Bonnie Sutton
Contents contributed and discussions participated by Bonnie Sutton
NCLB: The Football Version - 1 views
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From a posting by Michael Paul Goldenberg on the EDDRA2 listserve, Sunday, January 29, 2012.
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NCLB: The Football Version
1. All teams must make the state playoffs and all MUST win the championship. If a team does not win the championship, they will be on probation until they are the champions, and coaches will be held accountable. If after two years they have not won the championship, their footballs and equipment will be taken away UNTIL they do win the champions...hip.
2. All kids will be expected to have the same football skills at the same time even if they do not have the same conditions or opportunities to practice on their own. NO exceptions will be made for lack of interest in football, a desire to perform athletically, or disabilities of themselves or their parents. ALL KIDS WILL PLAY FOOTBALL AT A PROFICIENT LEVEL!
3. Talented players will be asked to workout on their own, without instruction. This is because the coaches will be using all their instructional time with the athletes who aren't interested in football,
have limited athletic ability or whose parents don't like football.
4. Games will be played year round, but statistics will only be kept in the 4th, 8th, and 11th game.
It will create a New Age of Sports where every school is expected to have the same level of talent and all teams will reach the same minimum goals. If no child gets ahead, then no child gets left behind.
If parents do not like this new law, they are encouraged to vote for vouchers and support private schools that can screen out the non-athletes and prevent their children from having to go to school with bad football players.
Diane Ravitch Calls Herself A Voice For Teachers, In A Cruel Reform Movement - 3 views
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Posted: 01/25/2012 2012
Professor Diane Ravitch is a big voice in education policy and a huge critic of No Child Left Behind.
Yet, as former Assistant Secretary of Education under President George H. W. Bush, she helped promote the same policies she's now criticizing.
Ravitch's latest book is called, The Death and Life of the Great American School System. In the book, she details why she drastically reversed her position on school reform. While she used to push for testing, charters and privatization, now she's worried these efforts are making things worse and hurting students.
As an education reform veteran, Ravitch can tell you change isn't easy, and it isn't kind.
Ravitch: What we call reform right now, is really a very anti-teacher movement, a very cruel movement that says poverty doesn't matter. If you look at test scores - SAT or ACT or national or international test scores, the clearest correlation between test scores is family income. Kids from affluent homes have higher scores than kids from poverty. The people who call themselves reformers, say, poverty is just an excuse. Well that's nonsense - anyone who's poor can say, it's not an excuse.
People who live in poverty don't have good health care, they get sick more often, they don't have economic security, they don't have good nutrition - all these things are burdens of poverty, and to say they don't make a difference, and that the schools alone can change society, is simply a way of evading the responsibility that grown-ups have to fund our schools adequately, to give our teachers the resources they need to do a good job.
In Finland, where we often say we would like to be like Finland, less than four percent of the kids are in poverty, more than 20 percent here.
Youth Radio: While you were working in the White House, did you see any strategies that you really believe in - in terms of populations of students for whom traditional education isn't working?
Ravitch: For many years I was a supporter of charter schools. And the reason I supported them is because the original concept of the charter was that it would be created by teachers to address the needs of the kids who weren't making it in the regular public school. That the charter schools would be create dby teachers that then went out into the community and identified kids who had dropped out, or go into schools and see the kids who had their heads down on the desk or their eyes were closing. They were the low performers, the hard-to-reach. Teachers would then have the opportunity to try new strategies, to be completely innovative, and to collaborate and to help the public school by saying, this is what we've learned.
Some charters still do that, but they suffer terribly because the have low scores. And this is the great tragedy of No Child Left Behind - that is that every school is incentivized to get the highest scores, and to avoid the kids who need help. Because the kids who are the low performers are the kids who are going to drag your scores down, so there are many charters, most charters today, want the higher performing kids, they don't want the dropouts, they don't the kids who put their heads down on the desk and don't pay attention. So the very reason that charters were created has been pushed aside and instead we now have charter chains that boast, we have higher scores than regular public schools.
YR: We've also seen a focus on "college only" as the way to success. We're curious about your thoughts on vocational education, and career and technical education -- do these have a place in the future of the American system?
Ravitch: I think the college for all is a ridiculous goal. I think on the one hand, everyone should have a full rich curriculum - everyone should learn history because that's important to be a citizen in this country, and to understand where we came from and to make some independent judgements about who you vote for in the future. Everyone should have civics, everyone should have a command of the English language. All these things are necessary whether you intend to go to college or you don't intend to go to college. The arts are necessary just to be a human being. Having said that, I think there are still kids who don't want to go to college, and that's their right, they don't have to go to college. If everyone in our society had a college degree, we still wouldn't have jobs for everyone and it would be a hoax.
YR: What advice do you have for new teachers for them to stay in the profession?
Ravitch: I believe that if you intend to make a career of teaching, you should take a year of teacher training ad teacher preparation. I admire the people in Teach for America, I've met many of them, they're bright, they're idealistic --I don't think they're prepared to be teachers. Five weeks of training is not enough.
I don't admire the organization of Teach for America, because it makes boast about the success of its students, and they claim to have the answer to educate every child. They haven't done that, they can't do that. In two years time, no one turns around a school, no one closes the achievement gap.
YR: In a couple years, over half of our teachers will retire, is that scary to you?
Ravitch: That's a frightening thought. The question I pose to some of my friends who think all this turnover is good, is this, 'When you go to a hospital, do you want to be treated by an intern or a doctor?' And somehow they never say I want an intern - they want a doctor.
Originally published on Youthradio.org, the premier source for youth generated news throughout the globe.
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Schools and Inequality: A Multilevel Analysis of Coleman's Equality of Educational Oppo... - 2 views
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by Geoffrey Borman & Maritza Dowling
Four decades after the pathbreaking Coleman report, researchers are still working to address its primary message: that school social composition and resources are not important for understanding and addressing educational inequality. Using the original Equality of Educational Opportunity data, this study applied a two-level hierarchical linear model to partition the variation in ninth-grade students' verbal achievement into its within- and between-school components and to measure the associations among school-level social composition, resources, teacher characteristics, and peer characteristics and achievement. We estimated that 40% of the achievement variance was between schools, whereas Coleman and colleagues had originally estimated that only 8.5%-18% lay between schools. Explanatory analyses suggested that the racial/ethnic and social class composition of a student's school was over 1 3/4 times more important than a student's individual race/ethnicity or social class for understanding educational outcomes. Further, within-school Black-White achievement gaps and social class differences were explained in part by curricular differentiation and teachers' preferences toward middle-class students. These findings are contrasted with those from a set of traditional ordinary least squares regression models and the past conclusions drawn from the Coleman report. This is a long research paper.
http://www.tcrecord.org/Content.asp?ContentID=15664
Most Literate and Least Literate cities in the US - 1 views
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/the-most-least-literate-big-us-cities/2012/01/26/gIQAluv9SQ_blog.html
Valerie Strauss
Washington, D.C., is the most literate big city in the United States, and Bakersfield, Calif., the least, in the newest annual rankings that consider factors including the population's education level and the number of bookstores.
The rankings have been done annually for six years by Central Connecticut State University, which also factors in a city's newspaper, magazine and journal circulation, and library and Internet resources. The study looked at data in cities with populations of 250,000 and larger.
The nation's capital topped the list for the second straight year, with these right behind it in the top five: Seattle (2), Minneapolis (3), Atlanta (4) and Boston (5). Rounding out the top 10: Pittsburgh (6), Cincinnati (7), St. Louis (8), San Francisco (9) and Denver (10).
The bottom five, starting with the fifth worst: Fresno and then Stockton, both in California; El Paso and then Corpus Christi, both in Texas; and finally, at the bottom, Bakersfield.
'We need to talk about piracy (but we must stop SOPA first)' - 3 views
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danah boyd | apophenia has posted a new item, 'We need to talk about piracy (but
we must stop SOPA first)'
Much to my happiness, the internets are in a frenzy about the "Stop Online
Piracy Act" (aka SOPA). Congress is currently in recess, but the House
announced a hearing on the potential impact to the Domain Name Service on
January 18 and everyone expects the Senate to begin discussing a similar bill
"PROTECT IP [...]
You may view the latest post at
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2012/01/17/stop-sopa.html
Black, Latino Students Perform at Levels of 30 Years Ago - 1 views
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Black, Latino Students Perform at Levels of 30 Years Ago
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/23/black-latino-students-per_n_1224790.html
Teresa Wiltz First Posted: 01/23/2012 4:44 pm Updated: 01/23/2012 5:17 pm
This piece comes to us courtesy of America's Wire.
WASHINGTON -- Educators are expressing alarm that the performance gap between minority and white high school students continues to expand across the United States, with minority teenagers performing at academic levels equal to or lower than those of 30 years ago.
Despite the hope that improving education for children of color would propel them to better life outcomes, Latino and African-American students are not being prepared in high school classrooms for brighter futures. While achievement levels have improved considerably for minority elementary and middle school students, educators say their academic performance drops during high school years.
How prevalent is the achievement gap at the high school level?
On average, African-American and Latino high school seniors perform math and read at the same level as 13-year-old white students.
"We take kids that start [high school] a little behind and by the time they finish high school, they're way behind," says Amy Wilkins, vice president for government affairs and communications at the Education Trust, a Washington-based educational advocacy group. "That's the opposite of what American values say education is about. Education is supposed to level the playing field. And it does the opposite. . . .While many people are celebrating our postracial society . . . there is still a significant hangover in our schools."
The Education Trust says African-American and Latino students have made little to no progress in 12th-grade reading scores since 1994, continuing to lag behind white students. Math achievement has also remained flat, with the gap between white students and those of color widening.
Educators cite these causes for the disparity in performance:
Lowered expectations for students of color
Growing income inequality and lack of resources in low-income school districts
Unequal access to experienced teachers
An increased number of "out of field" teachers instructing minority students in subjects outside their area of expertise
Unconscious bias" by teachers and administrators.
These factors, experts say, produce an opportunity gap for students of color.
"A 12th-grade education in a more affluent neighborhood is not the same as the education in a less affluent neighborhood," says Dominique Apollon, research director of the Applied Research Center, a national nonprofit with offices in New York, Chicago and Oakland, Calif. "Top students in low-income schools don't have the opportunity to be pushed further and further."
Wilkins adds that "school is their best chance of escaping horrible circumstances. To cut them some slack in school is not the appropriate response to racism and poverty in American culture. It is a response that ends up being deadly to the students."
School advocates say students of color, regardless of class, are frequently met with lowered expectations from teachers and administrators. With such expectations come lowered requirements in the classroom, they say. Students in low-income schools are more likely to be given an "A" for work that would receive a "C" in a more affluent school, according to "Raising Achievement and Closing Gaps Between Groups: Lessons from Schools and Districts on the Performance Frontier," an Education Trust study released last November.
Students of color are also less likely to be given advanced-level coursework. John Capozzi, principal of Elmont (N.Y.) Memorial Junior-Senior High School, is among educators who call that a civil rights issue. Capozzi says he frequently battles those coursework perceptions, even from fellow educators and accreditation officials evaluating his school.
"They have preconceived notions about minority kids," says Capozzi, whose students are primarily African-American and Latino. "A large part of my job . . . [is] dispelling the stereotypes of our kids. It's long been embedded in society."
"African Americans and Hispanics have been denied access to the more rigorous courses," Capozzi says. All students, he says, "should be thrown into vigorous classes" and be given proper academic support to ensure their success. If they don't have access to those classes, he says, they won't be adequately prepared for college.
Research from the Education Trust study supports his assertion: More white high school graduates were enrolled in college prep courses than were their African-American, Latino and Native American counterparts. Often, schools attended by those minorities do not offer advanced classes.
According to Pedro Noguera, professor of education at New York University, "Where there's tracking, [you have] obstacles to getting into the more rigorous classes, and the teachers aren't that committed to teaching. Those are all signs of a dysfunctional culture. . . .In many schools, instead of encouraging kids [of color] to take [advanced courses], they're discouraging them and putting up obstacles."
Coming from a middle-class family doesn't protect minority students from such obstacles. Wilkins says middle-class black youngsters aren't doing as well as their white peers. Many are placed in less competitive classes, and a black child with high fifth-grade math scores is less likely to be enrolled in algebra in eighth grade, according to the Education Trust study.
"A lot of the time, those [middle-class black] kids are in schools where they are in the minority," Noguera says. "If they don't have teachers that are encouraging them, they feel alienated."
Another obstacle for poor and minority students is that they are more likely than white students to have inexperienced and "out of field" teachers. According to Wilkins, minorities at high-poverty schools are twice as likely to be taught by "out of field" teachers - for instance, a math instructor teaching English or a science instructor teaching history. That, education experts say, is a recipe for disaster.
Low-income minority students are also more likely to have newly minted teachers, many of whom aren't equipped to help underperforming students get on track. According to the Education Trust, low-performing students are more likely to be assigned to ineffective teachers.
"Some of the least experienced teachers are put in classrooms with our most needy kids," says LaShawn Routé Chatmon, executive director of the National Equity Project based in Oakland. "This doesn't mean that new teachers can't serve needy students. But there is a trend of large numbers of teachers who aren't fully prepared."
The result? According to Chatmon, inexperienced teachers inadvertently perpetuate the achievement gap. Students performing below their grade must be taught at an accelerated level, she says. Teachers must be "warm demanders," showing students respect, encouraging them to be partners in their learning and communicating clearly that they are expected to master the subject matter, Chatmon says.
This is particularly critical in the early years of high school when students learn groundwork for more advanced coursework.
"All the research shows that ninth grade is a pivotal year, for all students, but in particular minority students," Capozzi says. "If you don't catch them in ninth grade, the rise in dropouts increases dramatically."
Poverty also hampers minority student achievement. Blacks and Latinos have been disproportionately affected by the economy, with more and more children falling into poverty, according to Apollon.
Minority students typically attend schools that lack resources. They are also more likely to attend schools where the student-teacher ratio is high, books and computers are outdated and teacher aides aren't available to provide extra help for those who need it most.
"Young people of color are overrepresented in the poorest schools and the poorest neighborhoods," Apollon says. "There is a cumulative and compounding effect of structural deficiencies in many schools."
The sluggish economy has forced many school districts to slash budgets, eliminating after-school programs and arts instruction. Many schools are underfunded, even in more affluent districts. But wealthier schools benefit because parents can organize fundraisers or pay for private tutors.
Poor parents working two and three jobs often don't have the wherewithal to advocate for their children, education experts say. Often, the parents themselves received a substandard education. This creates a dynamic in which generations of families are stuck in a cycle of underachievement.
Also part of the poor performance of minority students is "unconscious bias." Teachers may think that students from poor families are so traumatized that they can't learn, experts say, and so they don't push those children to excel. Chatmon says that as African-American boys grow physically, teachers often talk about being afraid of "their size" and tend to overpunish them. As a result, a disproportionate number of black male students are suspended and miss class instruction, making it that much harder for them to catch up.
"Unconscious bias clearly plays a role in tracking young boys of color in particular into the slower track courses," Apollon says. "Unconscious bias clearly plays a role in terms of discipline as well. Obviously, if you're being suspended from school, all the teachers think you're disruptive. They'll have lower expectations of students that have been labeled 'undisciplined.' That certainly will have a negative impact on a student's ability to succeed."
America's Wire is an independent, non-profit news service run by the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. America's Wire is made possible by a grant from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. For more information, visit www.americaswire.org or contact Michael K. Frisby at mike@frisbyassociates.com.
The facts that school reformers ignore - 1 views
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By Valerie Strauss
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/the-facts-that-school-reformers-ignore/2012/01/23/gIQABWQRMQ_blog.html
This was written by Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, a non-profit organization created to broaden the discussion about economic policy to include the interests of low- and middle-income workers. From 1999 to 2002 he was the national education columnist of The New York Times, and he is the author of several books, including "Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right" and "Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap." This appeared on the institute's website.
By Richard Rothstein
Education "reformers" have a common playbook. First, assert without evidence that regular public schools are "failing" and that large numbers of regular (unionized) public school teachers are incompetent. Provide no documentation for this claim other than that the test score gap between minority and white children remains large. Then propose so-called reforms to address the unproven problem - charter schools to escape teacher unionization and the mechanistic use of student scores on low-quality and corrupted tests to identify teachers who should be fired.
The mantra has been endlessly repeated by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, and by "reform" leaders like Michelle Rhee, former Washington D.C. public schools chancellor, and Joel Klein, former New York schools chancellor. Bill Gates' foundation gives generous grants to school systems and private education advocates who adopt the analysis. In Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emmanuel makes the argument, and in New York, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has frequently sung the same tune.
And now, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has joined in. On Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday last week, the governor cast attacks on unionized teachers as a defense of minority students against the adult bureaucracy. "It's about the children," Mr. Cuomo said. Because of failing public schools, "the great equalizer that was supposed to be the public education system can now be the great discriminator."
But this applause line about school failure is an "urban myth." The governor, mayor and other policymakers have neglected to check facts they assume to be true. As a result, they may be obsessed with the wrong challenges, while exacerbating real, but overlooked problems.
Careful examination discloses that disadvantaged students have made spectacular progress in the last generation, in regular public schools, with ordinary teachers. Not only have regular public schools not been "the great discriminator" - they continue to make remarkable gains for minority children at a time when our increasingly unequal social and economic systems seem determined to abandon them.
We have only one accurate performance measure. The government administers periodic reading and math tests to samples of fourth, eighth and 12th graders. Called the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP, pronounced "nape"), it is less subject to corruption than standardized tests now legally required of all schoolchildren.
NAEP samples are only large enough to produce reliable national and (for fourth and eighth graders) state estimates, but not for classrooms or schools. Thus, principals or teachers suffer no consequences for poor NAEP scores, giving them no incentive to steal time from instruction to drill on NAEP-type questions.
Not every selected student gets identical NAEP questions. Scores aggregate answers from different students' booklets, covering different topics from the math and reading curriculums. In contrast, state and city standardized tests change little each year; teachers can predict which of many topics will likely appear, and focus instruction on those.
Here's what NAEP shows: Average black fourth graders' math performance in regular public schools has improved so much that it now exceeds average white performance as recently as 1992. The improvement has been greatest for the lowest achievers, those in the bottom 10 percent. Eighth graders show similar, though less dramatic trends. The black-white gap has narrowed little because whites have also improved.
These irrefutable facts characterize both the nation as a whole, and New York State specifically. In fact, New York State's black children made enormous gains in the 1990s, and much slower gains once the federal No Child Left Behind, and Mayor Bloomberg's and Chancellor Klein's test-based reforms kicked in. From 1992 to 2003, for example, black fourth graders' math performance jumped 22 scale points (about two-thirds of a standard deviation). From 2003 to 2011, the gain was only 5 scale points.
There is something perverse about using Dr. King's birthday as the occasion for an accusation that schools have been the "great discriminators" when those schools have been boosting the achievement of African Americans at a far more rapid rate than they've been able to boost the achievement of whites.
Overall, the national and New York State data are hard to reconcile with a story that schools are filled with teachers having low expectations, poor training, and complacency arising from excessive job security, and the way to fix public schools is more accountability for student test scores.
There are certainly ineffective teachers, and schools should do better at removing them. But data suggest that this problem, while real, is relatively small compared to others we ignore. Here are two: There has been substantial reading improvement at the fourth but not eighth grade; and no comparable improvement, even in math, for 12th graders.
Assuming systemic failure to justify a frenzy of ill-considered reforms, we've spent almost no time investigating what caused these trends. We can only speculate.
Plausibly, schools have more influence on math. Reading, especially for older children, results more from exposure to vocabulary and complex language at home, and to visiting museums, libraries, and zoos, to gain context for the written word.
We do know that the verbal gap between middle class and disadvantaged children is well established by age 3. We can improve reading scores for fourth graders by drilling basic skills, but not for older children whose reading depends more on relating text to the world beyond.
Popular reforms, holding schools and teachers accountable for test scores, are consistent with the facts only if we believe that most teachers work hard to teach math, but not reading. More plausible is that elementary schools do at least a passable job, and we should focus reform instead on establishing early childhood centers that give disadvantaged children greater verbal exposure and the breadth of experience that affluent children typically receive.
Rather than spending such energy imagining how schools have failed, so we can fix them, we might devote attention to investigating what schools have done well, so we can do more of it.
High schools' apparent lack of improvement for disadvantaged youth remains puzzling. Here, too, we should consider some factors outside of schools, where racially isolated communities with concentrated poverty and few jobs can demoralize adolescents. We might get greater academic success by creating more after-school and summer programs that provide enriching experiences, competing with adverse neighborhood influences.
Systems cannot improve if prescriptions rely on flawed diagnoses. The governor and mayor should now step back, take a deep breath, and try to follow facts rather than ignore them.
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By Valerie Strauss | 04:00 AM ET, 01/24/2012
You Can't Afford Apple's Education Revolution - 3 views
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You Can't Afford Apple's Education Revolution
2:20PM January 20, 2012 | Brian Barrett
http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2012/01/you-cant-afford-apples-education-revolution/
Is what Apple showed us today future of education? The future we'd all been imagining for decades, no less. Harry Potter stuff.
Let's start with the good. There's a lot of it. Fifteen US bucks for an interactive textbook is an amazing price; they'd normally cost a hundred new, about half that gently used. The features that Apple's introducing - particularly those instant flash cards that might have gotten me through Chemistry unscathed - are indisputably an improvement over stale highlighters and multi-coloured Post-Its.
All of this represents the best kind of progress, a paradigm shift in education. That is, if you can afford it.
I've argued before that iPads are cheap for what they are. And that's true, assuming that what they are is a secondary device on which people with healthy disposable income can watch their YouTubes and send some emails and play Sword and Sworcery for hours and hours. But while iBooks are very affordable textbooks, the iPad makes for one insanely expensive backpack.
Under the best case scenario, you're a teenager in a district that has bought iPads for every single student. It's free for you, which is great! But even with a healthy discount, all those tablets carve a multimillion-dollar, taxpayer-funded chunk out of the education budget. Money that could be going to dozens of other in-classroom aids, teacher salaries, healthy lunches, etc. They'll come from somewhere, at the expense of something else.
Which would be fine if that iPad were a standalone device that could accommodate four years of curricula. It's not. Not even close.
Standalone? Try writing a 20-page term paper on an iPad. Or better yet, try telling every student they need to buy a $US70 wireless keyboard. Oh, and it's going to be spending a lot of time in your backpack, so better tack on a $US40 Smart Cover. The reality is that no matter how far Apple has pushed into the cloud, iPads still need laptops to complement them. And those accessories, those laptops? Whether it's the student or the schools, someone's paying for them.
Which might even be worth it if the iPad could disappear textbooks from your life altogether. But it can't, not remotely. While Apple's got three major textbook partners lined up, at the moment the selection is treacherously limited. Which means that for now, and potentially for a long time, backpacks across the country are going to be loaded down with hefty Pre-Calculus and AP Physics tomes.
You can argue that they only cost $US15 a pop, and that savings alone make them worth it. Which would be true, if publishers hated money. But publishers are businesses, and the business model in this place is clear: instead of selling an updated textbook every 5-10 years for $100, update and sell every year for $15. And it'll work; it's not like you can hand down an iBook from year to year. In fact, you expressly can't.
And then consider this: these iPad textbooks are every bit as big as their dead tree counterparts, and you need a lot of digital storage to lug them around. The eight books on display in the iTunes App Store today average out to about 1.5GB each; a full year's course load would quickly fill up a 16GB iPad, which means either schools/students will have to shell out for the more expensive 32GB version, or students are responsible for their own external storage options. My wallet hurts.
What all this adds up to is a education revolution for the landed gentry. Or even worse, schools that can't afford it chasing after a wave that's years away from cresting. Millions of dollars spent on a supplementary learning tool. A distant horizon mistaken for the here and now.
Let's be clear, though; this is indisputably the future. What we saw today is what our classrooms will look like once iPads are far cheaper, once digital textbooks can be handed down as easily as physical ones, once teachers of every subject have several digital textbooks to choose among. For now though, it's important to remember that "new" and "different" always come at a premium. One that the vast majority of us can't afford.
Dear Michelle Rhee: About that teacher evaluation study - 2 views
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/dear-michelle-rhee-about-that-teacher-evaluation-study/2012/01/20/gIQA0iVSGQ_blog.html
Dear Michelle Rhee: About that teacher evaluation study
By Valerie Strauss
Dear Michelle Rhee, former D.C. schools chancellor and current leader of StudentsFirst:
I just wanted to dash off a quick note about that commentary you wrote in Education Week about the big value-added teacher evaluation study that made headlines this month.
The study, titled "The Long-Term Impacts of Teachers: Teacher Value-Added and Student Outcomes in Adulthood," was conducted by two Harvard University researchers and one from Columbia. (Not shabby credentials; it's no wonder the New York Times made such a big deal of the study as an exclusive and then you decided to write about it.) The researchers claimed in their study that teachers with a high value-added score make a huge difference in the adult lives of their former students. You lauded the conclusions and said they support your own belief in test-based school reform. What I wanted you to know is that they actually don't.
I read the nearly 100 pages of the report (it's taken me a few weeks) and looked at all the graphs and charts. I confess that I didn't really understand all of it; a lot of that technical stuff is over my head. But I took in enough to realize that your interpretation of the study doesn't square with the facts, and I wonder if you were misled by the authors' own confusing executive summary (which I went back to read after finishing the study just to see what the researchers themselves thought was most important).
What Raj Chetty and John N. Friedman of Harvard and Jonah E. Rockoff of Columbia did was to study the school records of 2.5 million students in a major urban district over 20 years and also got income tax records from the Internal Revenue Service to inspect. (Who knew the IRS was so friendly? Incidentally, Diane Ravitch guessed the district was New York City, but I am digressing.)
The researchers were trying to draw conclusions about the worth of value-added scores, which have become very popular with reformers such as yourself but have been savaged by critics (disclosure: I'm one of them) because a number of studies have shown them be unreliable, invalid and unfair. A value-added scores is derived from a formula (there are many different ones) that uses a student standardized- test score to determine how much value a teacher had in student learning. But of course, I'm telling you what you already know, since this method is part of the troubled IMPACT teacher evaluation system you instituted in D.C. schools when you were chancellor.
(Really, Ms. Rhee, how can a formula ever accurately factor in the impact of a sleepless night in a homeless shelter on a hungry student's performance on a high-stakes test? Did you know that 22 percent of American children live in poverty and that low test scores are always correlated with family income? But again, I digress.)
From the mountain of data they collected, the authors concluded in the first of two parts of the study that a teacher with a high value-added score produces students who in the future will get high test scores. That's the same thing, essentially, as saying that teachers who help kids get high test scores will keep doing that in the future. That hardly seems worth a front-page story in the New York Times.
The big news was in the second part of the study. The authors concluded that teachers with high value-added scores will have a sustained effect on students that lasts through the students' adult lives.
In other words, as a friend of mine said, "High value-added teachers make high-scoring kids make successful adults."
How did the researchers measure success? They created proxies for success. Students with high-value-added teachers are supposedly:
1) less likely to have children as teenagers
2) more likely to be enrolled in a good college by the age of 20
3) by 28, have higher lifetime income than students who didn't have high-valued teachers.
Wow. All that from one, admittedly big, study.
The authors say the data come from the years 1989 to 2009, which to me implies that the standardized test scores used are recent. Actually, the scores are from the 1990s, well before the No Child Left Behind era ushered in those high-stakes standardized tests you like to use to hold students and and teachers and schools accountable.
The only data that come from 2009 concern the incomes of students who turned 28 in that year. Now, students who turned 28 in 2009 were born in 1981. Since the researchers used test data from grades four to eight, the students in question would have been 10-year-old fourth graders in 1991 and 14-year-old eighth graders in 1995.
So the authors used value-added data from 1991 to 1995 and then followed specific students from that period until they were 28 in 2009 and measured their income and other factors.
The executive summary, incidentally, never says the test data are so old. And on Page 5 of the actual report, the authors wrote: "An important limitation of our analysis is that teachers were not incentivized based on test scores in the school district and time period we study."
"Not incentivized" is a euphemism in this case for old data.
The following sentence on Page 5 says, "The signal content of value-added might be lower when it is used to evaluate teachers because of behavioral responses such as cheating or teaching to the test."
Signal content? That means, in this context, "a less reliable predictor."
This all leaves me wondering exactly how reliable any of this actually is.
Now you might be wondering, why am I telling you all of this? Why does it matter?
Well, it matters a lot. It shows that students going to school in the early 1990s - in the days before No Child Left Behind gave high-stakes tests such dangerous importance in accountability systems starting in 2002 - wound up doing quite well. They earned more, lived in better places, got into better colleges and didn't wind up as teenage parents.
So I ask you: Why exactly do we need high-stakes testing when the old tests seemed to be working just fine in helping students succeed? High-stakes tests have had many awful consequences: narrowed curriculum, cheating scandals, etc. This study seems to me to show we don't need them!
I should note that Footnote 9, which starts on Page 5, and Footnote 64 on Page 50 say that even in the low-stakes tests that were the basis of this study, there's a tendency for the top 2 percent of teachers ranked by value-added to have patterns of test-score gains that are consistent with cheating - and this percentage is, of course, much higher in the high-stakes era. You surely know all about the cheating scandal in Atlanta that pushed out the superintendent and others in a bunch of cities. In fact, there are investigations now into cheating when you were chancellor!
Cheating distorts the outcome, which leaves one to wonder why the authors put this important factor in a few small footnotes. Hmm.
Back to your Education Week commentary. You wrote that the study proves that the test-based reform program you started in D.C. schools when you were chancellor from 2007 to 2010 actually works. But it doesn't prove anything of the sort.
Using the authors' own markers of success, we can't know until 2016 whether D.C. public school students who were in eighth grade in 2010 and had high-value-added teachers will get into good colleges. And we can't know about the fourth graders until 2020.
Other things we won't know:
* Not until 2020 will we know if D.C. students who were in eighth grade in 2010 and had teachers with high value-added scores will live in a high-income zip code.
* Not until 2024 will we know if D.C. students who were in fourth grade in 2010 will live in a high-income zip code.
* Not until 2024 will know if D.C. students who were in eighth grade in 2010 have higher incomes.
* Not until 2028 will we know if D.C. students who were in fourth grade in 2010 have higher incomes.
Besides, other issues have been raised about the study that give a reader pause as to what real conclusions we can draw from it.
According to economist Bruce Baker of Rutgers University, writing on the School Financeblog, the income gains the authors talk about aren't really so big as it seems from reading the executive summary.
He wrote:
"One of the big quotes in The New York Times article is: 'Replacing a poor teacher with an average one would raise a single classroom's lifetime earnings by about $266,000, the economists estimate.' This comes straight from the research paper. BUT ... let's break that down. It's a whole classroom of kids. Let's say ... for rounding purposes, 26.6 kids if this is a large urban district like NYC. Let's say we're talking about earning careers from age 25 to 65 or about 40 years. So, $266,000/26.6 = $10,000 lifetime additional earnings per individual. Hmmm ... no longer catchy headline stuff. Now, per year? $10,000/40 = $250. Yep, about $250 per year."
He also wrote that it is difficult to figure out which teachers supposedly produced these great outcomes for kids. He wrote:
"Just because teacher [value-added] scores in a massive data set show variance does not mean that we can identify with any level of precision or accuracy which individual teachers (plucking single points from a massive scatter plot) are 'good' and which are 'bad.' Therein exists one of the major fallacies of moving from large scale econometric analysis to micro level human resource management."
Baker also concluded that while it's a "really cool academic study," the findings "cannot be immediately translated into what the headlines have suggested - that immediate use of value-added metrics to reshape the teacher workforce can lift the economy, and increase wages across the board!"
" The headlines and media spin have been dreadfully overstated and deceptive," he wrote.
The misleading commentary includes your commentary, Ms. Rhee.
If you really penned it, you might want to reconsider some corrections. If you relied on staff to write it as many organizational leaders do - I don't suppose Education Secretary Arne Duncan, for example, writes all of his great speeches - you might want to consider firing them.
Best regards, and I apologize that what I thought would be a quick note turned into a long one. These issues are really complex and can't be solved with bromides about how great teachers get great results.
Sincerely, The Answer Sheet
Hawaii teachers reject contract in 'blow' to Race to the Top - 2 views
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By Valerie Strauss
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/hawaii-teachers-reject-contract-in-blow-to-race-to-the-top/2012/01/20/gIQA2KHCGQ_blog.html
Public school teachers in Hawaii have rejected a contract that called for a move to a performance-based evaluation and compensation system, as required by the Race to the Top grant that the state won from the Obama administration.
The rejection comes shortly after Hawaii was warned by the U.S. Education Department that its $75 million Race to the Top grant had been put on "high-risk status" - the first state to be so sanctioned - because it had not moved quickly enough to implement specific reforms.
Sixty-seven percent of the 2,500 teachers, counselors and others represented by the Hawaii State Teachers Association opposed the contract, which was seen as a way to move Race to the Top efforts forward and improve its status with Washington. It was the first time in the organization's 44-year history that members rejected a contract that had been approved by its board, according to the Honolulu Civil Beat.
The Honolulu Civil Beat put this headline on a story it ran announcing the defeat of the contract proposal: "Hawaii Teachers Vote a Stunning Blow For Race to the Top"
Race to the Top is the administration's signature education initiative, a $4 billion-plus contest in which states and districts have competed for a slice of the money in exchange for implementing school reform policies favored by the department. Those include expanding charter schools and evaluating teachers in part on the basis of students' standardized test scores. Twenty-one states plus the District of Columbia have been awarded grants through several rounds of Race to the Top. Hawaii won $75 million but could lose its grant (a few million dollars have already been spent) if the department is not satisfied with the pace of reform there.
Education Department officials told Gov. Neil Abercrombie (D) in a recent letter that the progress the state had made in implementing reforms in the first 14 months of the grant had been "unsatisfactory." Federal officials are planning to visit Hawaii early this year to do an on-site evaluation of Race to the Top compliance.
The proposed contract called for a new evaluation system for teachers that would be partly based on student growth, a controversial approach because there are many factors that influence a student's academic performance and teasing out how much a teacher is responsible is very difficult. The formulas that are used to try to do this rely on standardized test scores earned by students and are not sophisticated enough to be valid or fair, assessment experts say, although policymakers have forged ahead with these systems anyway.
But the contract proposal, according to several Hawaii newspapers, did not actually spell out the details of how the new evaluation system would work. It would, however, have reversed a 5 percent pay reduction that went into effect last year.
Hawaii may be having the biggest trouble among Race to the Top recipients satisfying the Education Department, but it isn't the only one; implementation in several states is slow.
The Associated Press reported earlier this month that reports issued by states detailing their progress in the first year of their Race to the Top grant showed that most of them were behind schedule with implementation. New York and Florida were having the most serious problems aside from Hawaii, the AP said.
SOPA & citizenship in a digital age - 1 views
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Kid-Tech News for Parents
http://www.netfamilynews.org/?p=31155>
You could call Internet users "citizen lobbyists." This week, in a post-Arab Spring sign of how participatory media - and its participants - are powerfully changing things, they successfully went head-to-head with some powerful forces and won. Christopher Dodd, the head of the film industry trade group that lobbied and failed to push through the Stop Online Piracy Act (along with the US Chamber of Commerce and the recording industry) said that "no Washington player can safely assume that a well-wired, heavily financed legislative program is safe from a sudden burst of Web-driven populism," according to the New York Times. "The startlingly speedy collapse of the antipiracy campaign by some of Washington's savviest players … signaled deep changes in antipiracy lobbying in the future."
So it's an understatement to say that it feels like this year will be a watershed. But lawmakers won't be the only ones to feel the power of the people outfitted with social media. I think social media companies themselves will too. In six blog posts, journalist, author and professor John Batelle looks at a variety of indicators of that. The most interesting to me was No. 6: "'The corporation' becomes a central societal question mark," he writes. "Most of us are struggling with the role corporations play in our society," he writes. "From a balance sheet prospective, corporations are in far, far better shape than just about every country in the world. Even as our personal incomes shrink on a per capita basis, and the world dips in an out of what feels like an eternal recession, corporate profits are up and up again. This feels a bit out of whack."
"Citizen regulators" next
And author and professor Don Tapscott writes, in his "20 big ideas for 2012," that "the privacy community is in shambles. In the past the threat was Big Brother (governments) assembling detailed dossiers about us. Then came Little Brother (corporations) creating detailed customer profiles. Today the problem is the individuals themselves. Hundreds of millions are revealing detailed data about themselves, their activities, their likes/dislikes, etc. online every day." In "Here's my personal data, marketers. What do I get for it?" Ad Age points to a passel of startups aimed at giving users control over their data.
What I see so much of still (maybe this will change now that SOPA-as-we-know-it is reported dead) is a sense of user powerlessness and potential victimization by corporations - like we're somehow living in a social media world while our heads are stuck back in the mass-media one of the past. Certainly that victimization is a theme of many discussions about consumer privacy and online safety. But what about our growing power? Increasingly, the "product" of these companies is the "content" of our lives. We create the product - through our searches, status updates, tweets, blog posts, photos, videos, avatars, etc. We are their bread and butter. This gives us considerable collective power, once there's a critical mass of users who get this. We don't know our own strength! Part of it is the need for a new media literacy, a mindfulness not just about what we upload and download but about our power and our collective place in social and media history. Tapscott's ninth "big idea" is "the citizen regulator," and I think that's next. Governments will be crowd-sourcing regulation, once we all begin to realize and exercise our collective bargaining power. Certainly the world's children are learning to! We can start figuring this out by watching our children - and talking with them about SOPA and how they want to participate. [Here's my own prediction, posted last month: "Anti-social media companies will be obsolete," including some characteristics of successful pro-social media corporations.
Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education - 15 views
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Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education
reviewed by Simon Funge - December 21, 2011
Title: Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education
Author(s): Özlem Sensoy & Robin DiAngelo
Publisher: Teachers College Press, New York
ISBN: 080775269X, Pages: 240, Year: 2011
Search for book at Amazon.com
Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education by Özlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo is a timely addition to the library of any educator concerned with an increasingly polarized society in which rhetoric frequently crowds out reasoned, thoughtful analysis of the current social, economic, and political space. Part of the Teachers College Multicultural Education series, this concise 214-page book offers the committed, but perhaps bewildered, professional or community educator a guidebook for leading students and participants through the morass of individual and public opinion toward theoretically-grounded knowledge that promotes action on behalf of creating a more socially just world.
Sensoy and DiAngelo base their pedagogical approach on a critical social justice perspective that explicitly points to the historical and ongoing structural inequalities that serve to devalue and minoritize social groups while simultaneously valuing and privileging dominant social groups. The authors assert that all individuals (including both educators and students) must cultivate and continually develop the self-awareness required to recognize the nature of, and our position within, these unjust social arrangements. Through ongoing reflection and by developing our "critical social justice literacy" (p. xix), the authors argue, we will be better prepared to work more effectively toward destabilizing present social relations in service of constructing a more just society. Is Everyone Really Equal? offers a step-by-step process through which this literacy can be developed.
The book is accessible, well-paced, and includes a variety of devices to help deepen the reader's understanding of the material: text boxes highlight and define key terms, clarify important concepts, connect content to concepts learned in previous chapters, and offer readers alternate ways to consider the content presented given their unique social positions. A number of vignettes and examples are also provided to assist the reader with applying the concepts to day-to-day experiences. In addition, the authors introduce us to a number of Canadian and US-based activists - some well-known to the reader and others not - who, through their work, have concretely operationalized the critical social justice perspective presented. And, at the end of each chapter, the authors provide a series of constructive discussion questions and creative activities to encourage reflection and to expand the reader's understanding of the content presented in the chapter.
Chapter 1 prepares readers to approach their learning from a critical, informed perspective that recognizes that, despite how attached we may be to our personal opinions, these often reflect a shallow understanding of complex social phenomena. Crucially, the authors acknowledge that developing a critical social justice perspective can be a difficult and emotionally fraught process as readers are asked to come to terms with their social position in the power structure.
Chapters 2 through 5 explore how oppression functions to confer power and privilege in the form of "rights, advantages, and protections" (p. 58) to members of the dominant (i.e., privileged) group at the expense of the minoritized (i.e., oppressed) group, and that this process is normalized through the process of socialization. The authors argue that oppression occurs at the group level "when one group's prejudice is backed by historical, social and institutional power" (p. 39). As such, the cultural and ideological justification of this exploitation occurs through the dominant group's control of major societal institutions including the "military, medicine, media, criminal justice, policing, finance, industry, higher education, religion, and science" (p. 45). Significantly, the authors argue that oppression is rationalized, in part, via internalized processes such that members of both the dominant and minoritized group come to accept their respective positions as fixed. In effect, this internalized worldview effectively renders dominance invisible to the privileged group.
In Chapters 6 through 8 Sensoy and DiAngelo make concrete how the process of socialization and structural dominance occurs by applying a critical social justice perspective to two specific forms of oppression. Sexism is addressed in depth in Chapter 6 while racism is explored in Chapters 7 and 8. With these chapters, the authors reveal how cultural institutions including the media, the workplace, and schools shape and construct gender and race in ways that privilege men and Whites respectively while simultaneously disadvantaging women and people of Color. As a result of this socialization, men and Whites may fail to acknowledge their privileged position or be dismissive of claims to the contrary. A further complicating factor, the authors note, is that individuals exist at the intersection of multiple social identities - some dominant and some minoritized - thus making more complex our understanding of the impact of these social arrangements.
The difficulty of recognizing oppression and privilege fuels common objections to social justice education. In Chapter 9 the authors address some of these, including claims that schools ought to be politically neutral spaces, that a focus on oppression and difference is an exercise in divisiveness, or that oppression is a function of human nature, a thing of the past, or not as bad as those who complain about it might believe. These concerns and others are usefully reframed by the authors through the lens of a more informed and critical social justice perspective.
In the final chapter, Sensoy and DiAngelo distill the content they have presented to four core principles. In effect, critical social justice requires that we must (1) "Recognize how relations of unequal social power are constantly being negotiated at both the micro (individual) and macro (structural) levels;" (2) "Understand our own positions within these relations of unequal power; (3) "Think critically about knowledge;" and (4) "Act on the above in service of a more just society" (p. 145). To this last principle, a number of helpful suggestions for disrupting oppression at the individual and group levels are offered.
As an introductory text to social justice education, educators who have extensively engaged in learning about the topic or are regularly engaged in social justice work in the community or in the classroom may be inclined to give Sensoy and DiAngelo's book a pass. This would be a mistake. Beyond reinforcing what the advanced educator may already understand, for the educator who embraces the opportunity to engage even the most resistant student, the authors name and confront the kinds of platitudes educators may encounter when delivering social justice education. Moreover, students and educators new to social justice education may even recognize their own misgivings in these statements. For instance, readers may be familiar with refrains like "I don't think about people's race, class, gender. I just see people as human" (p. 14) or "You can only be oppressed if you let yourself be oppressed" (p. 38) and "No one's handed me anything. I've worked hard for what I have" (p. 57). That the authors address these and other objections in a manner consistent with a critical social justice perspective can be of value to the beginning and more advanced educator or student alike.
It should be noted, however, that members of dominant groups will very likely struggle with the concepts presented - not because Sensoy and DiAngelo fail to present their content in a clear, straightforward, and understandable manner, but because these readers are required to reflect upon and potentially disrupt their taken-for-granted assumptions about themselves and about their worldview. This is not to make the argument that the inevitable conflict that arises should be avoided, but to state that students or participants engaged in this work may respond to their discomfort by closing themselves off from further learning - an outcome potentially counterproductive to the creation of prospective allies engaged in efforts to construct a more inclusive and just society. Therefore, those educators who plan to use this book should be prepared to carefully facilitate students' and participants' learning and have the capability to help them work through their resistance toward a deepened understanding of the material. Whether used as primary or secondary course text or as a facilitator's guide for the delivery of social justice content, Özlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo's Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education will likely prove to be an invaluable resource for educators committed to guiding their students toward action on behalf of creating a more just society.
Cite This Article as: Teachers College Record, Date Published: December 21, 2011
http://www.tcrecord.org ID Number: 16631, Date Accessed: 1/20/2012 4:47:53 PM
Rural Telco Groups Call on Vilsack to Intervene in USF Reform - 0 views
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Telecompetitor.com
By Joan Engebretson
The NTCA, OPASTCO and the Western Telecommunications Alliance have joined forces once again, jointly sending a letter last week to Agriculture Secretary Thomas J. Vilsack asking him to escalate rural telco concerns about certain elements of the Connect America Fund order adopted by the FCC late last year.
In addition the groups asked Vilsack to help prevent the FCC from undertaking several additional reform measures.
http://www.telecompetitor.com/rural-telco-groups-call-on-vilsack-to-intervene-in-usf-reform/
Connectivism and Connective Knowledge Online Course - 4 views
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Welcome to CCK12
Stephen Downes: 'Connectivism' and Connective Knowledge
January 14, 2012 . ... On Jan. 17 George Siemens and I will launch the third offering of our online course called 'Connectivism and Connective Knowledge
If you're interested, you can register here: http://cck11.mooc.ca The course is a MOOC -- a massive open online course. What this means is, first, that it may be massive. Our first offering attracted 2200 people, our second about 700 people. Other MOOC-style courses we've offered have also been massive. PLENK 2010, for example, which we offered last fall, attracted 1700 people.
Connectivism and Connective Knowledge is an open online course that over 12 weeks explores the concepts of connectivism and connective knowledge and explore their application as a framework for theories of teaching and learning. Participation is open to everyone and there are no fees or subscriptions required.
Register Here
The course will outline a connectivist understanding of educational systems of the future. It will help participants make sense of the transformative impact of technology in teaching and learning over the last decade. The voices calling for reform do so from many perspectives, with some suggesting 'new learners' require different learning models, others suggesting reform is needed due to globalization and increased competition, and still others suggesting technology is the salvation for the shortfalls evident in the system today. While each of these views tell us about the need for change, they overlook the primary reasons why change is required.
For a quick introduction to connectivist courses and how they work, please view the videos below.
- Success in a MOOC
- Knowledge in a MOOC
On this site we will be providing information about moocs and listings of available moocs. Watch this page for announcements regarding upcoming offerings.
Open Source - 3 views
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Connexions
http://cnx.org/aboutus/
Check out Connexions -17,000 opensource learning modules & over 1,000 collections. Anyone know of any other opensource textbooks for the K-12 realm? The only other one that I know of is CK-12.
Connexions - Opensource Educational Content Repository. | Digital Tools and Education
Connexions is one of the most popular open education sites in the world. Its more than 17,000 learning modules and over 1000 collections (textbooks, journal articles, etc.)
Does Technology Spending Amount to a New Utility Bill? - 1 views
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Telecompetitor.com
By Andrew Burger
With Americans spending 6%-12% of their incomes on utility bills, the rising cost of energy and other natural resources, e.g. water, continues to be a major concern for Americans. New research on American's technology spending has revealed that 63% of U.S. households spend 35% more on technology bills than utility bills, however.
In conducting research among nearly 1,100 of its customers, remote tech support company iYogi put its hypothesis "Is technology now the real utility?," to the test. Results of the in-depth survey of customers' technology usage and monthly spend came out positive.
http://www.telecompetitor.com/does-technology-spending-amount-to-a-new-utility-bill/
The Value of Teachers - 1 views
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The Value of Teachers
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: January 11, 2012
Suppose your child is about to enter the fourth grade and has been assigned to an excellent teacher. Then the teacher decides to quit. What should you do?
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/12/opinion/kristof-the-value-of-teachers.html?_r=1&=&pagewanted=all
Well, not exactly. But a landmark new research paper underscores that the difference between a strong teacher and a weak teacher lasts a lifetime. Having a good fourth-grade teacher makes a student 1.25 percent more likely to go to college, the research suggests, and 1.25 percent less likely to get pregnant as a teenager. Each of the students will go on as an adult to earn, on average, $25,000 more over a lifetime - or about $700,000 in gains for an average size class - all attributable to that ace teacher back in the fourth grade. That's right: A great teacher is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to each year's students, just in the extra income they will earn.
The study, by economists at Harvard and Columbia universities, finds that if a great teacher is leaving, parents should hold bake sales or pass the hat around in hopes of collectively offering the teacher as much as a $100,000 bonus to stay for an extra year. Sure, that's implausible - but their children would gain a benefit that far exceeds even that sum.
Conversely, a very poor teacher has the same effect as a pupil missing 40 percent of the school year. We don't allow that kind of truancy, so it's not clear why we should put up with such poor teaching. In fact, the study shows that parents should pay a bad teacher $100,000 to retire (assuming the replacement is of average quality) because a weak teacher holds children back so much.
Our faltering education system may be the most important long-term threat to America's economy and national well-being, so it's frustrating that the presidential campaign is mostly ignoring the issue. Candidates are bloviating about all kinds of imaginary or exaggerated threats, while ignoring the most crucial one.
Mitt Romney, who after his victory in New Hampshire on Tuesday seems increasingly likely to be the Republican nominee, refers to education only in passing on his Web site. The topic receives no substantive discussion in his 160-page "Believe in America" economic plan.
This latest study should elevate the issue on the national agenda, because it not only underscores the importance of education but also illuminates how we might improve schools.
An essential answer: more good teachers. Or, to put it another way, fewer bad teachers. The obvious policy solution is more pay for good teachers, more dismissals for weak teachers.
One of the paradoxes of the school reform debate is that teachers' unions have resisted a focus on teacher quality; instead, they emphasize that the home is the foremost influence and that teachers can only do so much.
That's all true, and (as I've often written) we need an array of other antipoverty measures as well, especially early childhood programs. But the evidence is now overwhelming that even in a grim high-poverty school, some teachers have far more impact on their students than those in the classroom next door. Three consecutive years of data from student tests - the "value added" between student scores at the beginning and end of each year - reveal a great deal about whether a teacher is working out, the researchers found.
This study, by Raj Chetty and John N. Friedman of Harvard University and Jonah E. Rockoff of Columbia University, was influential because it involved a huge database of one million students followed from fourth grade to adulthood.
The blog of the Albert Shanker Institute, endowed by the American Federation of Teachers, praised the study as "one of the most dense, important and interesting analyses on this topic in a very long time" - although it cautioned against policy conclusions (of the kind that I'm reaching).
What shone through the study was the variation among teachers. Great teachers not only raised test scores significantly - an effect that mostly faded within a few years - but also left their students with better life outcomes. A great teacher (defined as one better than 84 percent of peers) for a single year between fourth and eighth grades resulted in students earning almost 1 percent more at age 28.
Suppose that the bottom 5 percent of teachers could be replaced by teachers of average quality. The three economists found that each student in the classroom would have extra cumulative lifetime earnings of more than $52,000. That's more than $1.4 million in gains for the classroom.
Some Republicans worry that a federal role in education smacks of socialism. On the contrary, schools represent a tough-minded business investment in our economic future. And, increasingly, we're getting solid evidence of what reforms may help: teacher evaluations based on student performance, higher pay and prestige for good teachers, dismissals for weak teachers.
That, and not most of the fireworks that passes for politics these days, is the debate we should be having on a national stage.
*
I invite you to visit my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook and Google+, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
More Wireless Broadband Is What Consumers Want, U.S. Needs to Close the Digital Divide - 3 views
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Submitted: January 9, 2012 - 2:41pm
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-honig/more-wireless-broadband-i_b_1161068.html
Originally published: January 9, 2012
Last updated: January 9, 2012 - 2:43pm
Source: Minority Media and Telecommunications Council
Author: David Honig
Location:
Minority Media and Telecommunications Council (MMTC), 3636 16th Street, NW, Washington, DC, 20010, United States
[Commentary] Susan Crawford is a heroine of mine. Not only is she a distinguished telecom policy scholar, she's one of the very few who has focused on the digital divide. Her recent New York Times commentary "The New Digital Divide" accurately points out that the nation is at risk if we don't close the disparate access to broadband along the lines of race and class. The Minority Media and Telecommunications Council (MMTC) has declared that broadband access, adoption, and informed use is the #1 civil rights issue in the digital age, and that without broadband a person living in the digital age is doomed to second class citizenship.
But what should be the remedies? How does a community implement school integration without bus rides that deprive children of sufficient sleep? Can healthcare be equalized without training physicians to be aware of their unconscious prejudices that translate into racially disparate treatment patterns? Can housing be desegregated without also planning for desegregation of the nearby schools and workplaces?
Equalizing access to broadband is a civil rights matter of the greatest importance. And, with the greatest respect, Professor Crawford takes us part of the way toward the answer - but not all the way there. Her analysis, while substantially correct, contains two errors.
First, she mistakenly identifies wireless as a big part of the problem of the digital divide when, actually, it's much more a part of the solution.
And second, while she correctly recognizes that shared networks lead to lower prices and hence more affordability and higher rates of adoption, her argument comes several years too late. -
I will look for another reference.
The Library of Congress Teacher Conference Schedule for Early 2012 - 1 views
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The Library of Congress Teacher Conference Schedule for Early 2012
January 4th, 2012 by Anne Savage
This post comes to us from the 2011-2012 Library of Congress Teacher in Residence, Earnestine Sweeting.
How often do you have the opportunity to chat with specialists who provide free access to digitized primary sources and provide information on how to make these primary sources a central part of your classroom activities?
Library of Congress staff members working with teachers at a conference
Every year the Library's education specialists bring Library of Congress resources to conferences in major cities across the United States. We look forward to meeting educators like you and providing suggestions on teaching with the Library's digitized primary source collections.
Stop by our booth in the exhibit hall for a one-to-one demonstration of the Library's online resources for teachers. We can answer your questions and show you some of our new materials.
Check the conference program for scheduled presentations and workshops, which provide instructional strategies for teachers and ready-to-present professional development resources for administrators, coaches, and other educational professionals.
We'll have more conference information later in the year, but here's our line-up through June:
Consortium of School Networking Washington, DC Mar. 5-7
National Association of Elementary School Principals Seattle, WA Mar. 23-24
Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development Philadelphia, PA Mar. 24-26
American Association of Museums Minneapolis, MN Apr. 29-May 2
International Reading Association Chicago, IL Apr. 29-May 2
International Society for Technology in Education San Diego, CA June 24-27
Are you planning to attend a conference this year? We look forward to seeing you!
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This email summarizes how you can participate in the various events during Digital Learning Day, which include:
9:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. (ET): Morning Webcast
1:00 p.m. - 2:30 p.m. (ET): National Town Hall featuring U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski
3:00 p.m. - 6:30 p.m. (ET): Replay of Morning Webcast
There will be a live online chat running concurrently with each of these sessions. Additionally, individuals can follow the action on Twitter at www.twitter.com/DLDay2012 or with the #DLDay hashtag.
Additional details on each session appear below.
Morning Webcast: 9:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. (ET)
An extensive, in-depth webcast demonstrating how digital learning is already being used in classrooms around the country will be available to view from 9:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. (ET). During the webcast, educators will share innovative approaches designed to ensure that students graduate from high school, prepared for college and a career. A live chat feature will allow individuals who are interested in learning more about digital learning to engage in an online, real-time conversation with leaders in education technology.
The webcast and live chat will be accessible at http://www.DigitalLearningDay.org. An abbreviated schedule for the webcast appears below. The complete programming schedule for the morning webcast, including a list of featured speakers, schools, and sites, is available at http://www.digitallearningday.org/events/national-events/dldwebcast.
9:00 a.m. - 10:00 a.m. (ET): Leadership and Innovation
Bailey Mitchell, chief technology and information officer at Forsyth County School District (GA) and Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former governor of West Virginia, will moderate this session featuring district and school leaders who will discuss the importance of vision, leadership, and stakeholder ownership to ensure buy-in at the community, district, school, and classroom levels.
10:00 a.m. - 11:45 a.m. (ET): Instructional Strategies
In this session led by Esther Wojcicki, a journalism teacher at Palo Alto High School (CA) and member of the Alliance for Excellent Education board of directors, and Gov. Bob Wise, educators will explore how digital learning and technology can provide opportunities for teachers to apply evidence-based pedagogical practices that support effective teaching and learning.
11:45 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. (ET): Effective Teaching and Professional Learning Opportunities
Led by Barbara Treacy, director of EdTech Leaders Online, and Gov. Bob Wise, this session will feature national, state, and district leaders and educators discussing teacher preparation and on-going, job-embedded learning opportunities that can provide teachers with the instructional strategies and pedagogy, as well as planning time, to maximize the potential of applying technology in the classroom.
National Town Hall: 1:00 p.m. - 2:30 p.m. (ET)
The marquee event for Digital Learning Day is the virtual National Town Hall, which will feature a joint announcement and roundtable discussion with U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski.
Additional participants include Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former governor of West Virginia, and Leon Harris, Emmy Award-winning journalist and news anchor for ABC7/WJLA-TV (Washington, DC) and former coanchor of CNN Live Today, who will moderate the event.
Live via Skype, the town hall will broadcast teachers, students, and leaders on the ground at Englewood Schools in Colorado; Mooresville Graded School District in North Carolina; Klein Independent School District in Houston, Texas; and New Tech West High School in Cleveland, Ohio.
Featured teachers will include Kristin Kipp, English teacher at Jeffco 21st Century Virtual Academy in Colorado and the 2011 iNACOL/SREB National Online Teacher of the Year; and Joseph Isaac, biotechnology teacher at McKinley Technology High School in Washington, DC.
The town hall will conclude with a special focus on the Reconnecting McDowell project in West Virginia, which is a comprehensive, long-term effort to make educational improvement in McDowell County the route to a brighter economic future. That segment will feature Jim Brown, superintendent of McDowell County Schools, Gayle Manchin, vice president of the West Virginia State Board of Education, and Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.
The National Town Hall will also include a live chat moderated by Alliance staff members and education technology experts.
Register to watch the National Town Hall and participate in the live chat at http://digitallearningday.eventbrite.com/.
Replay of Morning Session: 3:00 p.m. - 6:30 p.m. (ET)
Being cognizant of the schedules of teachers and individuals living on the West Coast, the Alliance will re-air the morning session from 3:00 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. (ET).
Although the video content will be the same, the Alliance will conduct an entirely different live chat for the afternoon session to allow individuals who are interested in learning more about digital learning to engage in an online, real-time conversation with leaders in education technology.
The webcast and live chat will be accessible at http://www.DigitalLearningDay.org. An abbreviated schedule for the webcast appears below. The complete programming schedule for the webcast, including a list of featured speakers, schools, and sites, is available at http://www.digitallearningday.org/events/national-events/dldwebcast.
The afternoon schedule is as follows:
3:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m. (ET): Leadership and Innovation
Bailey Mitchell, chief technology and information officer at Forsyth County School District (GA) and Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former governor of West Virginia, will moderate this session featuring district and school leaders who will discuss the importance of vision, leadership, and stakeholder ownership to ensure buy-in at the community, district, school, and classroom levels.
4:00 p.m. - 5:45 p.m. (ET): Instructional Strategies
In this session, led by Esther Wojcicki, a journalism teacher at Palo Alto High School (CA) and member of the Alliance for Excellent Education board of directors, and Gov. Bob Wise, educators will explore how digital learning and technology can provide opportunities for teachers to apply evidence-based pedagogical practices that support effective teaching and learning.
5:45 p.m. - 6:30 p.m. (ET): Effective Teaching and Professional Learning Opportunities
Led by Barbara Treacy, director of EdTech Leaders Online, and Gov. Bob Wise, this session will feature national, state, and district leaders and educators discussing teacher preparation and on-going, job-embedded learning opportunities that can provide teachers with the instructional strategies and pedagogy, as well as planning time, to maximize the potential of applying technology in the classroom.
For more information on Digital Learning Day, visit http://www.DigitalLearningDay.org.
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Alliance for Excellent Education, 1201 Connecticut Avenue, NW Suite 901, Washington, DC 20036 United States