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Linda Garcia

The Answer Sheet - What 'Superman' got wrong, point by point - 6 views

voices.washingtonpost.com/...-superman-got-wrong-point.html

shared by Linda Garcia on 03 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Promise Academy is in many ways an excellent school, but it is dishonest for the filmmakers to say nothing about the funds it took to create it and the extensive social supports including free medical care and counseling provided by the zone
  • Two-thirds of Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone funding comes from private sources
  • In New Jersey, where court decisions mandated similar programs, such as high quality pre-kindergarten classes and extended school days and social services in the poorest urban districts, achievement and graduation rates increased while gaps started to close. But public funding for those programs is now being cut and progress is being eroded.
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  • Most test score differences stubbornly continue to reflect parental income and neighborhood/zip codes, not what schools do. As opportunity, health and family wealth increase, so do test scores.
  • they reduce teachers to test-prep clerks, ignore important subject areas and critical thinking skills
  • But schools and teachers take the blame for huge social inequities in housing, health care, and income.
  • Unions have historically played leading roles in improving public education, and most nations with strong public educational systems have strong teacher unions.
  • The movie touts the benefits of fast track and direct entry to teaching programs such as Teach for America, but the country with the highest achieving students, Finland, also has highly educated teachers.
  • Charters were first proposed by the teachers’ unions to allow committed parents and teachers to create schools that were free of administrative bureaucracy and open to experimentation and innovation, and some excellent charters have set examples. But thousands of hustlers and snake oil salesmen have also jumped in.
  • And the Education Report, "The Evaluation of Charter School Impacts, concludes, “On average, charter middle schools that hold lotteries are neither more nor less successful than traditional public schools in improving student achievement, behavior, and school progress.”
  • The Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University, concludes that only 17% of charter schools have better test scores than traditional public schools, 46% had gains that were no different than their public counterparts, and 37% were significantly worse. While a better measure of school success is needed
  • While a better measure of school success is needed
  • While a better measure of school success is needed
  • It is not a sustainable public policy to allow more and more public school funding to be diverted to privately subsidized charters while public schools become the schools of last resort for children with the greatest educational needs.
  • In spite of the many millions of dollars poured into expounding the theory of paying teachers for higher student test scores (sometimes mislabeled as ‘merit pay’), a new study by Vanderbilt University’s National Center on Performance Incentives found that the use of merit pay for teachers in the Nashville school district produced no difference even according to their measure, test outcomes for students.
  • approximately a third of America’s new teachers leave teaching sometime during their first three years of teaching; almost half leave during the first five years.
  • many of the top students have been lured to careers in finance and consulting.” It’s the market, and the disproportionately high salaries paid to finance specialists, that is misdirecting human resources, not schools.
  • They ignore the social construction of knowledge, the difference between deep learning and rote memorization.
  • This is a common theme of the so-called reformers: We are at war with India and China and we have to out-math them and crush them so that we can remain rich and they can stay in the sweatshops. But really, who declared this war? When did I as a teacher sign up as an officer in this war? And when did that 4th grade girl become a soldier in it? Instead of this new educational Cold War, perhaps we should be helping kids imagine a world of global cooperation, sustainable economies, and equity.
  • So the outcome of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top has been more funding for schools that are doing well and more discipline and narrow test-preparation for the poorest schools.
  • Waiting for Superman has ignored deep historical and systemic problems in education such as segregation, property-tax based funding formulas, centralized textbook production, lack of local autonomy and shared governance, de-professionalization, inadequate special education supports, differential discipline patterns, and the list goes on and on.
  • anonymous on 03 Oct 10
     
    This post corrects the misinformation in Waiting for Superman.
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  • Benjamin Caulder on 22 Oct 10
     
    This is a good read. I don't know if its only me but "documentary" somehow implicitly means "true story". There really ought to be some sort of rating system, like G-NC17, for the accuracy of a documentary so the public doesn't buy the misinformation.
  • Evonne Villagomez on 18 Nov 10
     
    This is article is particularly helpful for me since my essay is on charter schools. I found this read interesting because it hihglights the areas in education which charter schools seem to be disregarding.
  • Kyle Dodson on 18 Nov 10
     
    I love the criticism if offers on the poster/ text alone. Many professors in the credential program are irate over the film and it's nice to see point-by-point what is wrong with the "documentary." I just love this article in general. It helps to be able to combat certain statistics in conversation too :)
anonymous

Weblogg-ed » "Disposable Reform" - 0 views

weblogg-ed.com/...disposable-reform

shared by anonymous on 27 Aug 10 - Cached
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 27 Aug 10
       
      This is fascinating. I agree that "real" learning is self-motivated and directed--and yet we've trained students to think that the only thing that is valuable is what the teacher says. I do a lot of group work in my classes, and one of my colleagues asked me recently if I got bored since I wasn't on stage, so to speak, all the time. I do sometimes, but I don't think my class is about me, it's about helping my students learn. And I believe they learn more if they are actively engaged . . . which is more likely to happen in a smaller group than in a whole class discussion.
  • “What % of teacher ed programs prepare teachers NOT to be the focal point of the classroom?” and the responses were telling. Most said 5-10%, and my sense is that’s pretty accurate.
  • But I also found it striking that she connected our difficulty in sustaining change with what she termed our “disposable culture” here in the US. We try one reform and dispose of it, then we try another and dispose of that one, and then we try yet another. And I can’t help ask, whose fault is that?
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    • anonymous
      anonymous on 27 Aug 10
       
      Again, I totally agree. After teaching here in Fresno for 11 years, I've seen so many initiatives to create collaboration between high school and the university. I worked with a great project when I first arrived here, a literacy center at Fresno High. CSUF students, many of whom wanted to be teachers, would tutor high schools, sometimes in the classroom, sometimes in the Literacy Center's room. Everyone involved in the project loved it . . . but after three years, the funding ran out. Now there's discussion yet again about another round of university intervention in high schools . . . I wish we could just develop a great program that would receive long-term funding, instead of just a "flavor-of-the-day" approach to education.
  • anonymous on 27 Aug 10
     
    Interesting blog about how we repeatedly introduce "new" programs and ideas in schools, only to abandon them for the next wave of "new" ideas.
Linda Garcia

ASCD Infobrief:Examining Charter Schools:Examining Charter Schools - 1 views

www.ascd.org/...Examining-Charter-Schools.aspx

shared by Linda Garcia on 28 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • By definition, the common link among these 5,000-plus schools is their acceptance of increased accountability in exchange for increased autonomy, but the schools themselves may have little in common
  • More than three-quarters of charter schools nationwide are freestanding, started by educators, parents, activists, and others
  • Although Americans' approval of charter schools has increased 15 percent in the last five years and reached a two-thirds favorable rating, half of the respondents to a recent Phi Delta Kappan poll mistakenly believe that charters are not public schools and are allowed to teach religion.
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  • saying that charter schools are vital to promoting innovation in American schools (Obama, 2009)
  • With so much variation among charter schools, however, significant questions exist regarding how well they are educating students, how they manage their financial responsibilities, and whether creating more charter schools will be better for the nation's schoolchildren.
  • In 2009, Secretary Duncan made lifting charter caps a key component of qualifying for education funding under the $4.35 billion Race to the Top (RTTT) program. Originally, to qualify for RTTT money, Duncan said states must eliminate any caps on charter schools. In November 2009, Duncan changed the requirement so that states with caps could still receive money if they had other kinds of innovative public schools and as long as the caps were generous enough (The Wall Street Journal, 2009).
  • Parents' demand for charter schools is outpacing their availability in many locations, with an estimated 365,000 students on waitlists—enough to fill more than 1,100 average-sized charter schools
  • In Montana, where there are no charter schools and where more than half of the state's school districts have enrollments of fewer than 100 students, Superintendent of Schools Denise Juneau objected to the RTTT focus on charter schools in a July 28 letter to Secretary Duncan. "Montana's rural context and economic status has made it challenging for many communities and the state to support the public schools we currently have," Juneau wrote in the letter, "much less encourage the duplication of infrastructure a charter school would mean in most communities" (McNeil, 2009).
  • "The charter movement is putting itself at risk by allowing too many second-rate and third-rate schools to exist," he said, in reference to a recent study by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University that found that more than 80 percent of charter schools were performing the same as or worse than their local public schools (2009).
  • The comparison found that only 17 percent of charter schools were producing gains that were significantly better than their traditional public school counterparts, while 46 percent were similar to their local public schools and 37 percent performed significantly worse (Center for Research on Education Outcomes, 2009).
  • In contrast, another recent study by Stanford economics professor Caroline Hoxby found that students who entered lotteries and gained admission to New York City charter schools performed better on state assessments than students who entered the same lotteries and were not admitted to the charter schools.
  • The findings of both studies have been disputed. Critics of the Hoxby study point out that it relies on extrapolations of data, comparing statistical projections of student achievement as opposed to actual student achievement (Ravitch, 2009). Critics of the CREDO study raise doubts about its seemingly contradictory findings that charter schools provided gains for English language learners and poor students while having negative effects on Hispanic and black students (Anderson, 2009).
  • For middle and high school charters that did have baseline scores, that study found charter schools in five of the seven locations it examined were on average no better or worse than local traditional public schools (Zimmer et al., 2009).
  • Of the more than 5,250 charter schools that have ever opened, 657 have closed since 1992. Of those, 41 percent closed because of financial deficiencies caused by either low enrollment or inequitable funding; 27 percent for mismanagement; and only 14 percent for poor academic performance (Allen et al., 2009).
  • A 2005 analysis by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) found that 90 percent of authorizers were local school districts, and two-thirds lacked a dedicated office or staff to oversee the authorizing process (Vanourek, 2005). NAPCS, which has described quality authorizing as an intensive, data-driven process that requires dedicating substantial resources to the task, has called for stricter accountability for local school boards and other entities that authorize charter schools
  • anonymous on 28 Oct 10
     
    An examination of charter schools
Jacob Eckrich

http://www.asdk12.org/NCLB/everyone/NCLBsummary.pdf - 0 views

www.asdk12.org/...NCLBsummary.pdf

NCLB Standards Implementation

shared by Jacob Eckrich on 19 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • Jacob Eckrich on 19 Nov 10
     
    The Following is a simple breakdown of how NCLS is to be implemented, as well as all the requirements that come attached with it regarding teachers, students, and funding.
Elvira Ledezma

The Answer Sheet - Will new standards mean better-educated kids? -- Willingham - 0 views

voices.washingtonpost.com/...new-standards-mean-better.html

shared by Elvira Ledezma on 08 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • Almost all states climbed on board the common standards train when the commitment required no more than a statement of interest. Interest was sustained by the promise of Race to the Top money. As the conductor comes around requesting payment (that is, real changes loom) states are beginning to jump.
  • commonly known as No Child Left Behind, requires that states adopt the standards in order to get access to 14.5 billion in federal funds.
  • We also need (1) a curriculum that implements the standards; (2) professional development for teachers; (3) lesson plans that implement the curriculum.
Jacob Eckrich

Back in Black - Education Crisis - The Daily Show with Jon Stewart - 10/05/10 - Video C... - 4 views

www.thedailyshow.com/...ck-in-black---education-crisis

Education Funding

shared by Jacob Eckrich on 19 Nov 10 - No Cached
    • Jacob Eckrich
      Jacob Eckrich on 19 Nov 10
       
      While this is a comedy show, its political and social relevence is great. While I don't agree with a ll the views presented on this show, it does force people to think.
  • Jacob Eckrich on 19 Nov 10
     
    While this is funny, it is also depressing. It goes to show you how poorly education is being reformed, and how little many of us know how to go about fixing it.
  • Jennifer Flores on 19 Nov 10
     
    Jacob this was really funny, but like you said very sad at the same time. Our education system is crap and everyone knows it. There are so many people saying they have the answers, but no one is stepping up to the plate to fix it. I'm not saying I have the answers, but there has to be something we can do to make it better.
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