Ri-Shawn Biddle at Dropout Nation argues in favor of school choice
When defenders of the status quo say that families should not have a wide array of educational options available [...] they are essentially arguing that there should be no civil right to a high quality education. That argument is absolutely wrong on every moral and intellectual level. Poor and minority families should not have to wait for these dropout factories to either shut down or be overhauled. Neither should middle-class families or anyone else. What these families deserve is the option to escape. They deserve school choice.
Ed pundit Chester Finn argues against local control
The weak and generally stagnant academic performance of most American school kids, our scandalous achievement gaps, the country’s sagging performance vis-à-vis other countries, the skimpy preparation of many teachers and principals, the shoddy curricula, the fat and junky textbooks, the innovation-shackling union contracts, the large expenditures with meager returns—these are not the result of an overweening federal government. They are, in fact, almost entirely the product of state and local control of public education
North Caroline caves into pressure to delay teaching U.S. history
When the state department of education put forward its earlier plan for new social studies standards, officials said they had no intention of diminishing history instruction. State Superintendent June Atkinson said at the time that the revised standards would actually have increased the amount of time students spent studying U.S. history during their elementary and secondary schooling, and that they would learn plenty about the major developments throughout American history. But with all the negative feedback, state officials agreed to revisit the plan.
Teach For America Recruits get better results
Teach for America [...] racked up the highest student scores among new teachers in reading, science and social studies. Even compared to students of veteran teachers, students of TFA teachers had the highest test scores in reading.Indystar article on teacher-blaming and reform
[M]any good teachers think those of us pushing for education reform blame them for their schools' failures. We're not. We're actually making the opposite case: Good and great teachers are responsible for their schools' successes.
Baltimore schools get a turn-around
In 2007, the school board hired Andres Alonso, a Cuban immigrant with a Harvard degree and strong views on how to change things. In three years, he pushed through a sweeping reorganization of the school system, closing failing schools, slashing the central office staff by a third and replacing three-quarters of all school principals.
Glen Miller at The Quick & the Ed looks at bachelors degree completion rates
Despite being our best indicator of institutional-level completion, the federal graduation rate has a number of limitations; problems that critics of the measure (or schools with low results) consistently bring up when asked to explain outcomes.[...] When these issues are combined, critics assert that federal graduation rates are much lower than reality.
When Asians Enroll! (and other tales from meritocracy's margins)
By the logic of meritocracy, the cream would rise naturally to the top, regardless of status or association, and yet generations passed wherein the "cream" remained almost consistently white and male... that is, until just recently, when the world woke up to the news that minorities were not just gratefully accepting the token slots assigned them, but slowly and surely invading campuses in force, dramatically shifting the demographic away from the white, male, middle-class face of higher education. Meritocracy was somehow, if unevenly, coming through on its promise of diversity. Calamity ensued.
When It Comes to Privilege, Gen Y Plays Dumb
Of all of the downsides associated with the can-do attitude Gen Y was ostensibly raised with (the inability to handle failure or criticism, a purported bafflement at not having the world handed to us on a silver platter, etc.), the most subtle and rarely acknowledged would have to be the fact that we weren’t educated to the fact that not all of our peers were being indoctrinated with the same overweening sense of self-esteem that we were.
Bills Gates funds the development of a better system to evaluate teachers
[Gates] is investing $335 million through his foundation to overhaul the personnel departments of several big school systems. A big chunk of that money is financing research by dozens of social scientists and thousands of teachers to develop a better system for evaluating classroom instruction.[...] For teachers, the findings could mean more scrutiny. But they may also provide more specific guidance about what is expected of the teachers in the classroom if new experiments with other measures are adopted — including tests that gauge teachers’ mastery of their subjects, surveys that ask students about the learning environments in their classes and digital videos of teachers’ lessons, scored by experts.
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"students of TFA teachers had the highest test scores in reading."
ReplyDeleteThis would indicate that one of the most important things we need to do is get top students into teaching in much higher numbers. This will mean teacher salaries will have to compete with the private sector. The big problem we have in America is that historically our economy has been really good and teacher pay has been so-so. We can't attract enough great teachers until we change that.