There was no shortage of prescriptions at the time for how to cure the poor performance that plagued so many American schools. Proponents of No Child Left Behind saw standardized testing as a solution. President Bush also championed a billion-dollar program to encourage schools to adopt reading curriculums with an emphasis on phonics. Others argued for smaller classes or more parental involvement or more state financing.
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Building a Better Teacher - NYTimes.com - 7 views
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This record encouraged a belief in some people that good teaching must be purely instinctive, a kind of magic performed by born superstars.
President's Day Mattie wells 4th grade Wells Elementary School Macon GA - 4 views
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shared by Suzie Nestico on 27 Mar 11
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Father: Why I didn't let my son take standardized tests - The Answer Sheet - The Washin... - 0 views
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shared by Suzie Nestico on 27 Mar 11
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My wife and I had Luke “opt out” of No Child Left Behind standardized testing (here in Pennsylvania known as the Pennsylvania System of School Achievement, or PSSAs).
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Last week I did just that. I looked at the test and determined that it violated my religion. How, you might ask? That’s an entirely different blog, but I can quickly say that my religion does not allow for or tolerate the act of torture and I determined that making Luke sit for over 10 hours filling in bubble sheets would have been a form of mental and physical torture, given that we could give him no good reason as to why he needs to take this test.
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ch a reason for opting out of the PSSA testing will negatively affect the school’s participation rate and could POTENTIALLY have a negative impact on the school’s Adequate Yearly Progress under the rules of No Child Left Behind.
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I asked Luke what he thought about it all. He just smiled. I also asked him what some of his friends were saying. According to Luke, they did not believe that NCLB and PSSAs were going to be used to evaluate the school. They didn’t know about AYP and the sanctions that came with it. Luke’s friends just thought the tests, “were used to make sure our teachers are teaching us the right stuff.” My guess is that is what most parents believe. Why wouldn’t they believe it? They’ve been told for nine years that we are raising standards, holding teachers accountable, and leaving no children behind. Who wouldn’t support that?
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This time, instead of having Luke sit through another meeting, he researched the Japanese earthquake and tsunami as a current events project.
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The point was to give Luke some experience in how to conduct planned civil disobedience in a lawful manner.
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That, of course, is the real problem. NCLB and the standards movement is a political bait and switch. Sold as one thing (positive) to the public and then in practice, something radically different (punitive). This is probably one of the biggest reasons I decided to do the boycott—to make my community aware and to try and enlighten them of the real issues.
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My answer is that the government is not listening. Teachers, principals, teacher educators, child development specialists, and educational researchers have been trying to get this message out for years. No one will listen.
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Civil disobedience is the only option left. It’s my scream in a dark cave for light. I want teachers to teach again. I want principals to lead again. I want my school to be a place of deep learning and a deeper love of teaching. I want children exposed to history, science, art, music, physical education, and current events—the same experience President Obama is providing his own children.
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Maybe civil disobedience will be contagious. Maybe parents will join us in reclaiming our schools and demand that teachers and administrators hands be untied and allow them to do their jobs—engage students in a rich curriculum designed to promote deep learning and critical thinking.
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Another PA parent opts his child out of PSSA standardized testing as a measure of civil disobedience. Word of caution: This can very much hurt a school's Adequate Yearly Progress and ultimately the school may suffer. But, what if this movement spread amongst parents? What then? Would the government take over the school?
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President Obama Presents American Jobs Act (Enhanced Version) - YouTube - 0 views
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"Uploaded by whitehouse on Sep 8, 2011 Shares plan to create jobs with joint session of Congress. September 8, 2011." With captions and interactive transcript
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shared by Ruth Howard on 26 Sep 09
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More from Ponoko | Beyond The Beyond - 0 views
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shared by Ruth Howard on 26 Sep 09
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Ponoko and ShopBot announce partnership
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More than 20,000 online creators meet over 6,000 digital fabricators
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The launch today of www.100kGarages.com begins a new chapter in how things are made and distributed, enabling anyone with an Internet connection to get almost anything custom made and delivered from local state-of-the-art digital makers.
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The website is a partnership between Ponoko, the world’s easiest making system, and ShopBot, a world leader in the design of affordable, high-performance digital making tools. Using the 100kGarages website anyone can get their ideas made locally with the click of a mouse, and delivered within just a few days. It is powered by Ponoko’s online ‘click to make’ system and ShopBot digital fabricators in 54 countries around the world. For the innovators who President Obama called “the risk takers, the doers, and the makers of things”, 100kGarages is an exciting new service for everyone who wants to get things made – by making it yourself or finding someone to make it for you.
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www.100kGarages.com
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Ponoko, the world’s easiest making system, is an online marketplace for everyone to make real things. It’s where creators, digital fabricators, materials suppliers and buyers meet to make almost anything. More than 30,000 user-generated designs have been instantly priced online, made and delivered since Ponoko was selected to launch at TechCrunch40 in 2007. Ponoko has reinvented how goods are designed, made and distributed
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ShopBot Tools designs and manufactures low-cost, high-value CNC tools for digital fabrication of wood, plastic and aluminum products.
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Weblogg-ed » The Obama Speech - 0 views
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I have read the President’s speech and I agree with his comments. I am a conservative republican and I did not find any problem with what the President will say in his speech to the students. There is no brainwashing or indoctrination in his comments. We have problems in our schools and that needs to change.
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Op-Ed Columnist - Swimming Without a Suit - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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There are some hopeful signs. President Obama recognizes that we urgently need to invest the money and energy to take those schools and best practices that are working from islands of excellence to a new national norm. But we need to do it with the sense of urgency and follow-through that the economic and moral stakes demand.
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Recovering from the Need to Achieve - HBS Working Knowledge - 2 views
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e is an HNAP, or a high-need-for-achievement professional, according to Harvard Business
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DeLong believes the tendency to be a high-need-for-achievement type is embedded in the DNA, an addiction that spans across socioeconomic groups. Instead of experiencing happiness or well-being, HNAPs seek "relief in the accomplishment of tasks." Moving immediately to the next task on the list, they never savor accomplishments for long, he says. This creates a vicious cycle marked by a feeling of little or no real sense of purpose and a "flatness"—in career and in life. They often go through patches of life without creating or enhancing meaningful relationships, and even lack strength to deal with life's failures.
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So is there relief for HNAPs from all this obsessive comparing and competing?
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Copyright © 2011 President and Fellows of Harvard College
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I realize that most hard-driving managers and executives have been socialized to believe they cannot admit vulnerability to themselves or others. I would urge you to get past this misconception and realize that such admissions will enhance your productivity and career. So, consider: Do you regret any significant decisions you've made about your career? If you had to do it over again, would you do it differently? Have there been times when you treated your people unfairly? When you failed to listen and learn and instead directed and dictated? Do you feel you've been working at peak capacity in recent years? If not, why not? Are you unwilling to admit your mistakes to your direct reports? To your bosses? To your colleagues? Have you asked anyone for help recently? Have you admitted you didn't know something and needed to learn it? Have you asked for coaching? If you were to be completely honest with your boss and knew that there would be no negative repercussions, what secret fear or anxiety would you admit to him? Do you believe that you're in the right job, in the right group, and in the right organization? Or do you feel there's a mismatch between where you are now and what you want to accomplish
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Letting go—or flying without a net—is a big part of DeLong's prescription. He calls for the reader to stop and reflect with self-awareness; let go of the past; create a vision or specific goal with an agenda; seek support through mentors and a network; don't blink (or fall back on old behaviors); and take action that makes you vulnerable.
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Harvard Business School Blog about high need for achievement professionals. Can this be applied to some of our students?
Dickinson College President and U.S. Army War College Commandant Highlight th... - 0 views
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Education Department Grants Coronavirus Relief To Small Colleges : Coronavirus Live Upd... - 0 views
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The 20 institutions that received the most amount of money from the unmet-need fund serve less than 3,000 students combined, and about half are religious schools — including Bible colleges and seminaries — several of which serve less than 100 students.
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Much of the CARES Act's more than $14 billion for higher education is being distributed according to the number of full-time low-income students a college serves, which is measured through federal Pell Grants. The $350-million unmet-need fund followed a different formula. Miller says for this particular pot, schools that did not receive $500,000 or more from other available CARES Act funds were given the difference between what they did receive and $500,000 limit. "So the result is that the smaller you are and the less money you've already gotten, the more you get from this program," Miller says. But $350 million can only go so far. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was given the discretion to choose which schools would benefit from the fund, and by how much.
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Brad Smith, the president of Bakke Graduate University in Dallas, which was allotted $497,338 in federal aid, says he didn't learn of his school's eligibility until he was contacted by NPR. "I don't know anything about this," Smith says, noting that his school hadn't asked for additional federal help. "I'm taking responsibility to find out what it means."
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shared by Ed Webb on 29 May 20
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The academy's neoliberal response to COVID-19: Why faculty should be wary and... - 1 views
academicmatters.ca/eoliberal-response-to-covid-19
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shared by Ed Webb on 29 May 20
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In the neoliberal economy, workers are seen as commodities and are expected to be trained and “work-ready” before they are hired. The cost and responsibility for job-training fall predominantly on individual workers rather than on employers. This is evident in the expectation that work experience should be a condition of hiring. This is true of the academic hiring process, which no longer involves hiring those who show promise in their field and can be apprenticed on the tenure track, but rather those with the means, privilege, and grit to assemble a tenurable CV on their own dime and arrive to the tenure track work-ready.
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The assumption that faculty are pre-trained, or able to train themselves without additional time and support, underpins university directives that faculty move classes online without investing in training to support faculty in this shift. For context, at the University of Waterloo, the normal supports for developing an online course include one to two course releases, 12-18 months of preparation time, and the help of three staff members—one of whom is an online learning consultant, and each of whom supports only about two other courses. Instead, at universities across Canada, the move online under COVID-19 is not called “online teaching” but “remote teaching”, which universities seem to think absolves them of the responsibility to give faculty sufficient technological training, pedagogical consultation, and preparation time.
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faculty are encouraged to strip away the transformative pedagogical work that has long been part of their profession and to merely administer a course or deliver course material
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remote teaching directives are rooted in the assumption that faculty are equally positioned to carry them out
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The dual delivery model—in which some students in a course come to class and others work remotely using pre-recorded or other asynchronous course material—is already part of a number of university plans for the fall, even though it requires vastly more work than either in-person or remote courses alone. The failure to accommodate faculty who are not well positioned to transform their courses from in-person to remote teaching—or some combination of the two— will actively exacerbate existing inequalities, marking a step backward for equity.
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Neoliberal democracy is characterized by competitive individualism and centres on the individual advocacy of ostensibly equal citizens through their vote with no common social or political goals. By extension, group identity and collective advocacy are delegitimized as undemocratic attempts to gain more of a say than those involved would otherwise have as individuals.
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Portraying people as atomized individuals allows social problems to be framed as individual failures
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faculty are increasingly encouraged to see themselves as competitors who must maintain a constant level of productivity and act as entrepreneurs to sell ideas to potential investors in the form of external funding agencies or private commercial interests. Rather than freedom of enquiry, faculty research is increasingly monitored through performance metrics. Academic governance is being replaced by corporate governance models while faculty and faculty associations are no longer being respected for the integral role they play in the governance process, but are instead considered to be a stakeholder akin to alumni associations or capital investors.
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treats structural and pedagogical barriers as minor individual technical or administrative problems that the instructor can overcome simply by watching more Zoom webinars and practising better self-care.
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In neoliberal thought, education is merely pursued by individuals who want to invest in skills and credentials that will increase their value in the labour market.
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A guiding principle of neoliberal thought is that citizens should interact as formal equals, without regard for the substantive inequalities between us. This formal equality makes it difficult to articulate needs that arise from historical injustices, for instance, as marginalized groups are seen merely as stakeholders with views equally valuable to those of other stakeholders. In the neoliberal university, this notion of formal equality can be seen, among other things, in the use of standards and assessments, such as teaching evaluations, that have been shown to be biased against instructors from marginalized groups, and in the disproportionate amount of care and service work that falls to these faculty members.
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Instead of discussing better Zoom learning techniques, we should collectively ask what teaching in the COVID-19 era would look like if universities valued education and research as essential public goods.
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while there are still some advocates for the democratic potential of online teaching, there are strong criticisms that pedagogies rooted in well-established understandings of education as a collective, immersive, and empowering experience, through which students learn how to deliberate, collaborate, and interrogate established norms, cannot simply be transferred online
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Humans learn through narrative, context, empathy, debate, and shared experiences. We are able to open ourselves up enough to ask difficult questions and allow ourselves to be challenged only when we are able to see the humanity in others and when our own humanity is recognized by others. This kind of active learning (as opposed to the passive reception of information) requires the trust, collectivity, and understanding of divergent experiences built through regular synchronous meetings in a shared physical space. This is hindered when classroom interaction is mediated through disembodied video images and temporally delayed chat functions.
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When teaching is reduced to content delivery, faculty become interchangeable, which raises additional questions about academic freedom. Suggestions have already been made that the workload problem brought on by remote teaching would be mitigated if faculty simply taught existing online courses designed by others. It does not take complex modelling to imagine a new normal in which an undergraduate degree consists solely of downloading and memorizing cookie-cutter course material uploaded by people with no expertise in the area who are administering ten other courses simultaneously.
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when teaching is reduced to content delivery, intellectual property takes on additional importance. It is illegal to record and distribute lectures or other course material without the instructor’s permission, but universities seem reluctant to confirm that they will not have the right to use the content faculty post online. For instance, if a contract faculty member spends countless hours designing a remote course for the summer semester and then is laid off in the fall, can the university still use their recorded lectures and other material in the fall? Can the university use this recorded lecture material to continue teaching these courses if faculty are on strike (as happened in the UK in 2018)? What precedents are being set?
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Students’ exposure to a range of rigorous thought is also endangered, since it is much easier for students to record and distribute course content when faculty post it online. Some websites are already using the move to remote teaching as an opportunity to urge students to call out and shame faculty they deem to be “liberal” or “left” by reposting their course material. To avoid this, faculty are likely to self-censor, choosing material they feel is safer. Course material will become more generic, which will diminish the quality of students’ education.
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In neoliberal thought, the public sphere is severely diminished, and the role of the university in the public sphere—and as a public sphere unto itself—is treated as unnecessary. The principle that enquiry and debate are public goods in and of themselves, regardless of their outcome or impact, is devalued, as is the notion that a society’s self-knowledge and self-criticism are crucial to democracy, societal improvement, and the pursuit of the good life. Expert opinion is devalued, and research is desirable only when it translates into gains for the private sector, essentially treating universities as vehicles to channel public funding into private research and development.
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The free and broad pursuit—and critique—of knowledge is arguably even more important in times of crisis and rapid social change.
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Policies that advance neoliberal ideals have long been justified—and opposition to them discredited—using Margaret Thatcher’s famous line that “there is no alternative.” This notion is reproduced in universities framing their responses to COVID-19 as a fait accompli—the inevitable result of unfortunate circumstances. Yet the neoliberal assumptions that underpin these responses illustrate that choices are being made and force us to ask whether the emergency we face necessitates this exact response.
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The notion that faculty can simply move their courses online—or teach them simultaneously online and in person—is rooted in the assumption that educating involves merely delivering information to students, which can be done just as easily online as it can be in person. There are many well-developed online courses, yet all but the most ardent enthusiasts concede that the format works better for some subjects and some students
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Emergencies matter. Far from occasions that justify suspending our principles, the way that we handle the extra-ordinary, the unexpected, sends a message about what we truly value. While COVID-19 may seem exceptional, university responses to this crisis are hardly a departure from the neoliberal norm, and university administrations are already making plans to extend online teaching after it dissipates. We must be careful not to send the message that the neoliberal university and the worldview that underpins it are acceptable.
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We heard the President's ConnectED call-to-action, and here is our billion-dollar respo... - 1 views
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Microsoft has announced an initiative as part of the ConnectED movement in the US. Here are the details: "Windows 8.1 Pro Operating System: One of the most powerful and flexible operating systems for education, it provides the ability for students and teachers to use education apps and Microsoft Office, search for information across their device and the web, and is optimized for touch, education apps, research, productivity and digital inking, critical keys to better learning outcomes. Office 365 Education Communication and Collaboration Tool: Email, sites, online and offline document editing and storage, IM, and web conferencing capabilities for all you students for free. Plus 5 copies of Office for free for more than 12 million students at qualified institutions. Partners in Learning Network Teacher Training and Resources: Partners in Learning provides educators with a network of nearly 1 million educators from 136 countries. It offers them a forum where they can share ideas, find free lesson plans to inspire classroom learning and develop professionally. Bing for Schools Ad-free search: An ad-free digital literacy platform aimed at helping students learn important digital skills based on access to a connected computing device, daily common-core aligned lesson plans, and a safe, private environment where search history will not be mined for data. Student training and resources: Microsoft IT Academy: For roughly 2,000 high-needs schools, Microsoft is providing academic institutions and their educators, students, and staff with digital curriculum and certification for fundamental technology skills. Affordable Broadband from EveryoneOn: A critical component to connected learning, Microsoft's non-profit partner EveryoneOn is offering home Internet service for as low $10 to the 36 million Americans living in low-income communities."