Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

Samuel Abrams, a visiting scholar at Teachers College, Columbia University, and national expert on why schools in Finland are so successful, visited Anchorage and Bethel area schools last month, ate the lunches and sat in on classes. Some things impressed him, and others illustrated problems that schools face across the U.S., he said.

This past week, I read "the evaluation deal" between NYSUT (the New York teachers union) and the State Education Department. I was surprised, and I was angry. I was particularly struck by the lack of logic and fairness in the rules of the deal. And so to gain some perspective (and to lower my blood pressure) I went to the cafeteria at lunchtime and sat with some kids. I bought some bags of chips and put them on the table and told them I wanted input on grading, a subject near and dear to their hearts. The first scenario I gave them was this…. "Suppose this marking period you had three tests. Each of the tests was on different topics, and you passed all three. Would it be fair for your teacher to fail you?"

Yesterday's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel carries a feature on the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.The Bradleys were the main source of support for Gov. Walker's assault on Wisconsin's teachers and public employee unions. Indiana's T-Party Gov. Mitch Daniels sat on Bradley's board of directors. His teacher-bashing, anti-union school "reform" initiative was recently embraced by Ed Sec. Arne Duncan.  They also provided support for the Milwaukee school voucher program and its main proponent in the African-American community, Howard Fuller and his Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO) . They funded Charles Murray, author of racist book, "The Bell Curve," which argues that intelligence is predicated on race, and Dinesh D'Souza, author of "The End of Racism," which attempts to absolve Whites from discrimination against Blacks during slavery, claiming that Blacks were too uncivilized to be a part of society anyway.

I long wondered why public school teachers sat quietly during the decade-long No Child Left Behind era watching high-stakes standardized test-based reform take hold, leading to a host of damaging unintended consequences (narrowed curriculum and teaching to the test, just to name a few).

It was right there for all to see. Whitney, whining and thinking he knows what is best for boys and girls of color blabbered; On average, poor, minority kids are much more likely to be taught by teachers who: Didn't major or minor in the field they are teaching Are inexperienced Did poorly on SATs and other standardized tests Got poor grades in high school and college Attended noncompetitive colleges In the immortal words of Arte Johnson, verrrry interesting. But shall we break this apart and yet again show and immortalize the ignorance of Whitney? Sure, why not?

Like any veteran teacher, I have had occasional doubts about turning Big Education Decisions over to local school boards. I spent thirty years teaching in the same small-town district, which morphed from very rural farmland to the fringes of urban exodus during that period. The prosperous founding-family farmers who sat on our Board of Ed in the 1970s were supplanted by the "rising tide of mediocrity" hand-wringers in the 1980s, "basic education only" cost-cutters in the 1990s and technology enthusiasts in the 21st century.

The College Board attributes the dip to the larger, more diverse participant pool that includes more first-generation, ethnic and racial minority,and low-income students. Still, the downward trend in reading and writing is cause for concern, says Wayne Camara, vice president for research and development for the College Board. While there is no one explanation, he says educators need to look at curriculum as a factor.

Uneducated Guesses challenges everything our policymakers thought they knew about education and education reform, from how to close the achievement gap in public schools to admission standards for top universities. In this explosive book, Howard Wainer uses statistical evidence to show why some of the most widely held beliefs in education today--and the policies that have resulted--are wrong. He shows why colleges that make the SAT optional for applicants end up with underperforming students and inflated national rankings, and why the push to substitute achievement tests for aptitude tests makes no sense. Wainer challenges the thinking behind the enormous rise of advanced placement courses in high schools, and demonstrates why assessing teachers based on how well their students perform on tests--a central pillar of recent education reforms--is woefully misguided. He explains why college rankings are often lacking in hard evidence, why essay questions on tests disadvantage women, why the most grievous errors in education testing are not made by testing organizations--and much more.

Inci Akpinar, the vice president of a company called Atlas Texas Construction & Trading, sat down with an official from the Louisiana Department of Education a little more than a year ago and made him an offer.