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Troy Patterson

Public schools aren't failing | CharlotteObserver.com - 0 views

www.charlotteobserver.com/...lic-schools-arent-failing.html

msm299

shared by Troy Patterson on 08 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • In fact, both show that American public school children are doing remarkably well.
  • For example, the NCES report shows that in schools with less than 25 percent poverty rates, American children scored higher in reading than any other children in the world. In. The. World.
  • The takeaway is simple. Our middle-class and wealthy public school children are thriving. Poor children are struggling, not because their schools are failing but because they come to school with all the well-documented handicaps that poverty imposes – poor prenatal care, developmental delays, hunger, illness, homelessness, emotional and mental illnesses, and so on.
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  • public school children outscored their private school counterparts, and nationally, charters are outperformed by traditional schools the majority of the time.
  • “the charter school movement [is] quickly becoming a backdoor for corporate profit.”
  • research is clear that money spent addressing the issues of child poverty are the most effective way to move test scores up
  • “Nobody understands the challenges and shortcomings of American schools better than the people who have dedicated their lives to them.” Yet educators are rarely asked for their expertise.
  • If policy makers were to listen to educators – and to students and parents – they would hear that the real crisis in public education is the loss of our collective commitment to the common good.
Troy Patterson

Two months in, Eli Broad's new foundation president still learning the ropes | Pass / F... - 0 views

www.scpr.org/...ead-of-philanthropic-education

msm270

shared by Troy Patterson on 08 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • “It would look like a national system,” said Broad, describing what he would see as a perfect education infrastructure. “Rather than having 14,000 school boards across America, it would get governors involved, big city mayors involved, and it would have a longer school day and a longer school year.”
  • It's been a direction fueled by lots of money. In the past 13 years Broad has donated $800 million to education initiatives. A lot of it has gone to charter schools. In 2012, the KIPP charter school group got more than $2 million and Green Dot received $775,000 to supplement public funding. The online tutoring group Khan Academy received $1 million that year, too.
  • Broad has known all along he needs allies in public office to carry out his vision. He's generously donated to elections — from school boards to the U.S. presidency. He leans Democrat in Washington but anti-union on school boards.
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  • After three decades in Washington, Reed says he was ready to leave the political gridlock and lead a results-driven effort such as the Broad Foundation.
  • Troy Patterson on 08 Mar 14
     
    Two months in, Eli Broad's new foundation president still learning the ropes
Troy Patterson

The Principal: The Most Misunderstood Person in All of Education - Kate Rousmaniere - T... - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...281223

msm265 leadership

shared by Troy Patterson on 02 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • In American public schools, the principal is the most complex and contradictory figure in the pantheon of educational leadership.
  • A few years ago when I walked the hallways of a high school with my five-year-old niece Evie, she remarked, without prompting: “There’s the principal’s office: you only go there if you are in trouble.”
  • Most remarkably, those very people who did not understand what a principal did were often the first to argue for the abolition of the role.
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  • The history of the principal offers even more contradictions. Contemporary principals work in the midst of unique modern challenges of ever-changing fiscal supports, school law and policy, community values, and youth culture.
  • The complex role of the principal is not an accidental by-product of history; rather, the principal’s position at the nexus of educational policy and practice was an intentional component of the role when it was originally conceived.
  • Like other middle managers, the principal had a “dual personality,” standing “on the middle ground between management and employee,” as both a loyal sergeant to a distant supervisor and a local administrator who had to negotiate with workers in order to get the job done properly.
  • Through the mid-20th century, the principalship was an inconsistently defined position, as often a teacher with administrative responsibilities as an administrator who supervised teachers.
  • As the principalship evolved away from the classroom to the administrative office, the principal became less connected with student learning, and yet more responsible for it.
  • Modern principals came to have less to do with student learning and more to do with upholding administrative structures and responding to public pressures.
  • For all those efforts, however, the history of the principalship is marked by an increasing discrepancy between the popular image and the actual work of the position. Ironic too, is the dominant image of the principalship with an office, given the great variety, mobility, human interactions, and community relations of principals’ work.
Troy Patterson

Get Rid of Grade Levels: A Personalized Learning Recipe for Public School Districts | E... - 0 views

www.edsurge.com/...pe-for-public-school-districts

msm329 learning education

shared by Troy Patterson on 28 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • The problem with the current public education model is that it was created for the industrial revolution.
  • Harrisburg, South Dakota is taking concrete steps to go from teacher-driven to student driven learning.
Troy Patterson

Why Aren't There More Podcasts for Kids? - The Atlantic - 2 views

www.theatlantic.com/...476157

msm329 podcasting

shared by Troy Patterson on 30 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • “A podcast aimed at 3-10-year-olds that parents could actually tolerate—if you could do it right—would be an unbelievable hit,”
  • NPR saw a 75 percent increase in podcast downloads
  • while adults and teens could easily fill their waking hours with audio, kids would struggle to fill a few.
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  • The absence of images in podcasts seems to be a source of their creative potential. Without visuals, listeners are required to fill the gaps—and when these listeners are children, the results can be powerful.
  • Not only are children listening and responding creatively, observations suggest they’re also learning.
  • When it comes to using public radio in the classroom, Brady-Myerov believes three-to-five-minute segments are most effective, leaving the teacher significant time to build a lesson around the audio.
  • That said, a number of schools have already begun incorporating longer podcasts into their curricula, to great success.
  • high-school teachers in California, Connecticut, Chicago, and a handful of other states have been using Radiolab, This American Life, StoryCorps, and, overwhelmingly, Serial.
  • TeachersPayTeachers.com (a site where educators can purchase lesson plans) saw a 21 percent increase in downloads of plans related to podcasts in 2014, and a 650 percent increase in 2015.
  • Research further supports the benefits of audio learning for children. When words are spoken aloud, kids can understand and engage with ideas that are two to three grade-levels higher than their reading level would normally allow.
  • Aural learning is particularly helpful for students who have dyslexia, are blind, or for whom English is their second language, who might struggle with reading or find it helpful to follow a transcript while listening.
Troy Patterson

Gifted & Talented…and Afraid | EduGuide - 1 views

eduguideblog.wordpress.com/...gifted-talented-and-afraid

msm289

shared by Troy Patterson on 30 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • In fourth grade, I was one of three students selected to participate in a “Gifted & Talented” program. My parents were so proud; I was one of the “smart kids,” a brilliant writer and a natural actress, and life was going to be so easy for me.
  • getting the right answers, best grades, and lead roles in school plays wasn’t about learning; it was about proving, to myself and the world, that I deserved that “Gifted & Talented” distinction.
  • I was afraid to take risks that might show me off as anything less than innately brilliant.
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  • I avoided subjects I found difficult, padding my schedule with all English and Social Studies while skipping Math and Science. I stopped trying out for school plays, afraid of not being cast as a lead.
  • as for writing, supposedly my greatest “natural talent,” I hoarded everything I wrote and never managed to finish or submit a single manuscript for publication. Because even one rejection letter wouldn’t have just meant that my story wasn’t good enough; it would have meant that I, as a human being, was not good enough.
  • for me, the “Gifted & Talented” label unintentionally contributed to what psychologist Carol Dweck would call a “fixed mindset”:
  • The categories are not “smart” and “dumb”; they are “learned that already” and “haven’t learned that yet.”
  • As a fourth grader, I wasn’t more gifted or talented than anyone else; I had just learned a little more about theater, literature and writing, thanks to my parents, than many of my peers had.
  • That didn’t make me smart or talented any more than it made my peers stupid.
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