reform - Eric Hoefler on Diigo

07 May 08

Truthdig - Reports - Liberating the Schoolhouse

An article discussing the changes that happend in an LA school when teachers were given true professional responsibility.

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education reform

As the teachers expanded their responsibility, a new professional authority began to emerge among them that translated into new norms for the school. Instead of blaming everyone but themselves for the students’ failure, the teachers took on collective responsibility for the students’ success.
The pressure for test scores leads school boards and superintendents to mandate what is to be taught and to reward principals and teachers who comply and punish those who do not.
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- The few research studies that have been done show that reforms do not last because leadership changes, districts change their focus, teachers lose their motivation, and energy for innovation diminishes.
- But a close examination of the shakeup at Baldwin Park High School reveals an even more fundamental culprit: adherence to the belief that power can only flow from the top to the bottom
- Collaborative decision-making invariably improves employees’ productivity, the quality of their work lives, and their job satisfaction.³ But these improvements always wither with the introduction of top-down control, which strips employees of their professionalism, weakens their commitment to the organization’s goals and dampens their motivation to work hard and do a good job.⁴

24 Apr 08

Bridging Differences: A Marshall Plan for Teaching

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education reform

Imagine schools where educators work together to address students needs, not federal mandates, where the decisions are made by those closest—not farthest—from the real action. Where student engagement and responsibility for their work is mirrored in the attitudes of their faculty.
They are designed so that teachers are powerful adults who make decisions that continually improve the school—who work in teams that share students, and who have time every week to plan a curriculum together that responds to the realities on the ground as well as in the subject disciplines, to develop and evaluate portfolio assessments, and to talk about kids and what they need and how to support them.
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- Unlike the U.S., where teachers either go into debt to prepare for a profession that will pay them poorly or enter with little or no training
- This includes proactively recruiting expert teacher leaders—rather than just waiting to see who shows up in administrative credential programs or wooing people from unrelated fields.
- Every time we issue mandates that effectively remove power and responsibility from the adults who surround kids we remove the ingredients needed for them to become powerful and responsible adults.

22 Apr 08

What Should Happen in Our Houses of Learning? | Bridging Differences

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popculture education reform

When I think of “the street,” I think of those aspects of youth behavior that adults should not tolerate, like profanity, rudeness, violence (lack of impulse control), semi-nudity, purposefully slovenly dress, etc.
I admit my limitations, but I can’t see the value of studying the “art” of Britney Spears, Lindsey Lohan, Justin Timberlake, or other current media stars.
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- teaching Ebonics
  - I suspect this is a semantic problem. By "teaching," I would assume Ms. Meier meant something like "using as an example, from which general rules about grammar and usage could be extracted" and NOT "here's how to 'speak Ebonics.'" - on 2008-04-22
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- I see a national curriculum as the product of a professional consensus, one that involves subject-matter experts, teachers, administrators, and even end-users of the public schools like college professors and journalists.
- I also see such a curriculum evolving from careful research on international curriculum standards about what students at various ages are expected to know and be able to do. And I envision a curriculum that in toto amounts to not more than 50 percent of the school day, so that there would be many variations and additions depending on the state, region, and locale. I also envision a curriculum that encourages projects, intensive study, and creative teaching.

17 Apr 08

Bridging Differences: Our Overarching Disagreements

Parents do not send their children to school to learn the vulgar language, misogynistic and homophobic attitudes, racism, violence, and crude behavior that are common on “the street,” but to learn language, values, and behavior that is better than what they encounter outside school.

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education reform

Parents do not send their children to school to learn the vulgar language, misogynistic and homophobic attitudes, racism, violence, and crude behavior that are common on “the street,” but to learn language, values, and behavior that is better than what they encounter outside school.
Indeed, we look to the schools to pass on the wisdom, knowledge, and skills that have been accumulated over the years, and, in that sense, they are a conservative agency. And yes, they can change the social order by making us wiser, more civilized, smarter and better able to collaborate with others. But they can't improve the social order if they do no more than reflect what is.
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- Kids have plenty of time to indulge in the highs and lows of popular culture without wasting precious time in school.
  - I wonder what Steven Johnson (Everything Bad is Good for You) would say here. On the one hand, his argument is that pop culture is becoming increasingly more complex and therefore not only worthy of our time but actually beneficial (it's making us collectively smarter). Also, the morality of pop culture is not the important or interesting aspect for Johnson. On the other hand, if pop culture is doing its work just fine without any "official" sanction (i.e., people participate in pop culture because they want to, not because someone tells them to) then perhaps this is correct. In school, focus on those necessary things that students will not likely acquire on their own outside of school. - on 2008-04-15
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- schools have the responsibility to introduce children and youth to the behavior, language, values, knowledge, and skills that they need to improve their lot in life, to prepare for college or the modern workplace.
- character-formation and citizenship
  - The problem, of course, is the question: "whose character?" - on 2008-04-15
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- Teachers are usually the best judges of whether their students are learning and how well they are learning. Yet there is value, I contend, in external assessments.
  - I agree with this statement, but am worried about who determines what that external assessment will look like. To my mind, an external science test should be created by three cooperative groups: teachers who are well-versed in the syllabus; practicing scientists who have a real-world understanding of what and how science students should "know"; and an independent group of people experienced in effective methods for assessment (i.e., people who don't think "multiple choice" is the best method to assess everything). - on 2008-04-15
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- We must somehow develop the educational leadership to put testing into perspective and use it more wisely.
- The question that must somehow be solved is how to provide public accountability while ditching the stupid and non-educative regime of sanctions and incentives that is now being fastened around the necks of American educators.
- 1. How on earth could evaluation damage the trust between teacher and student? Doesn't it offer clarity, and isn't clarity a necessary component of trust?
  
  2. How could a teacher possibly avoid evaluating students, even if this were the desired course of action?
  
  3. If evaluation is treated as a hostile and external thing, how will students develop an internal critical voice and learn to face external criticism without fear?
- None of these negative motivators can enable learning as much as the teacher saying and the children truly believing: I am here to help you.
- Our teachers’ #1 and only priority needs to be student learning. It is fairly easy to evaluate; much more difficult to teach.
- Or do they excel at labeling/limiting our children?
- external assessment as a way to ensure public trust that schools are actually accomplishing what they say that they are accomplishing
- If we try to win the kids over, we give up some of the integrity of teaching. This doesn't mean we have to be dull and harsh--we should be neither! It just means we should take their own judgments (positive and negative) in stride. Students, for their part, need to figure out that school is not a popularity contest--not for them, not for the teachers. There is something bigger at stake than being liked.
- Regardless of personality, students should all be able to trust that their teachers are looking out for them and trying their best to enable student success.
- I honestly believe teachers can bond with their students in such a way as to foster an environment of trust AND still effectively evaluate these same kids. I also firmly believe they should not be the only evaluators of their students
- Teachers should be trustworthy in their interactions with children. That does not guarantee that the children will trust them, nor can it be a precondition for learning.

21 Dec 07

What Should Be Done About Standardized Tests? A Freakonomics Quorum - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog

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education nclb reform testing

Some standardized tests perform their measurement mission marvelously; others do a dismal job of it.
It depends on whether the right kinds of tests are being used and whether those tests are good ones. Given the kinds and caliber of the standardized tests currently being used in our schools, I come down on the “less” side of the argument. But that’s chiefly because the wrong sorts of standardized tests are frequently being used.
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- Do you know that almost all of the standardized tests now being employed to judge school quality are unable to distinguish between well taught and badly taught students?
- most professors know no more about making exit exams than they do about making French fries.
- Those instruments may not be perfect, or even good at identifying scholastic aptitudes, but boy are they good at telling us who the best test-takers are.
- the majority of today’s state-level standardized tests are multiple-choice measures of mostly low-level skills
- They largely sidestep higher-level skills
- when tests are high-stakes events, as they are under NCLB (teachers and principals can eventually lose their jobs if their students flunk NCLB tests for several consecutive years), educators have a strong incentive to “teach to the test.” In this case, that means teaching low level skills at the expense of the more demanding material that everyone says students need to master in today’s complicated world.
- Yet many state lawmakers have been wary of setting the bar higher for fear of large numbers of students failing.

13 Nov 07

Google Reader (245)

www.educationsector.org/...analysis_show.htm - Preview

education politics reform

where the locus of authority should be in school reform
NCLB is a repudiation of the nation's long tradition of local authority in public education
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- . The law reflects the changing mission that the nation has assigned public education.
- it has to try to teach a far wider range of students to the standards it had traditionally reserved for the gifted and the privileged.
- the draft proposes to give states financial incentives to benchmark their standards against national and international norms, to further centralize public education's expectations.
- At the same time, the draft would cede local school systems far more freedom than NCLB currently does to use locally developed methods of measuring school performance—a step that would decentralize decision-making in public education.
- The ineffectiveness and inefficiency of many state standards under NCLB, and of many local standards in the pre-NCLB era, make the logic of national standards and tests nearly irresistible.
- which students should be the focus of reform.
- NCLB, the latest incarnation of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, a cornerstone of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, is focused on helping disadvantaged students achieve to higher standards via the setting of statewide standards for all students, requiring schools to report how various groups of traditionally underserved students perform against those standards, and holding educators accountable for their students’ results.
- NCLB, some have argued, has co-opted the entire educational system on behalf of low-achieving students.
- there has been a movement to change the ways schools are judged under NCLB, to give them credit for improving and incentives to improve the performance of students all along the achievement continuum.
- There is a third fundamental tension in school reform between regulatory and market-based or entrepreneurial reform strategies.
- whether consumer choice is sufficient to produce high-quality schools.
- The challenge for policymakers rests in striking the right balance between charter school autonomy and accountability.
- They believe, that is, that credentials are proxies for quality.
- Advocates of performance-driven reform believe in letting more people into the profession and then paying close attention to the quality of their work
- performance-based teacher pay.
- there hasn’t been sufficient attention to the measurement systems needed to ensure a performance-based system in teaching can work effectively.
- only 28 percent of public school teachers teach students who take statewide standardized tests.
- unregulated education markets don’t serve students, or taxpayers, particularly well.
- Policymakers are setting clear performance expectations for providers of new school models—much clearer than existed in the early days of the charter school movement—but are also giving education entrepreneurs freedom to meet those expectations.
- We are moving, inexorably, to a more diversified, market-driven system of public education, one that expands the definition of who public educators are and what public education is.
- School systems in a number of cities are beginning to cast themselves in the same role, overseeing schools run by a range of educational entrepreneurs from both within their systems, and without. Their challenge will be to ensure the educational equivalent of keeping the planes running on time and accident-free.

08 Nov 07

Education Week: Closing the Measurement Gap

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assessment education nclb reform

Not that this is necessarily "bad," but the comparison is somewhat problematic. Asking "which hospitals are likely to have their heart patients die" is not the same as "which schools are failing to successfully educate students in basic skills."

Nevertheless, the more nuanced (and logical) approach to school assessment seems smart to me.

- ehoefler on 2007-11-08

high-mortality hospitals for heart patients
rather than reporting hospitals’ raw mortality rates, states “risk adjust” these numbers to take patient severity into account.
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- The idea is that hospitals caring for sicker patients should not be penalized because their patients were sicker to begin with.
- So, in addition to the adjusted mortality rate, “confidence intervals” are reported to illustrate the uncertainty that stems from these differences in size. Only when these confidence intervals are taken into account are performance comparisons made between hospitals.
- so why not do the same in education?
- When educators make this point, they are censured for their “soft bigotry of low expectations.”
- In education, there is a mandate that schools should make up the difference, irrespective of students’ risk factors.
- By the same token, the fact that some students in a school are failing does not mean that the school is failing. Sound public policy should be able to distinguish these two conditions.
- We have rightly seen tremendous political opposition to the idea of lowering expectations based on students’ social backgrounds.
- But when a school is not a low-performing outlier, it makes no sense to castigate educators and hope for the best.
- Instead, funding for a robust set of interventions should be made available to these schools.
- we cannot expect to get the same results for disadvantaged kids on the cheap.
- Risk adjustment places blame where it belongs.
- If we close the measurement gap, we can begin a radically different conversation about what investments in public education are necessary to give disadvantaged kids a fair shot.

Education Week: No Quick Fixes to 'Poverty Gap' Under NCLB

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education nclb reform

struggling schools that serve predominantly poor student populations are the very schools most likely to suffer from a drain on resources
his own experiences suggest that students need at least 100 individual lessons, at 40 minutes each, to get a grade-level-size boost.
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- Teachers also reported spending slightly more time on school-related activities outside school—seemingly a plus for students.
- teachers were not fleeing in droves
- Overall, the study also found that administrators reduced class sizes after states introduced the tougher testing and accountability systems, but usuallyin the grades being tested.
- Some evidence also turned up that administrators may have moved more-experienced teachers to those target grades.
- Gaps in teacher quality in schools attended by disadvantaged students and those attended by children from wealthier families remained large, as did the gaps between poor and nonpoor students within the same schools.
- Educators may have begun basing promotion decisions on more objective measures, such as test scores. But the trend halted temporarily in 2004, when a spike occurred in the number of low-income children held back in school; the trend then returned to pre-NCLB levels the following year.
- “Maybe where we are in NCLB implementation,” she added, “is that we’re not ready to have huge statements about what’s working and what’s not.”

26 Oct 07

Education Week: Shift Happens

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education reform

With most homes and classrooms connected to the Internet, one form of engagement that warrants a deeper look is the use of e-mail.
What would happen if every teacher and parent exchanged one e-mail per day, perhaps about a lesson that day and one for the next?
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- What if, that is, students provided feedback about the performance of their instructors, instructors about administrators, instructors about parents, and parents about instructors and administrators.
- What would happen if, instead of simply viewing schooling as a place where students go to learn, with buildings to be repaired or replaced, we viewed school as a process through which students gained skills and acquired knowledge?
- Crazy ideas?

10 Jul 07

The 7 Lesson Schoolteacher

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education reform

The first lesson I teach is confusion.

19 Mar 07

Education Week: The New Anti-Intellectualism in America

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education nclb reform testing

Intellectual life is challenging, enormously diverse, and rewarding. It requires initiative and independent thinking, not the tedious following of orders. It should not be reduced to mental drudgery.
Part of our job as educators is to offer opportunities, to open the door to a world of intellectual possibilities. Another part is to encourage our students to think and to take responsibility for their own expanded learning.
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- Students come to expect that they should have answers at their fingertips instead of developing an attitude of inquiry—one of willingness to figure things out.
- Providing a complete structure of what is to be learned and a detailed list of outcomes expected of all students facilitates quick, shallow learning and swift forgetting.
- In the interest of intellectual habits of mind, students must be asked to identify for themselves the important points in every unit of study, construct their own summaries, attempt problems that have no obvious solution, engage in interpretation, and evaluate conflicting explanations and points of view.

18 Mar 07

Lawmakers demand changes to No Child Left Behind law - CNN.com

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education nclb reform

We can't have one-size-fits-all

08 Mar 07

The Totalitarian Urge

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politics reform technology

“Older mechanical technologies make us see the world as deterministic, knowable and manipulable. New emergent technologies like the Internet teach us that control is an illusion, the universe is out of control and laughing at us, and that the more we watch and control, the more problems we have.”

05 Mar 07

The Problem with Class-Size Reduction

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class education reform size

large-scale class-size reductions implemented without significant school reform efforts simply won’t benefit students on a large scale.
Will we get the same achievement gains from 23 students working with poorly supported teachers pulled from the bottom of an ever-dwindling supply pool as we do from 30 students working with truly accomplished professionals?
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- Yes, some class-size reductions can make a difference for our kids, but not until we can guarantee an adequate, continuing supply of effective educators. We do that by investing in quality teacher-preparation programs, improving teacher working conditions, elevating the status of the teaching profession, and paying educators a professionally competitive salary.

01 Mar 07

Academic Rigor: A Rough Cut

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education reform

They led me to think about the difference between "training" and "education." May I suggest that "training" is something that is mandated from above, can be very important, and is probably mistaken for education in most discussions about rigor in K-12 education. Education, from its latin roots (to draw forth, to lead toward) is essentially an invitation to learning and knowledge.

28 Feb 07

Bridging Differences

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education nclb reform unions

I am deeply disturbed, upset, concerned, outraged, that so many schools—under pressure to meet AYP for NCLB (see how easily the acronyms invade our lives?)—have turned into test-prep factories.

18 Feb 07

Tommy & Roy: Domestic Shock and Awe on the Education Front | The Huffington Post

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assessment nclb reform testing

I left the session with the impression that they really didn't want to hear our concerns and that our testimony was beside the point.

STANFORD Magazine: July/August 2006 > Features > No Child Left Behind

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assessment education nclb reform testing

“massive” use of standardized tests “is one of the most effective, if unintentional, vehicles this country has created for suppressing creativity.”
NCLB’s greatest absurdity derives from the demand that schools alone wipe out the achievement gap.

12 Feb 07

a brief philosophy of “anti-teaching”

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alternative education reform

Teaching is about providing good information.
>
Anti-teaching
>
is about inspiring good questions.
>

06 Feb 07

Dianne Piché vs. Mike Petrilli vs. Joel Packer on No Child Left Behind

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education nclb reform

Eric Hoefler's Library tagged reform → View Popular

Truthdig - Reports - Liberating the Schoolhouse

Bridging Differences: A Marshall Plan for Teaching

What Should Happen in Our Houses of Learning? | Bridging Differences

Bridging Differences: Our Overarching Disagreements

What Should Be Done About Standardized Tests? A Freakonomics Quorum - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog

Google Reader (245)

Education Week: Closing the Measurement Gap

Education Week: No Quick Fixes to 'Poverty Gap' Under NCLB

Education Week: Shift Happens

The 7 Lesson Schoolteacher

Education Week: The New Anti-Intellectualism in America

Lawmakers demand changes to No Child Left Behind law - CNN.com

The Totalitarian Urge

The Problem with Class-Size Reduction

Academic Rigor: A Rough Cut

Bridging Differences

Tommy & Roy: Domestic Shock and Awe on the Education Front | The Huffington Post

STANFORD Magazine: July/August 2006 > Features > No Child Left Behind

a brief philosophy of “anti-teaching”

Dianne Piché vs. Mike Petrilli vs. Joel Packer on No Child Left Behind

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