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Subject: Teacher Depreciation Week | NationofChange - 1 views
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Subject: Teacher Depreciation Week | NationofChange
Date: May 13, 2012 10:05:09 AM EDT
http://www.nationofchange.org/teacher-depreciation-week-1336829721
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Teacher Depreciation Week
It was Teacher Appreciation Week this week. Unfortunately, someone forgot the appreciation part.
President Obama, for one, kicked off the week by proclaiming that from now on the week would also (instead?) be forever known as National Charter Schools Week.
Declaring charters to be "incubators of innovations," the president praised charter schools for having "brought new ideas to the work of educating our sons and daughters."
Apparently, no one had sent the president the memo that charter schools are hugely controversial, particularly with teachers.
What's "Innovative" About Charter Schools?
In fact, the week before the president exuded about charter schools, a new study was presented by the National Education Policy Center revealing that one "innovation" that large charter school franchises definitely can not claim is cost savings.
The study looked at the per-pupil spending of charter schools operated by major charter management organizations (CMOs) in New York City, Texas and Ohio with district schools and found that many high profile charter network schools outspend district schools of similar size, serving the same grade levels and similar student populations.
But probably teachers' biggest beef with charter schools is that they don't have to play by the same rules that public schools do, while they loudly claim to be "innovative." As school finance analyst Bruce Baker explains:
Charter schools are limited public access in the sense that:
Furthermore, Baker continues, in many states, charters are allowed to operate completely outside the authority of locally elected school boards and municipal governments and can contract with private management firms and private boards that can require student disciplinary codes and parental participation regulations that would not be tolerated in a community-operated school. So in many respects, a great many charter schools -- although they receive public funds -- are not really "public" schools at all.
So it is quite likely that any supposed innovation coming from a charter school would have absolutely no applicability to a traditional public school because the student populations and set of circumstances governing those schools are so remarkably different. It's like doing a controlled experiment in which the test groups gets to change all the variables and manipulate the results.
So if President Obama had the power to choose when to honor charter schools with an unfounded proclamation about their "innovative" powers, he could not have picked a worse time to do it.
What Teachers Really Think
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One wonders if the president's choice for when to proclaim National Charters Schools Week had to have come from his Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Duncan is undoubtedly a big fan of charter schools. But in his kick-off address for Teacher Appreciation Week, which appeared on the Huffington Post, Duncan avoided the subject of charter school altogether and instead ticked off a list of "what teachers say they want" without ever quoting a single teacher or sourcing a survey or research study of teacher attitudes and desires.
If Secretary Duncan had bothered to look up some actual evidence of what teachers feel about their current lot in life, he would have found that they are extremely dissatisfied with how they're being treated. Which is why the Secretary's post was triggered nearly 200 comments, most of them deeply critical of him and his policies, and mostly from teachers, practicing and former. This example from Alex Messer was particularly pointed:
The truth is Arne Duncan's policies represent a destructive force to education in America. Just this past month, 3-5th graders were subjected to NINE hours of high-stakes tests in NY State alone. And this is just the beginning. Teachers have had their names published with their employee evaluations in national newspapers - which happens in NO other profession. As if this public humiliation were not enough, the new evaluation framework being agreed to in NY State - and shepherded under Duncan - will lead to teachers being fired based on faulty data with margins of error over 50%. The current trend of high-stakes testing and teacher bashing will have ramifications that people aren't quite seeing yet.
Testing Teachers' Patience
Regarding those tests, at least some portion of the ever-expanding regime of high-stakes testing mandated across the country closely followed or preceded Teacher Appreciation Week in many states, including Texas, New York, and Florida.
Teachers by and large don't think too much of these tests. According to the education trade newspaper Education Week, a new survey of more than 10,000 public school teachers has found that "only 28 percent of educators see state-required standardized tests as an essential or very important gauge of student achievement. In addition, only 26 percent of teachers say standardized tests are an accurate reflection of what students know."
What teachers would prefer instead are ongoing classroom assessments that would actually tell them something about what their students are learning while the teacher can actually do something about it. And they would much rather see class participation and performance on class assignments-- the things they see going on in their classrooms everyday -- as more important measures of student learning.
Pink-Slipped Into Attrition
Another trying experience many teachers start being put through this time of year are the annual rounds of teacher layoffs that occur in school districts across the country.
As Valerie Strauss reports from her blog at The Washington Post, " two business days before National Teacher Day, D.C. Public Schools officials sent out notices to 333 teachers saying that their jobs had effectively been eliminated." Congratulations!
DC School is not alone in executing such an ill-timed slap to its employees. California also recently issued mass teacher layoff notices -- for the fourth year in a row. Many of these teachers -- perhaps 75 percent, according to one study -- may end up employed in school when the next school year begins. But how can you be certain you're not in the 25 percent?
You don't have to imagine what this does to the morale of teachers. Just listen to them:
Somehow I thought this year would be different. It's not.Every year for the six years since I entered education, I've been laid off. It is the same cycle. Tales of budget problems start in January. Preliminary layoff notices go out in March. Final notices are given out May 15. And until last year, every year I've gotten hired back to the same school in June or July.I realize it is not just me. It is not just Santa Clara County; it is not just California. Across the country, this has become the norm.[snip]Try as I might, this year is no different. I developed a love for every one of my students. I started talking about what my colleagues and I would collaborate on next year. And so I cried on March 15 and, once again, despite my best intentions, it will hurt deeply when I get laid off for real.Yet for the next eight weeks, I will teach my students with enthusiasm and commitment. I will stand up at Open House and greet prospective fourth-graders with excitement when they tell me how much they hope they can be in my class next year. And when my darlings are promoted and say they'll come back to see me next year, I'll tell them I can't wait to see them. And that's true..
Change Could Be Worse Than The Status Quo
With a general election coming up this fall, you would expect that the intolerable status quo of teachers would be a major point of contention for the opposition Republican party. Most seasoned observers believe that the 2012 election is "up for grabs," and Republicans know a wedge issue when they see one.
Yet prominent Republican governors -- such as Louisiana's Bobby Jindal, Virginia's Bob McDonnell, and New Jersey's Chris Christie -- are pushing education policies that are exceedingly harsher on classroom teachers, abolishing their rights to collective bargaining and due process, subjecting them to unfair and inaccurate evaluation processes, and threatening their health and retirement security.
At the national level, President Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney align on a number of key issues affecting teachers. As an article at The Fiscal Times observed:
Both politicians place great store in standardized testing to evaluate teacher performance and student progress, and both generally back former President George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind program. Both favor charter schools as an alternative to failing public schools and merit pay to attract better teachers. And both have had their run-ins with teachers unions.
The only point of contention in regard to public schools teachers appears to be what to spend on them.
The Real Value Of Teachers
So what did classroom teachers think about all these pretty pronouncements about them this past week?
Here's how one teacher put it at the blogsite for the Atlanta Journal and Constitution's education reporter Maureen Downey:
It's teacher appreciation week, again, and the fact that teacher morale is at the lowest it's probably ever been shows that our nation is ignoring the reason that the week was started in the beginning. Think of it as the educational equivalent of taking the "Christ" out of Christmas. A holiday we'll go on celebrating arbitrarily since it no longer has anything to do with teachers themselves.
A favorite bromide passed around by the political class is that the "value" of teachers is in their effects on the future earnings of the children they teach.
The data source for these fulminations is a study calculating that a "highly effective" teacher can lead to our kids earning many more thousands of dollars when they grow up.
While this conclusion may sound particularly impressive, it ultimately dehumanizes teachers, reducing their immense influence on our children's development and well-being to a mere cipher on a spreadsheet. And when teachers are treated almost exclusively as economic units -- a cost on a balance sheet to argue over its "value" in the much bigger enterprise that is America -- their immense real value will be continuously depreciated, and the greater purposes of education that certainly dwarf mere income -- goals like creativity and curiosity, responsibility and self-reliance, patriotism and active citizenry -- become diminished.
This week President Obama and many others in his administration did an immensely important and brave thing when they chose to break ranks from the stalemate on marriage equality. In doing so, they didn't talk about the dollars and cents of the matter and instead chose to talk about gay couples not as abstractions on a ledger but as human beings with feelings and rights and dignity. When are our leaders going to start talking about teachers that way?
National science test shows only slight improvement - 1 views
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By Lyndsey Layton,
National tests measuring science knowledge among eighth-graders show slight improvement compared with those of two years earlier,but one-third of all students still lack a basic understanding of the physical, life and earth sciences, according to a federal study made public Thursday.
The tests showed that black and Hispanic students had made slightly more progress than white students, making a tiny dent in the persistent achievement gaps between the racial groups.
Ethnic disparity in science test results
Private school students outpaced public school students nationwide. And students who reported that they regularly performed hands-on science projects in class scored higher than students who less frequently did that kind of class work.
The study is based on the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress. The tests are given in different subjects and periodically to fourth-, eighth- and 12th-graders across the country.
The tests, often called The Nation's Report Card, are the only continuing and nationally representative assessment of what students know.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan said the slight increase in test scores and narrowing of the achievement gap were promising but that the country has a long way to go. "This tells me that we need to work harder and faster to build capacity in schools and in districts across the country," Duncan said in a statement. "We have to do things differently; that's why education reform is so critical."
Gerry Wheeler, interim executive director of the National Science Teachers Association, was blunt. "This is dreadful," he said.
Wheeler said No Child Left Behind, the 2002 federal education law, is partly to blame, because it emphasized reading and mathematics at the expense of science. "As a country, we've backed off on science," he said. "We even have members in elementary schools who say, 'My principal told me to stop teaching science.' "
It is difficult to say how the 2011 results fit into a larger trend line of student performance. The National Assessment Governing Board, which sets policy for the test, changed the framework for the science exam two years ago, making comparisons to tests prior to that impossible.
In Virginia, students scored higher than the national average and posted higher scores in 2011 than they did in 2009. The performance gap between white students and blacks and Hispanics did not change between 2009 and 2011.
In Maryland, students performed the same as the national average for public school students. The average Maryland scores were four points higher in 2011 than in 2009 but the percentage of students performing at the proficient and basic levels did not change over the two years. The performance gap between white students and other racial groups, as well as between poor students and those from more affluent families, did not significantly change between 2009 and 2011.
One bright spot in Maryland is the fact that the gender gap seems to have largely disappeared. On average, boys and girls scored alike on the science test, and the same percentage of males and females were deemed basic or proficient. But a greater percentage of boys than girls were deemed advanced.
Students in the District turned in the worst performance in the region, performing significantly below the national average. The achievement gap between whites and blacks was nearly twice as wide as the national average, and the gap between white students and Hispanics was also wider than the national average. D.C. schools did not participate in the voluntary testing in 2009, so no comparisons to earlier results can be made.
The results come as corporations, the military and the federal government are growing increasingly concerned about U.S. students and their mastery of the STEM subjects - science, technology, engineering and math.
President Obama, who hosted a science fair at the White House in February and spoke about the need to improve science and technology education in his State of the Union address, wants to train 100,000 new math and science teachers over the next decade. He intends to contribute federal dollars to a $100 million program led by the Carnegie Corporation to create more science teachers.
Those efforts are not enough, Wheeler said. "The message is getting lost at the local level, and that's where the change has to happen," he said. "Otherwise, it's pretty much a scatter gun thing - there's no united effort to bring these children forward."
Compared with 2009, the average science scores in 2011 were one point higher for white students, three points higher for black students and five points higher for Hispanic students. There were no significant changes in scores for Asians.
The Ironies of Teacher Appreciation Week - 1 views
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/the-ironies-of-teacher-appreciation-week/2012/05/09/gIQAjkjTEU_blog.html
The ironies of Teacher Appreciation Week
By Valerie Strauss
Last Friday, the Friday before the start of Teacher Appreciation Week and two business days before National Teacher Day, D.C. Public Schools officials sent out notices to 333 teachers saying that their jobs had effectively been eliminated. This should be considered better form than last year, when they sent out "excessing" notices on the last day of Teacher Appreciation Week.
But Washington D.C. is hardly the only place that could be cited for violating the spirit of the week so close to it. In state after state, legislatures are considering and passing laws to restrict or end teacher tenure, cut teachers' collective bargaining rights, unfairly evaluate teachers in part by student standard test scores, and take other actions that teachers consider hostile.
There is too, the warm embrace of school reformers and the Obama administration of Teach for America - to which teachers take particular offense. TFA recruits newly minted college graduates who are not education majors and gives them five weeks of summer training before placing them in classrooms in high-poverty and rural schools, the very schools you'd think would need the most highly trained teachers.
One of the official events on Education Secretary Arne Duncan's schedule this week, as he goes around honoring teachers, is to appear at Teach for America's second annual gala. Of course he did; the Education Department has showered millions of dollars on the organization in the last few years, and last September, Duncan said at an event with Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp and National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel: "I don't think anyone in the country has done more over the past 15 to 20 years than Wendy Kopp to identify the talents and characteristics that lead to great teaching."
That was news to many teachers and education researchers in this field.
It would be interesting to see the reaction of education policymakers if they were told that one or more of their children's teachers had five weeks of training and wasn't really interested in the teaching profession.
TFA recruits are asked to commit to only two years of teaching, helping to create turnover in schools where teacher instability is most harmful. (TFA itself and its critics cite different numbers when talking about the number of corps members who stay in education beyond a few years.)
This isn't to say, of course, that some TFA recruits don't turn out to be wonderful teachers. I know some who have. Still, America is not going to improve its teaching force with an army of itinerant young teachers.
There is a deep irony in the fact that school reformers talk so much about successful education systems in other countries, such as Finland, which have tough standards for entry into the profession, and their strong backing for Teach for America. Something is wrong with this picture.
All of this helps explain why teachers' job satisfaction has sharply dropped since 2009, and the proportion who are thinking of leaving teaching has gone from 17 percent to 29 percent - a 70 percent increase in only two years, according to the most recent Metlife Survey of the American Teacher.
There is no question that there is a lot about the teaching profession that can and should be improved. Plenty of teacher training programs are inadequate, and there are teachers in classrooms who shouldn't be. Most teacher evaluation systems need to be improved, and there is work under way toward that end.
But the unfortunate reality is that a lot of the "reforms" undertaken recently to "fix the profession" won't work, and are more than likely to drive more teachers out of the profession.
The U.S. Education Department, in what it says is an effort to elevate the teaching profession to help students and teachers alike, released on Monday a 14-page "vision document" for transforming the education profession.
There are some good ideas in the document, but, try as it might, the Education Department can't get out of its own way. In Section VII, Teacher Evaluation and Development, it includes as one of the teacher evaluation tools "measurements of student growth data." In Education Department lingo, that means, at least in part, student standardized test scores.
Among the 3.2 million teachers now working in K-12 schools, there are certainly some who are not opposed to using test scores for evaluation. That doesn't make it a good or fair idea, and it continues to make standardized tests the driving force in public education, a role these exams weren't designed to have and which many - and I'd wager most - teachers think is inappropriate.
One of the comments on the Education Department website announcing the vision document says the following:
"Unless the public is persuaded that teachers are critical for our democratic society, the profession will continue to suffer economically and socially. After basking in the attention from stories of the positive influence they have had on on the lives of individual students during Teacher Appreciation Week, teachers need to integrate one more lesson to their repertoire. How ironic that teachers must teach the significance of teaching."
And that's where we stand during Teacher Appreciation Week 2012.
Some links you may find useful:
What teachers say they want
Has the NEA warmed up to Teach for America
Thoughts on teachers - from Socrates to Lady Gaga
The global reach of Teach for America's Wendy Kopp
Teach for America is great! Just not for my kids!
FCC to Tell Phone Companies to Follow Low-Price Rule for Schools - 1 views
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PARTNER CONTENT
By Jeff Gerth, ProPublica
Premium article access courtesy of Edweek.org.
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2012/05/08/31pnbk_propublca_erate-fcc.h31.html?tkn=ZSUFu7VFod7dsVoOiqAlxZw%2Fqs%2Bk%2FJBRNKrh&cmp=clp-edweek&google_editors_picks=true
After 15 years of neglect, federal regulators are finally planning to tell phone companies selling services to schools and libraries how to comply with a rule requiring them to charge bargain prices.
Last week ProPublica revealed that the Federal Communications Commission had failed to provide guidance for the low pricing rule case since the 1997 launch of the school program, called E-Rate. Lawsuits and other legal actions in four states turned up evidence that AT&T and Verizon charged local school districts much higher rates than it gave to similar customers or more than what the program allowed.
The preferential pricing rule, called lowest corresponding price, was designed to give schools a leg up in the complicated world of voice and data pricing, and to make sure school children had access to the Internet. But despite evidence of inflated pricing, the FCC never brought an enforcement case against a service provider for violating the rule.
While the main victims of this failure are the nation's schoolchildren who receive suboptimal broadband access, there's another set of victims: the vast majority of people with a cellular or landline phone contract. That's because the program provides a subsidy to schools to help them pay for the telecom services. Telephone consumers pay for this subsidy, usually through a "Universal Service Fund" charge on individual phone bills. The subsidy fund is capped at about $2.25 billion a year.
Schools and libraries draw on this fund to help pay for the services provided by the telecom companies-virtually all schools are eligible, but the poorer the school, the more it can draw. Here's the rub: Requests for help almost always exceed the available funding. So when phone companies charge inflated rates to schools and government regulators turn a blind eye, this fund is depleted faster; fewer schools and libraries benefit; and money taken from millions of telephone customers goes to boost corporate profits instead of to help as many schoolchildren as possible.
Now, the FCC will finally teach phone companies about the preferential pricing rule. Over the next week companies that participate in the program will be attending annual training sessions in Atlanta and Los Angeles that are designed to explain the program's rules. This year's training sessions-unlike those in past years-will include lengthy discussions of the bargain pricing rule, according to a power point presentation posted on the website of the private company that administers the E-Rate program for the FCC, the Universal Service Administration Co.
The presentation tells companies that schools are "not obligated to ask" for the lowest corresponding price, "but must receive it!"
Asked to explain why the upcoming training sessions for providers were going to discuss the pricing rule for the first time, a spokesman for the FCC released a statement saying the new guidance was "prompted by an internal discussion last August of issues raised in the whistle-blower case."
That case was brought in 2008 by Todd Heath, who audited school telecom bills in Wisconsin. He alleged in federal court that Wisconsin Bell, a unit of AT&T, was charging several schools far more than others for essentially the same services, thus violating the pricing rule. The company says it follows the E-Rate rules and is contesting Heath's allegations in court. One of their defenses is the FCC's lack of guidance about the pricing rule.
ProPublica interviewed several FCC officials responsible for E-Rate last December, in a discussion mostly about the lowest corresponding price rule. None of them mentioned the prospect of new training about the rule, even after it was pointed out that the FCC had provided phone companies virtually no guidance on the price rule for the previous decade.
Copyright 2012, ProPublica Inc. Republished with permission from ProPublica.
Ravitch: Pearson's expanding role in education - 1 views
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Ravitch: Pearson's expanding role in education
By Valerie Strauss
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/ravitch-pearsons-expanding-role-in-education/2012/05/07/gIQApr4H8T_blog.html
This was written by education historian Diane Ravitch, a research professor at New York University and author of the bestselling "The Death and Life of the Great American School System." This first appeared on her blog.
By Diane Ravitch
Ever since the debacle of Pineapplegate, it is widely recognized by everyone other than the publishing giant Pearson that its tentacles have grown too long and too aggressive. It is difficult to remember what part of American education has not been invaded by Pearson's corporate grasp. It receives billions of dollars to test millions of students. Its scores will be used to calculate the value of teachers. It has a deal with the Gates Foundation to store all the student-level data collected at the behest of Race to the Top. It recently purchased Connections Academy, thus giving it a foothold in the online charter industry. And it recently added the GED to its portfolio.
With the U.S. Department of Education now pressing schools to test children in second grade, first grade, kindergarten - and possibly earlier - and with the same agency demanding that schools of education be evaluated by the test scores of the students of their graduates (whew!), the picture grows clear. Pearson will control every aspect of our education system.
Now we learn from Michael Winerip in the New York Times that Pearson has made a deal with Stanford University to license teachers, no matter what state they are in.
The deal is this: the school of education is supposed to send Pearson two 10-minute videos of the prospective teacher, plus the response to a written examination. Someone in the Pearson shop-possibly a retired teacher-will evaluate the prospect and decide after a brief review, whether they should get a license to teach.
It seems the teaching candidates at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst say they won't do it. They prefer to be evaluated by the people who see them teach every day. Their professors prefer to use their judgment about their students, rather than to outsource it to people who will never see their students face-to-face.
This is a hopeful sign. We should never forget that we always have the power to say no. It takes courage. But it can be done. Say no.
We can say no to testing. We can say no to anything that offends our basic values. We can stop the corporatization of public education. We can stop the outsourcing of responsibility from public institutions to Pearson and other providers.
Many years ago, I interviewed a famous at MIT about the role of standardized tests in education. He said something I never forgot. He said, "Let me write a nation's tests, and I care not who writes its songs or laws."
Are we prepared to hand over our children, our teachers, and our definition of knowledge to Pearson?
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By Valerie Strauss | 01:00 PM ET, 05/07/2012
A state that just says 'no' to charters, other reforms - 1 views
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A state that just says 'no' to charters, other reforms
By Valerie Strauss
This was written by Melissa Westbrook, a public education activist and co-writer of the Seattle Schools Community Forum blog, based in Seattle.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/a-state-that-just-says-no-to-charters-other-reforms/2012/05/02/gIQAJCXvxT_blog.html?tid=pm_local_pop
By Melissa Westbrook
Quietly marching to its own drummer, Washington State has mostly turned its back on the education reform movement that is sweeping much of the rest of the country.
Washington is one of nine states that does not have a charter school law. Our state has defeated charter laws three times at the ballot box - two were citizen initiatives and one was a referendum to repeal a charter law passed by our legislature. In between those votes, five more bills were introduced and rejected in our Legislature.
In this year's legislative session, a new charter bill was introduced. This bill included the ability to create charter schools, takeover of failing schools by the state and a parent/teacher trigger. Among those testifying against the bill was the head of the Washington State School Directors' Association, Mary Fertakis, who said, "Let the people decide if this is the right time and the right tool to best serve our students."
The bill never made to the floor for a vote and died at the end of the session. When the Legislature had to go into special session to finish the budget and a couple of legislators were pushing the charter bill, Gov. Christine Gregoire, a Democrat, said, "Get over charter schools," and promised a veto if the bill passed.
Jay Inslee, the Democrat now running to succeed Gregoire as governor, has rejected the idea of charter schools for his education platform.
Another favorite of education reformers, Teach for America, came in just last fall to Seattle's public schools (as they did to another smaller district, south of Seattle).
Seattle's school board had negotiated a narrow contract with TFA that does not require Seattle Schools to hire any TFA members - a different arrangement from many other such contracts - and, if the district cannot find an outside donor for the TFA fee (Seattle's is $4,000 per teacher per year), then Seattle Schools does not have to pay TFA its fee.
Seattle has site-based hiring teams and with a plethora of fully-qualified and unemployed teachers to choose from, Seattle schools only hired six TFA teachers.
The University of Washington's College of Education (whose dean is a former TFA corps member) created an entire alternative certification program only for TFA members but they have just 11 TFA students between the two districts. They needed at least 40 students to justify its costs and so it is running at a loss.
Why no charter schools and almost no Teach for America in Washington State? It seems to be that when Washingtonians are presented with data about outcomes for both charter schools and TFA, they just say 'no.'
What do we have instead? Our Legislature has passed several bills over the last several years in support of innovation within our existing education structure. There have been 22 such schools recognized for providing programs for students that are "bold, creative, and innovative."
Another law, Lighthouse Schools, designates schools with STEM programming that provide technical aid to other schools/communities that want to create a STEM focus. Our Legislature also just passed a bill that sets up a partnership with some of our state's lowest performing schools and our public four-year universities to create "lab schools" to accelerate student achievement and increase teaching skills.
What makes this all especially interesting is that Seattle is home to two players in the ed reform movement.
One is the Center for Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington (it is not part of the College of Education. ) The CRPE does policy research mainly around charter schools, urban district reform and teacher assessments, all hallmarks of ed reform. And again, this in a state that does not have charter schools or, another ed reform favorite, any mayoral control of school districts.
The second much more powerful player is the education arm of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In Washington state it invests in STEM creation in schools, early education and support for low-income students. But there would seem to be a disconnect in what the Gates foundation does for Washington education and Bill Gates' very public support of ed reform issues like charter schools and TFA. Neither Gates nor the foundation have been involved in public discussions in Washington about charter schools.
We don't need under-trained teachers in our schools. We don't need the costs of the infrastructure for charter schools for the low number of positive outcomes from them. We especially don't need the for-profit charter management organizations to come into our state and help to make education into a profit center instead of the public service it is to the young citizens of Washington state.
My belief is that Washington's hesitation in the ed reform game is Washington's educational gain.
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Social Media Rules Limit New York Student-Teacher Contact - 1 views
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/02/nyregion/social-media-rules-for-nyc-school-staff-limits-contact-with-students.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1
Social Media Rules Limit New York Student-Teacher Contact
By DAVID W. CHEN and PATRICK McGEEHAN
New York City public schoolteachers may not contact students through personal pages on Web sites like Facebook and Twitter, but can communicate via pages set up for classroom use, the city'sEducation Department said on Tuesday after it released its first list of guidelines governing the use of social media by employees.
Published: May 1, 2012
Joshua Bright for The New York Times
New York City's schools chancellor, Dennis M. Walcott.
The guidelines do not ban teachers from using social media and, in fact, recognize that it can offer tremendous educational benefits. Nor do they address cellphones and text messaging between teachers and students, which, according to a review by The New York Times of dozens of Education Department investigations in the past five years, have been more widespread and problematic.
But the guidelines do reflect growing concerns nationwide about the instantaneous ease with which teachers can interact electronically with students, and the potential for misuse or abuse. New York City's guidelines, which were reported on Tuesday in The Wall Street Journal, represent the latest official response to a number of episodes involving teachers accused of behaving inappropriately with students.
At least seven school employees have been arrested in the past few months in relation to sexual offenses involving students, and the schools chancellor, Dennis M. Walcott, is pushing to fire several teachers accused of such offenses.
In recent years, dozens of teachers have been investigated and some have been fired for inappropriate interactions and relationships with students that began or were conducted on social media Web sites, according to Richard J. Condon, the department's special commissioner of investigation. In 2009, for instance, there were 14 such accusations involving Facebook; in the first 11 months of 2011, there were 69.
The guidelines say, in general, that teachers should maintain separate professional and personal Web pages. They may not e-mail, "friend" or otherwise communicate with students via the teachers' or students' personal pages. Teachers also should use privacy settings "to control access to their personal social media sites."
They may communicate with students via professional pages, devoted to classroom business like homework and study guides, but must get a supervisor's approval before setting up such pages. Parents must sign a consent form before their children can participate on those pages.
And teachers should "have no expectation of privacy" when using social media, because principals and other officials will be on the lookout for any "questionable" behavior.
"If a particular type of behavior is inappropriate in the classroom or a professional workplace, then that behavior is also inappropriate on the professional social media site," the guidelines state.
But the unions representing school employees reacted coolly.
Chiara Colletti, a spokeswoman for the principals' union, the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators, said the guidelines appeared to be "overbroad."
"We are concerned that our principals will be expected to bear the burden of monitoring social media activities that are, in fact, almost impossible to monitor," she said.
Michael Mulgrew, president of the teachers' union, the United Federation of Teachers, said that he was "taken aback" by the tone of the guidelines, which he worried would discourage teachers from using social media tools.
"The D.O.E. is basically telling the people who have gone above and beyond to make education more interactive, 'Hey, if you want to do it, you do it at your own peril.' "
But compared with some other school boards, New York City's is taking a more measured approach to electronic communications.
Last month, the Board of Education in Paramus, N.J., for example, approved restrictions on employee use of social networks and cellphones, including a prohibition against naming students as "friends" on social media and giving out cellphone numbers to students without permission from supervisors. Even then, teachers cannot call students under the age of 18 on their cellphones without the authorization of a parent.
"All e-contacts with students should be through the district's computer account or e-mail and telephone system," the Paramus policy states.
New York officials said that they chose not to prohibit all forms of direct electronic contact, and that they could still discipline teachers who used cellphones inappropriately. "The last thing we want to do is prohibit communication and prevent a teacher from helping a student in distress, even if that means making a phone call," a spokesman, Matthew Mittenthal, said.
Numerous teachers in New York have been investigated for improper contact via cellphone or text messages, according to records obtained by The Times under a Freedom of Information request.( Snip) Do read the article case studies..
Personalized Learning - 3 views
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Mapping a Personalized Learning Journey - K-12 Students and Parents Connects the Dots with Digital Learning
http://www.tomorrow.org/speakup/2012_PersonalizedLearning.html -
http://www.tomorrow.org/speakup/pdfs/Infographic_PersonalizedLearning2012.pdf ( Infograph)
Mapping a Personalized Learning Journey - K-12 Students and Parents Connects the Dots with Digital Learning is the first in a two part series to document the key national findings from Speak Up 2011. This report focuses on how today's students are personalizing their own learning, and how their parents are supporting this effort. The ways that students are personalizing their learning centers around three student desires including how students seek out resources that are digitally-rich, untethered and socially-based. The key questions being addressed in this report include:
How are students personalizing their learning?
How are parents helping students to personalize their learning journey?
What are the digitally-rich, untethered and socially based learning strategies that facilitate this process?
How can education stakeholders support students as they seek to personalize their learning?
What are the gaps between administrators' views of personalized learning compared to parents' and students' views?
Key Findings from this year's report include:
Students are adopting technologies and then adapting them to support their own self-directed learning. For example, 1 in 10 high school students have Tweeted about an academic topic. 46% of students have used Facebook as a collaboration tool for schoolwork.
Parents are supporting their children's personalized learning journeys. 64% of parents report that they would purchase a mobile device for their child's academic use at school.
There is a gap in offerings between what schools offer and what students want to learn. As a result, students are looking outside of the classroom to meet their personalized learning goals. For example, 12% of high school students have taken an online class on their own, outside of the classroom, to learn about a topic that interested them.
In math and science classrooms where students and teachers direct learning supported by technology, students' interest in a STEM career is 27%, compared with 20% for students in traditional math and science classrooms.
Parents' definition of academic success for their children places a strong emphasis on learning the right skills to be successful (73%)- more than any other metric for success, including monetary success or getting into a good college.
http://www.tomorrow.org/speakup/2012_PersonalizedLearning.html
AERA highlights NRC reports - 2 views
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The American Educational Research Association recently held its annual conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, where a number of NRC activities were highlighted. Robert Hauser, executive director of DBASSE, participated in a featured AERA session that focused on the social and behavioral sciences in K-12 STEM education. AERA also featured symposia on NRC reports about:
Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education,
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12521&utm_medium=etmail&utm_source=Division%20of%20Behavioral%20and%20Social%20Sciences%20and%20Education&utm_campaign=DBASSE+April+Update&utm_content=Web&utm_term=
Improving Adult Literacy Instruction
,and
Successful K-12 STEM Education.
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13158&utm_medium=etmail&utm_source=Division%20of%20Behavioral%20and%20Social%20Sciences%20and%20Education&utm_campaign=DBASSE+April+Update&utm_content=Web&utm_term=
An unintended consequence of value-added teacher evaluation - 2 views
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An unintended consequence of value-added teacher evaluation
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An unintended consequence of value-added teacher evaluation
By Valerie Strauss
A high school teacher in New York sent me the following e-mail, which discusses a most unfortunate unintended consequence of the state's new teacher and principal evaluation that depends largely on how well students do on standardized test scores.
The "value-added" method of evaluation - which uses complicated formulas to determine how much "value" an educator has added to a student's achievement on a standardized test - is now the law in New York as well as a host of other states. New York's system is known as the APPR,or Annual Professional Performance Review.
Many assessment experts have warned that such evaluations are unreliable, but school reformers have insisted on implementing these systems anyway. This has occurred even though there are school systems that have effective teacher evaluation systems that don't use standardized test results, including in high-achieving Montgomery County in Maryland and Fairfax County in Virginia.
This teacher raises an important consequence of putting high stakes on a standardized test.
Here's the e-mail:
"With testing so much in the news, I thought I would drop a quick note to tell you about a recent occurrence here in my district. A math teacher who teaches Trigonometry, a class for which there is a state Regents exam, pointed out the following trap for teachers.
He has some students in Trig who wanted to take the class to challenge themselves, but may not do very well on the Regents exam. Most of these students don't need to pass the exam to graduate as they have fulfilled their math requirements already.
So, some of them may decide to blow off the exam, though they still have to take it because it is the final exam for the course; others may give their best effort on the exam to see how well they can do, but may not score very well. Yet all of these scores are going to be used to judge the teacher as part of his APPR score here in New York.
So, the teachers now have an incentive to prevent students from challenging themselves and trying higher level math. After all, if they challenge themselves but don't do well on the exam, it hurts the teacher more than the student.
The higher the stakes of the test the more the testing becomes a deterrent to learning."
The challenge of the introverted student - 2 views
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The challenge of the introverted student
By Valerie Strauss
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/the-challenge-of-the-introverted-student/2012/04/28/gIQATva9nT_blog.html
This was written by Mark Phillips, professor emeritus of secondary education at San Francisco State University. A version of this appeared on his blog on Edutopia. He also publishes a monthly column on education for the Marin Independent Journal.
By Mark Phillips
One of my teacher interns at San Francisco State University wrote a paper a few years ago that reminded me of what I occasionally missed as a teacher. The interns had been assigned to write a letter to their high school teachers advising them about how they might have better served them as students.
My student, Rich DeNagel, wrote:
"Ninth grade was probably the worst year of my life. My home life was in shambles, and I was totally checked out of school. I was the quiet kid who showed up and never said a word. I had no ability to focus. Midway through the school year, my sister died. After that I spun into outer space. I felt so alone. I just wanted to talk to someone, anyone. I still showed up to school but nothing happened.
My home life deteriorated further the next years, and the feeling of isolation increased. School was a refuge from home, yet I felt alone at school. I was again the quiet kid who sat in class, doing and saying nothing. No one noticed.
I could have killed myself and I don't think the teachers would have known which kid it was. I didn't make contact with any of them . . . I don't remember any of them trying to talk to me.
I wanted so badly to talk to someone, anyone. I felt so alone. If anyone had tried to talk to me, I would have talked. No one ever did. I went through the world of school unnoticed.
As teachers, you need to be aware and attentive of all your students. Students are giving you messages all the time . . . The quiet ones may be just as troubled as the difficult ones. Try to touch base with each student. Get to know each one. Learn about them. Find out about what is going on at home. If you try to get to know them, they may respond to you and in turn respond to your class and maybe even school."
The Silent Type
Rich's message is clear and powerful. Every teacher should read it and reread it regularly. Fortunately there are also other recent voices that amplify the challenge and the ways to address it.
Susan Cain's brilliant new book, "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking," not only does a superb job of discussing the limitations created by an extrovert-centric value system, but specifically describes how teachers and parents can meet the challenge of nurturing "quiet kids in a world that can't hear them." It's also interesting that both Cain and Jonah Lehrer, in his best-selling book "Imagine: How Creativity Works," caution us about the limitations of group decision making, a context in which extroverts dominate and the creative thinking of introverts most often gets lost. This is a powerful reminder to teachers to balance the time provided for group processes with time for individual exploration and contributions.
I tend to shy away from books that focus on helping a child to "overcome" being an introvert. Although I think it's important to help introverted children learn to effectively navigate our extrovert-dominated world, I don't see introversion as a characteristic that needs to be "overcome," and neither do psychologists. They see it as an enduring trait, not a "state." I think teachers and parents need to place a higher value on introversion, a corrective especially well provided by Cain. But I think that Laurie Helgoe's "Introvert Power" does a good job of both embracing introversion and helping introverts learn to effectively use their strengths. A particularly valuable book in terms of helping kids learn the limits of self-containment while valuing and using their introversion, it is also a useful resource for teachers.
Listening Through the Noise
Having grown up as an introverted kid myself, I've always been aware that rewards for classroom engagement should not be measured only by oral contributions. Many of my best students were ones who rarely spoke in the large group, were active in smaller groups (and the smaller the better) and had a great deal to share with me privately in papers. I especially went out of my way to spend time responding to papers with comments, sometimes appropriately personal, thus encouraging a dialogue. I also took every opportunity I had to reach out to these kids, often just with a quick comment after the bell rang.
It's easier to recognize the challenge Rich describes than it is to meet it. Faced with four or five classes of more than 25 students, it's difficult for teachers to be aware of each student. It's also natural for the most difficult and the most talented to stand out. Yet it is obviously critical that we remain on the lookout for those who behave well and say little, for the invisible student in back of the room who we might recognize as withdrawn or even depressed if we looked just a little more carefully. And then it's important to reach out to that student, establish contact, and provide him or her with the opportunity to be and feel known.
Our classrooms contain too many forgotten introverted students who may need help but are not getting it and/or have gifts that aren't being either elicited or supported. It's important to remember that while Rich survived his high school experience and learned from it, some quiet students may not. Which is why - amid all the noise and excitement of our extroverted society - we must tap into the hidden gifts of our invisible adolescents as well.
Jamming the System: Standardized Tests, Automated Grading and the Future of Writing - 2 views
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View slide show on original site.
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View on Flickr on original site.
Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning
http://spotlight.macfound.org/blog/entry/jamming-the-system-standardized-tests-automated-grading-future-of-writing/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+macfound%2FiQaL+Spotlight+on+Digital+Media+and+Learning#When:19:51:00Z
Posted: 26 Apr 2012 12:51 PM PDT
Standardized testing-and now, standardized grading-are the bane of teachers and thoughtful administrators. So how can we harness the positive side of digital media and learning?
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Filed by Christine Cupaiuolo
The digital age has brought profound change to education. On the negative side-at least, according to the great majority of teachers-it has been a catalyst for the increasingly standardized and impersonal approach of large educational systems: making it easier to conduct and evaluate a standardized test across a state, region or country, and allowing state and federal bureaucracies endless ways to crunch the numbers on those tests for a variety of budgetary, political, and, yes, even educational ends.
The testing regimen that has ensued is the greatest threat to the positive potential of all these new digital tools. The power of digital tools and new media literacies-as we have documented in numerous ways-is the ability to inspire the unique creative and critical thinking of individuals. In short, it gives students a voice in and control over their own education.
For some, the choice is clear: students (and teachers) can either become robots-or they can build them.
Testing Teachers' Patience With Testing
Recent studies on attitudes toward testing and advances in automated scoring present a clearer picture of the competing goals and interests. Let's start with the less surprising of the lot: "Primary Sources: 2012," a study released by Scholastic and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, found an overwhelming number of teachers agree students should be measured by formative assessments, class participation and performance on class assignments. Less value was put on required, high-stakes testing.
The study includes responses from 10,000 teachers about their schools and student and teacher performance, including ways performance should be evaluated, supported and rewarded. On the subject of high-stake testing, which is more often supported by legislators than educators, the results are pretty much what we would expect.
Only 6 percent of teachers surveyed agree district-required tests are "absolutely essential," with 24 percent finding them "very important." State-required standardized tests received slightly less support overall; 7 percent said they were "absolutely essential" and 21 percent deemed them "very important." Tests from textbooks received the lowest marks-only 4 percent of teachers thought they are are "absolutely essential," and 22 percent said they are "very important."
"It's time for less focus on standardized tests and more on the development of creative and critical thought. The amount of time spent preparing for testing is disgraceful," said a middle school teacher.
High school teachers were even more likely to find less value in district- and state-required testing, though they were more enthusiastic than elementary and middle school teachers about final exams.
A Tale of Three Test States
In conversation with several teachers in the Chicago area, most said that Illinois has largely resisted raising the stakes for its standardized tests-at least compared to the oppressive level in places like New York or Texas. New York, you may recall, recently delighted testing critics when Daniel Pinkwater's nonsensical story "The Hare and the Pineapple" was twisted into a nonsensical question that caused students and teachers to ask, "Huh?" (Not to worry: the questions will not count in students' official scores.)
As for Texas, Valerie Strauss, author of The Answer Sheet blog in the Washington Post, has a good rundown of how test-centric Texas has become and how some schools are pushing back with resolutions asking the state Legislature to develop alternative systems (the movement has also spread to New York). The sample anti-testing resolution opens with:
WHEREAS, the over reliance on standardized, high stakes testing as the only assessment of learning that really matters in the state and federal accountability systems is strangling our public schools and undermining any chance that educators have to transform a traditional system of schooling into a broad range of learning experiences that better prepares our students to live successfully and be competitive on a global stage;
It goes on to note the importance of recognizing interest-driven learning and digital literacies, the 21st-century skills touted at the highest levels of education:
WHEREAS, Our vision is for all students to be engaged in more meaningful learning activities that cultivate their unique individual talents, to provide for student choice in work that is designed to respect how they learn best, and to embrace the concept that students can be both consumers and creators of knowledge; and
WHEREAS, only by developing new capacities and conditions in districts and schools, and the communities in which they are embedded, will we ensure that all learning spaces foster and celebrate innovation, creativity, problem solving, collaboration, communication and critical thinking; and
WHEREAS, these are the very skills that business leaders desire in a rising workforce and the very attitudes that are essential to the survival of our democracy;
Back in Illinois, high school students take the two-day Prairie State Achievement Exam (PSAE) in April of their junior year-and the results of this test leave a permanent mark on their transcript and determine a school's status under the No Child Left Behind law. A few years ago, the state, in an increasingly common collaboration, decided to make the first day of PSAE testing a complete ACT test, instead of a homegrown concoction that had only been meaningful for those local educators familiar with its idiosyncratic content and evaluation criteria.
This image by Brian Metcalfe illustrates how K-12 students might be encouraged to create Images with a Message.
The ACT, on the other hand, is nationally recognizable and accepted as part of most college applications. And while educators decried it as they would any standardized test, many Illinois teachers appreciated that at least a good portion of the testing their students had to take would also be genuinely useful-a high stakes experience, for sure, but one they would most probably undergo on their own (for a fee) as part of the college admissions process.
Even these limited good intentions, however, have been made somewhat of a mockery due to budgetary cutbacks. Until this year-stick with me here-the ACT administered as part of the PSAE was a complete ACT, which includes the traditional four multiple-choice tests as well as an added writing component that more and more colleges require students to have taken. But in 2011, state officials decided they could no longer afford to offer the writing component. Without it, the test became useless for most college applications (although state officials were able to get Illinois state colleges to let go of their requirement for the writing portion of the ACT-at least temporarily).
Of course, that writing portion of the ACT might very soon be graded by a computer, not a human being-so maybe students are lucky to have escaped yet another impersonal evaluation.
I, Robot Grader
The idea is likely to gain more support, now that a new study by researchers at the University of Akron determined that automated essay scoring software "achieved virtually identical levels of accuracy, with the software in some cases proving to be more reliable."
The study was based on a review of more than 16,000 essays from six states. Each set of essays varied in length, type and grading protocols, and all had been hand-scored according to state standards. The challenge for the nine companies (which control almost all of the automated essay scoring commercial market) was to see if their software could produce reliable and valid essay scores, when compared with trained human readers. This was not the first review of automated essay scoring software, but the researchers involved said it is the first comprehensive multi-vendor trial.
"Better tests support better learning," said Barbara Chow, education program director at the Hewlett Foundation, which funded the study and is sponsoring a contest to encourage new automated scoring techniquies. "This demonstration of rapid and accurate automated essay scoring will encourage states to include more writing in their state assessments. And, the more we can use essays to assess what students have learned, the greater the likelihood they'll master important academic content, critical thinking, and effective communication."
Proponents say automated grading frees teachers up from having to slog home dozens of papers that take a full weekend to grade. Poetry and creative writing teachers, however, may not get a break.
Automated grading "doesn't do well on very creative kinds of writing, such as haiku," said lead researcher Mark Shermis, dean of the College of Education at the University of Akron. "But this technology works well for about 95 percent of all the writing that's out there, and it will provide unlimited feedback to how you can improve what you have generated, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. If you are writing at 2 am, which many college students do, it's there to tend to your needs.."
Skeptics such as Les Perelman, a director of writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, point to shortcomings that make this technology less useful, regardless of the hour. Perelman has studied algorithms developed by Educational Testing Service, creator of the e-Rater, which can grade 16,000 essays in a mere 20 seconds. Michael Winerip interviewed Perelman for The New York Times and deserves special kudos for this breakdown:
While his research is limited, because E.T.S. is the only organization that has permitted him to test its product, he says the automated reader can be easily gamed, is vulnerable to test prep, sets a very limited and rigid standard for what good writing is, and will pressure teachers to dumb down writing instruction.
The e-Rater's biggest problem, he says, is that it can't identify truth. He tells students not to waste time worrying about whether their facts are accurate, since pretty much any fact will do as long as it is incorporated into a well-structured sentence. "E-Rater doesn't care if you say the War of 1812 started in 1945," he said.
Mr. Perelman found that e-Rater prefers long essays. A 716-word essay he wrote that was padded with more than a dozen nonsensical sentences received a top score of 6; a well-argued, well-written essay of 567 words was scored a 5.
An automated reader can count, he said, so it can set parameters for the number of words in a good sentence and the number of sentences in a good paragraph. "Once you understand e-Rater's biases," he said, "it's not hard to raise your test score."
E-Rater, he said, does not like short sentences.
Or short paragraphs.
Or sentences that begin with "or." And sentences that start with "and." Nor sentence fragments.
Continue reading Winerip's story. I love it, though maybe I'm just easily amused. (Hey, I'm human.)
Blame the System, Not the Robots
For a thoughtful look at the underlying problem with automated systems, settle in and read Marc Bousquet essay, "Robots Are Grading Your Papers!" Scary title aside, Bousquet suggests that the more troubling issue is why machines are delivering similar scores. The problem, it turns out, is not the success of the technology; rather, the technology's success is a symptom of the standardization of the process.
It seems possible that what really troubles us about the success of machine assessment of simple writing forms isn't the scoring, but the writing itself-forms of writing that don't exist anywhere in the world except school. It's reasonable to say that the forms of writing successfully scored by machines are already-mechanized forms-writing designed to be mechanically produced by students, mechanically reviewed by parents and teachers, and then, once transmuted into grades and sorting of the workforce, quickly recycled. As Evan Watkins has long pointed out, the grades generated in relation to this writing stick around, but the writing itself is made to disappear.
Bousquet blames "forces of standardization, bureaucratic control, and high-stakes assessment" for "steadily shrinking the zone in which free teaching and learning can take place." In doing so, he likens a teacher's job to other over-managed professions in which the real work occurs on an employer's own time, outside the system (ala "The Wire").
John Jones, an assistant professor at West Virginia University who teaches writing and digital literacy, wrote a compelling post last year on why the five-paragraph essay needs to be replaced with writing that has meaning and purpose outside of the classroom.
"[W]hile it is true that the goal of teaching writing has always been to prepare students for writing beyond the walls of the schoolhouse," writes Jones, "this is even more the case now that digital publishing has become so widely available in our society. In other words, as much as possible, the task of teaching writing is also teaching writing for public consumption, and teaching writing for public consumption in the network society means teaching writing and publishing as being inseparable."
Imagine the work of students encouraged to write for public, engaged spaces-including blogs, Twitter, Wikipedia, or writing projects that come to life with multimedia-and you begin to understand how the testing, and the robots, both fail.
Education and the income gap: Darling-Hammond - 1 views
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Education and the income gap: Darling-Hammond
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/education-and-the-income-gap-darling-hammond/2012/04/26/gIQAHn0LkT_blog.html
By Valerie Strauss
This was written by Stanford University Education Professor Linda Darling-Hammond, who directs the Stanford University Center for Opportunity Policy in Education and was founding director of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future. A former president of the American Educational Research Association, Darling-Hammond focuses her research, teaching, and policy work on issues of school restructuring, teacher quality and educational equity.
By Linda Darling-Hammond
There is much handwringing about low educational attainment in the United States these days. We hear constantly about U.S. rankings on assessments like the international PISA tests: The United States was 14th in reading, 21st in science, 25th in math in 2009, for example. We hear about how young children in high-poverty areas are entering kindergarten unprepared and far behind many of their classmates. Middle school students from low-income families are scoring, on average, far below the proficient levels that would enable them to graduate high school, go to college, and get good jobs. Fewer than half of high school students manage to graduate from some urban schools. And too many poor and minority students who do go on to college require substantial remediation and drop out before gaining a degree.
There is another story we rarely hear: Our children who attend schools in low-poverty contexts are doing quite well. In fact, U.S. students in schools in which less than 10 percent of children live in poverty score first in the world in reading, out-performing even the famously excellent Finns.
In high-achieving countries like Finland and Singapore, strong social safety nets ensure that virtually all schools have fewer than 10 percent of their students living in poverty. Although the poverty-test score association is similar across 14 wealthy nations (with the average scores of the poorest 5 percent of students just over half those of their wealthiest peers), our poverty rate for children is much higher than others: 22 percent of all U.S. children and 25 percent of young children live in poverty.
Furthermore, our supports to counter it are much weaker. As a result, many children lack preschool education, health care, and social supports. The proportion of children who lack even the basic support of stable housing has increased dramatically in the past few years, with 1 child in every 10 now homeless in many California school districts near my home.
These issues were vividly illustrated in last week's Capitol Hill briefing on the impact of poverty on education and what we can do about it . Sponsored jointly by the Broader Bolder Approach to Education and the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education , the panel got beyond the increasingly implausible "no excuses" rhetoric, using new evidence to examine the relationship between income and educational outcomes - as well as about strategies that have succeeded in reducing this relationship.
As panelist Sean Reardon documents in his study published in "Whither Opportunity?," the U.S. income gap is growing, and our safety net shrinking. The proportion of the national resources controlled by our wealthiest citizens is greater than it has been since the early 1930s, and the help available to the poor - in the form of housing, employment, and health care supports - is much less than it was 40 years ago. Furthermore, the disparity in access between rich and poor is growing as well - in terms of both publicly provided school resources and those that parents can invest in their own children privately. As a consequence, income is a much stronger predictor of school achievement than it has ever been.
The drop in America's relative international rankings on educational indicators as child poverty and inequality in educational funding have increased is widely cited as a sign that our entire education system is in crisis, that we cannot compete, and that drastic reform measures - centered mainly on test-based accountability and privatization of schools - are urgently needed. But these data demonstrate something different: our crisis is one grounded in what Gloria Ladson Billings has called the "aggressive neglect" of many of our children, and in our unwillingness to provide the needed supports to address it in far too many communities.
Some reforms make this worse - for example, charter and voucher strategies that can further segregate and encourage greater disparities in access to school resources and the "redlining" strategies that I recently documented, which punish under-resourced schools serving high-need students (making them even more unattractive to families and educators with other options). The effects of these policies in New York City are vividly illustrated in a recent Schott Foundation report.
Other reforms could, and do, improve the situation substantially: in addition to the general anti-poverty measures promoted by panelist Peter Edelman, the Broader Bolder set of policy strategies: early childhood education and health care; wraparound services and community schools; and investments in more equitable school resources focused on essential factors such as high-quality curriculum, well-qualified teachers and leaders, and accountability systems that fairly evaluate, inform, and support schools to improve.
We've see how this can work: A concerted effort to implement fair school funding, with high quality early childhood education, supports to strengthen teaching, and comprehensive school services led to large increases in student achievement and a substantial narrowing of the achievement gap in New Jersey over the last decade. As panelist David Sciarra noted, New Jersey - which is now ranks number 1 in the nation in writing, number 2 in 8th grade reading, and among the top 5 states in math - shows how a state with a large population of low-income students of color can support strong learning with the right investments.
We cannot pretend that multiple layers of growing inequality - in home, community, and school resources - don't matter for student learning, or that solutions to our education problems can be enforced without strategic investments in a level playing field. Our challenge is to confront the reality of growing up in America today and to design in- and out-of-school supports that will allow children a fair shot at the American Dream.
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Pearson and how 2012 standardized tests were designed - 2 views
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Pearson and how 2012 standardized tests were designed
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/pearson-and-how-2012-standardized-tests-were-designed/2012/04/27/gIQAjQ0MkT_blog.html
By Valerie Strauss
This was written by Fred Smith, a retired New York City Board of Education senior analyst who worked for the public school system in test research and development.
By Fred Smith
The recent Pineapple and the Hare fiasco does more than identify a daft reading passage on New York State's 8th grade English Language Arts test. Education Commissioner John King scrapped the selection and its six multiple-choice items, admitting they were "ambiguous," when the questions became public last week. The episode opens the door to discussing how the 2012 exams were put together.
The State Education Department signed a five-year, $32 million agreement with NCS Pearson to develop English Language Arts and math assessments in grades three to eight. In fact, math testing was administered over three days this week for 1.2 million students.
Pearson has grown immensely over the last decade, securing contracts with many states required to test students under the No Child Left Behind Act. This year it succeeded CTB/McGraw-Hill as New York's test vendor.
The ever-increasing and implausibly high percentages of students deemed proficient on CTB's exams was a test bubble that finally burst in 2009, as sobering data from community colleges revealed that most entrants were inadequately prepared in reading and math. Albany admitted the cut off points defining proficiency had been set too low.
Blame for the incredible results was ascribed to "stand-alone" field testing, where items are tried out to see how samples of students perform on them and to identify which ones will appear on the real aka operational tests.
The success of this method depends on sampling students who are representative of the test population and who will take the no-stakes field tests seriously. CTB's stand-alone field tests were given to students who had little motivation to do well on them. This led to miscalculations in constructing subsequent statewide exams.
To overcome the problem State Education Department officials sought vendors who would embed field test items - specifically, multiple-choice questions-inside the real exam. Pearson won the bid. Thus, last week's English Language Arts test contained try-out items that won't count in scoring the test and operational items that will.
The assumption behind this approach is that students will strive to do well on all items since they don't know which ones actually count in evaluating them (and their teachers and schools). By design, about one-third of the multiple-choice items do not count. Performance on these items will be studied to decide which should go on 2013's exams.
Where does the pineapple come in? Pearson's contract also calls for the vendor to provide 20-25 nationally-normed multiple-choice questions per grade. This is to allow students to be compared with students from other states. The pineapple passage was part of this stipulation.
The material was drawn from Pearson's item bank - material that had been seen in several other states handled by the vendor. That explains the buzz generated when it cropped up last week.
Students past and present who read The Pineapple and the Hare posted versions of this story and shared stunned reactions to it. Many wondered how, on its face, it could have survived field testing runs and passed the State Education Department's own teacher review processes.
By contract, Pearson is bound to provide 120-150 nationally normed ELA and math items to New York - items that have been exposed elsewhere. It will make money re-using previously developed items and selling them to Albany. Afterward, the vendor can sell them to other states, having banked a wealth of data showing how over one million more kids fared on its questions.
Ironically, despite its shortcomings, rhe State Eduation Department and Pearson will revert to stand-alone field testing this June to try out other multiple-choice and open-ended questions for use on next spring's exams.
Prediction: There will be many more revelations, and deja vu item experiences this year as the State Education Department/Pearson partnership launches. And because of the way the tests were hastily re-configured in December - reducing the number of multiple-choice items by 20 percent - expect errors within the items, mechanical mistakes (in test distribution and scoring) and technical foul-ups.
It looks like the vendor has worked out an amazing testing scheme - producing items along the way, paid for by one or another state, owned by Pearson, and then re-sold and re-sold to other states for developmental purposes or operational use.
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By Valerie Strauss | 03:00 AM ET, 04/27/2012
Digital Divides and Bridges: Technology Use Among Youth - 1 views
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diwnload PDF Digital Divides and Bridges: Technology Use Among Youth
Presentation on the site
http://pewinternet.org/Presentations/2012/Apr/Digital-Divides-and-Bridges-Technology-Use-Among-Youth.aspx?utm_source=Mailing+List&utm_campaign=ff253f2b2e-Newsletter_04262012&utm_medium=email
Amanda Lenhart spoke to the "Media and the Well-Being of Children and Adolescents" conference at the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. The conference brought together academics, researchers, non-profits and industry to discuss the effects of media on child mental and physical health and well-being.
In her talk, Amanda focused on bringing together data that highlights the demographic differences among groups of youth in their adoption, use, and experiences with technology and social media. While such data may have illustrated what was called a "digital divide" in the past, it now highlights a variety of digital differences among groups of youth. This talk brings together data previously shared in a variety of reports on youth as well as some new analysis.
Digital Divides and Bridges: Technology Use Among Youth
View more presentations from Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project
Digital Differences - 1 views
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Digital differences
http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Digital-differences/Overview.aspx?utm_source=Mailing+List&utm_campaign=ff253f2b2e-Newsletter_04262012&utm_medium=email
When the Pew Internet Project first began writing about the role of the internet in American life in 2000, there were stark differences between those who were using the internet and those who were not.1 Today, differences in internet access still exist among different demographic groups, especially when it comes to access to high-speed broadband at home. Among the main findings about the state of digital access:
One in five American adults does not use the internet. Senior citizens, those who prefer to take our interviews in Spanish rather than English, adults with less than a high school education, and those living in households earning less than $30,000 per year are the least likely adults to have internet access.
Among adults who do not use the internet, almost half have told us that the main reason they don't go online is because they don't think the internet is relevant to them. Most have never used the internet before, and don't have anyone in their household who does. About one in five say that they do know enough about technology to start using the internet on their own, and only one in ten told us that they were interested in using the internet or email in the future.
The 27% of adults living with disability in the U.S. today are significantly less likely than adults without a disability to go online (54% vs. 81%). Furthermore, 2% of adults have a disability or illness that makes it more difficult or impossible for them to use the internet at all.
Though overall internet adoption rates have leveled off, adults who are already online are doing more. And even for many of the "core" internet activities we studied, significant differences in use remain, generally related to age, household income, and educational attainment.
The ways in which people connect to the internet are also much more varied today than they were in 2000. As a result, internet access is no longer synonymous with going online with a desktop computer:
Currently, 88% of American adults have a cell phone, 57% have a laptop,; about six in ten adults (63%) go online wirelessly with one of those devices. Gadget ownership is generally correlated with age, education, and household income, although some devices-notably e-book readers and tablets-are as popular or even more popular with adults in their thirties and forties than young adults ages 18-29.
The rise of mobile is changing the story. Groups that have traditionally been on the other side of the digital divide in basic internet access are using wireless connections to go online. Among smartphone owners, young adults, minorities, those with no college experience, and those with lower household income levels are more likely than other groups to say that their phone is their main source of internet access.
Even beyond smartphones, both African Americans and English-speaking Latinos are as likely as whites to own any sort of cellphone, and are more likely to use their phones for a wider range of activities.
The primary recent data in this report are from a Pew Internet Project tracking survey. The survey was fielded from July 25-August 26, 2011, and was administered by landline and cell phone, in English and Spanish, to 2,260 adults age 18 and older. The margin of error for the full sample is ±2 percentage points. For more information about this survey and others that contributed to these findings, please see the Methodology section at the end of this report.
http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Digital-differences/Methodology.aspx
Building Schools Out of Clicks, Not Bricks - 2 views
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Building Schools Out of Clicks, Not Bricks
By D.D. GUTTENPLAN
Published: April 22, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/23/world/europe/building-schools-out-of-clicks-not-bricks.html?ref=internationaleducation
CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND - This past year has been a time of signs and wonders for the open educational resources movement, which pushes for free public access to educational materials.
Warrick Page for the International Herald Tribune
Sir John Daniel spoke at the Open Educational Resources conference in Cambridge, England, last week.
The first sign came from California, where a Stanford professor, Sebastian Thrun , decided to offer his introductory course in artificial intelligence for free online. Thanks in part to an article in The New York Times, enrollment for the class topped 160,000. And suddenly a movement that had spent a decade struggling to get the world's attention found itself at the top of policy agendas.
Unesco began its own open resources platform in November. In the United States, support is building for moves to require the recipients of public funds to make their research freely available.
Governments around the world began to realize that it was cheaper to invest in "clicks instead of bricks." The phrase was coined by John Daniel, a keynote speaker at the movement's annual conference at Queens College Cambridge last week, in an atmosphere that at times seemed more like a revival meeting than a sober gathering of academics from 21 countries.
Eko Indrajit from Indonesia explained that in a country with 19 million people of college age but where the universities can only accommodate 5 million - and where there are only 3,000 Ph.D.'s in the entire country - putting the best courses on the Internet was the quickest way to expand capacity without sacrificing quality.
"We don't believe in invisible hands," Dr. Indrajit said. "We believe that success can be designed."
One theme heard repeatedly during the three-day meeting was the opportunity created by the world financial crisis. Cable Green, director of global learning at Creative Commons , said that policy at the state level in the United States was swinging decisively in favor of open access partly because of the skyrocketing cost of textbooks. "Textbooks cost more than tuition in many community colleges," he said. "That can't be right."
"Digital technology makes sharing a lot easier and cheaper," said Nick Pearce of Durham University in Britain. Dr. Pearce, who teaches an anthropology course he described as "Sex, Death and Monkeys," cited the rapid growth of the Pinterest Web site as an example of "the way social media allows you to treat ideas as objects." Although initially favored by young women for sharing photos and fashion ideas, the site, which now ranks third in popularity behind Facebook and Twitter, is starting to be used in education, he said.
A decade ago there were only a handful of courses available online - all of them from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Today there are more than 21,000, with more being added every week, according to Anka Mulder, president of the Open Course Ware Consortium , which hosted the conference along with Open University in Britain. "We are now on every continent except Antarctica," she said, adding that students everywhere now live in a digital world. "My kids meet their friends online just as easily as their friends around the corner. But it has to become a lot easier, and more interesting, for students to meet online."
"At first a lot of professors didn't trust virtual education," said Sergio Martinez, from the University of Cantabria . With 120 courses now online, the university, though one of the smallest in Spain, gets more than 96,000 visitors a month to its Web site from all over the Spanish-speaking world.
The international reach of the movement was underlined by Dr. Daniel, who said that initial concerns that the traffic would all be from richer countries to poorer ones have not been borne out. "Instead we see a course on tropical medicine from Nkrumah University in Ghana being adapted by the University of Michigan," he said in an interview after his speech.
Bakary Diallo, rector of the African Virtual University , based in Nairobi, said that when his institution began in 1997 "we hoped that African countries would take up our material." That has indeed happened, but of the 197 countries where his students live, "Brazil is the first country, and the U.S.A. is the second."
The university, which offers a blend of online and face-to-face teaching, produces courses in English, French and Portuguese, and recently received a $15.6 million grant from the African Development Bank to expand its operations. Yet its education foundation course for teachers "is incredibly popular in Brazil. We don't understand why," Dr. Diallo said.
Although the delegates were united in their enthusiasm for the future of online learning, there were sharp divisions around issues like the future of teaching, copyright, private education providers and the importance of credentials and university credits in motivating and rewarding students.
"You don't need a teacher for learning," said Rory McGreal from Athabasca, the Canadian open university, arguing that most teachers "learn a lot on their own."
Rebecca Kahn from Peer2Peer University , which "organizes learning outside of institutional walls," said her organization was "never going to have a school of medicine. We're never going to have a school of engineering. But we can do some things better than a traditional university. We can adapt faster."
The role of open resources in enabling universities to adapt was the message of Steve Carson from M.I.T. Traditionally, universities performed three functions, he said: "providing content to students, learning activities, and assessment and certification." The Internet's ability to provide more and better content faster and more cheaply meant these functions "have become disaggregated," Mr. Carson said. But he suggested they may be about to come back together in a different form.
The issue of credentials, which was hardly on the agenda a few years ago, now surfaced in numerous discussions.
Peer2Peer offers what it calls "digital badges" for completed work, while M.I.T.'s MITx Web site awards online "certificates"; but neither give out credit or degrees. However, credits can be earned through the online OER University , while the State University of New York's Empire State College offers credit for prior learning.
"It's nice to talk about education for everyone, but the need for degrees still exists," said Ellen Murphy of the State University of New York .
The lack of agreement did not bother Mary Lou Forward, executive director of the Open Course Ware Consortium. "This is a very collaborative movement," she said. "Open means open. There's room at the table for all players."
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Ed Weiner
A recent opinion piece called into question the Free Library's place in our digital world. A quick stop on freelibrary.org - our "online branch" which receives 8 million unique visits annually - immediately highlights just how relevant and digitally savvy the Free Library is. There, users will quickly and easily find access to:
More than 30,000 ebooks for checkout;
Streaming and downloadable popular music;
Hundreds of podcasts from our renowned Author Events series, which are downloaded at a rate of 26,000 per month;
Digital databases that help our customers do everything from trace their family trees to learn a new language online;
Digital exhibitions and collections of thousands of images from our special collections.
In addition, free Wi-Fi is available in every one of our 54 locations (we are working on getting more laptop plug-ins) as well as 1,000 public-access computers. Each branch also provides computer-training programs covering topics that range from using social networking to market your small business to applying for a job online. (In fact, our Workplace Wednesdays job-training workshops teach customers about all aspects of finding and thriving in a job in today's digital world.)
The Free Library's commitment to bridging the digital divide doesn't end with support at our 54 branches. One can also stop into any one of our six technology hot- spot computer centers in underserved areas of the city, where we have the latest computer and broadband equipment and trainers to show you how to use it. Or, hop onboard our new Techmobile, our roving computer lab on wheels, for the latest in internet access and training.
The Free Library of Philadelphia not only offers unique and critical services to our 21-century customers, but it also has astounding value in our modern world. A recent and groundbreaking economic impact study conducted by the Fels Institute of Government found that in one year, the Free Library generated some $30 million in tax revenue for the city, all while helping 25,000 people learn to read or teach someone to read; helping nearly 1,000 Philadelphians find new jobs; and helping nearly 9,000 entrepreneurs start, improve, or grow their small businesses.
How cool. And how 21st century.
Sandra Horrocks
vice president
external affairs
Free Library of Philadelphia
End the corner of hate
Re: "Why the hatemongers at 15th & Market?":
Thank you, Kim Lisacek, for taking the time to write this letter. Maybe if more people write in it will encourage our Civil Affairs or mayor to take steps.
I am fully aware of the First Amendment, and freedom of speech. But, these people are on this corner every Friday, and they publicly speak hatred of white people.
We are all entitled to our opinions, and how we feel, but this is not a peaceful protest - this is a disgrace and an insult to all people, and it is a feeding ground for extremists to take a bad situation and turn it into the worst situation. When I stopped to listen, I couldn't believe my ears, and so proudly these men speak, as if it does not offend the people walking by. It is as if Charles Manson himself is on the corner promoting cultism.
I don't know these people, but my eyes don't lie, and my ears are good, and I can say without hesitation: This is wrong, from where I stand.
These men stand on a box at this very busy intersection in Center City, and they speak on a microphone so that you can hear them, at the steps of our mayor and city officials. This is not taking place down on Delaware Avenue - this is in our face.
Do we actually have a Civil Affairs group to address this? If yes, then where have they been?
Hello, wake up and see what is happening. It is an insult to all, and to be in Center City with all the hardworking people making a living, and all the tourists (outsiders) seeing this, it is unacceptable.
City of Brotherly Love - are you kidding me? You're preaching hatred, people. Come on, Philly, get your act together. We don't promote hatred; start breaking it down at the Clothespin.
Hey, here is an idea: Tell them to get a permit, and use the money to teach all of them not to be hating against any race. I want to see how long it will take.
K. Rhoads