual classroom observations.

More States Tie Tenure, Bonuses to New Formulas for Measuring Test Scores

New York City education officials announced Thursday that they would end their effort to rank teachers based on their students' standardized test scores, adding a surprise twist to one of the most contentious issues facing the city's teaching force.