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Half an Hour: Things You Really Need to Learn
This is, in [Stephen Downes'] view, what you need to learn in order to be successful.
The Mommy Files : College bound: Mission High School students beat the odds
Mission High School students Jonathan Spencer, Cindy Braki, Cedric Bowser and Jerome Pusung leaped over hurdles to get into college and receive the San Francisco School Alliance's Maisin Scholar Award. [via CG]
46 States and D.C. to Pursue Common Education Standards - washingtonpost.com
by Maria Glod - "If you agree to common standards but you don't agree to tests, it's like buying a car without a motor," said Jack Jennings, president of the D.C.-based Center on Education Policy. "It's buying the outside without getting the thing to work."
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The nearly complete support of governors for the effort -- leaders in Texas, Alaska, Missouri and South Carolina are the only ones that have not signed on -- is key.
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But Wilhoit said the shift also would help improve schools. Companies and researchers could more easily create textbooks and professional training that meshed with the curriculum coast to coast.
Bridging Differences: Test Results Are Not a Good Stand-In for Achievement
We forget that the American economy lived off the ingenuity of “ordinary” people, including many with limited or no formal educations, and not just “the best and brightest.” They sometimes saw themselves as anti-intellectuals—because we mistakenly created a false divide. Too many so-called intellectuals missed the connection between hand and eye and brain—not to mention ear, feet, and stomach! Americans turned their “ordinary” fascination with the world of work into hobbies and into finding new ways to do old things and old ways to do new things as well. They produced actual goods and products—good decently paid work was a source of pride.
Village schools are in urgent need of radical reform: Opinion | adn.com
For 100 years, Native Alaskans went to a school where their own language was forbidden, their history and culture benignly ignored or violently demeaned, denigrated, even persecuted. Teachers were given no orientation to the language or culture of their students or the communities in which they taught. The curriculum was the same course of studies as anywhere else in the U.S. And after 8th grade, the best and brightest students were recruited to attend boarding schools hundreds, even thousands, of miles from home.
Bridging Differences: Civil Rights and Democracy are Inseparable
The poorer the children, the less self-initiated activity allowed—after all, “they have to catch up.” The metaphors we use tell us a lot—including the unfortunate latest out of Washington: The Race to the Top. Ugh.
Deb
P.S. Speaking of using racing as a metaphor for schooling: If everyone becomes proficient, we’ll invent a new set of indicators to separate the very proficient, moderately proficient, etc. The new rank order will look a lot like the old ones—guess who’ll be on top and on bottom? On and on and on.
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We have a very strong heritage of seeing poverty as a personal failure.
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segregation remains in place. This is not simply due to racism as it affected schools—but also to hostility toward mixed residential communities in which not only black and white live side by side, but rich, poor, and middle-class do.
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Externalities in the Classroom: How Children Exposed to Domestic Violence Affect Everyone’s Kids - Freakonomics Blog - NYTimes.com
a very convincing new paper, by Scott Carrell of U.C. Davis and Mark Hoekstra of U.Pitt, “Externalities in the Classroom: How Children Exposed to Domestic Violence Affect Everyone’s Kids” (available here), suggests that these effects can be pretty big.
The real difficulty in this style of research is to find a useful proxy for whether or not a classroom is affected by a disruptive student.
ACHIEVEMENT SEMINARS 2008 - 2009 - About Us
Welcome to the home page for the Race, Culture, Identity and Achievement seminar series.
The seminar series will bring to Boston nationally recognized scholars, researchers and practitioners - individuals who can deepen our understanding of what it will take to normalize high academic achievement for students of color.
This series will create a location for teachers, teacher-educators, community leaders and involved citizens to engage in a sustained conversation about how race, culture and identity are implicated in the school achievement of Boston's increasingly multiracial and multiethnic student population.
Charter School at Tweed Probed for Test Tampering - June 2, 2008 - The New York Sun
The brainchild of the multimillionaire philanthropist Courtney Ross, the charter school is publicly funded but privately run.
Matthew Yglesias (June 23, 2008) - The Truth About Urban Schools (Domestic Policy)
...demographic factors have a huge influence on school achievement. Big city school systems tend to contain a higher-than-average number of poor kids, and poor kids tend to do worse than middle class kids, so cities wind up with bad test results.
The American Scholar - The Disadvantages of an Elite Education - By William Deresiewicz
How can I be a schoolteacher—wouldn’t that be a waste of my expensive education? Wouldn’t I be squandering the opportunities my parents worked so hard to provide? What will my friends think?
The Myth of the "Culture of Poverty"
The most destructive tool of the culture of classism is deficit theory. In education, we often talk about the deficit perspective—defining students by their weaknesses rather than their strengths.
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This classism is plentiful and well documented (Kozol, 1992). For example, compared with their wealthier peers, poor students are more likely to attend schools that have less funding (Carey, 2005); lower teacher salaries (Karoly, 2001); more limited computer and Internet access (Gorski, 2003); larger class sizes; higher student-to-teacher ratios; a less-rigorous curriculum; and fewer experienced teachers (Barton, 2004). The National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (2004) also found that low-income schools were more likely to suffer from cockroach or rat infestation, dirty or inoperative student bathrooms, large numbers of teacher vacancies and substitute teachers, more teachers who are not licensed in their subject areas, insufficient or outdated classroom materials, and inadequate or nonexistent learning facilities, such as science labs.
Cato Unbound » Blog Archive » “A Nation at Risk” Twenty-Five Years Later
A belief in decline has led to irresponsibility in school reform.
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Risk, to its credit, worried that “schools may emphasize such rudiments as reading and computation at the expense of other essential skills such as comprehension, analysis, solving problems, and drawing conclusions,” and it asserted, “Our concern, however, goes well beyond matters such as industry and commerce. It also includes the intellectual, moral, and spiritual strengths of our people. . . .”[3] But these caveats were buried beneath the report’s urgent calls to improve the reading and (especially) math skills that purportedly determined the nation’s economic health, and to increase the standardized testing that would spur such improvement.
From an irrational faith in the ability of standardized tests to inspire greater learning, and from an unwillingness to finance more expensive tests that would sample critical thinking as well as basic skills, we’ve again narrowed the curriculum to “minimum competency,” precisely the 1970s standard that A Nation at Risk denounced.
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it is hard to defend the proposition that teachers, especially those of minority and disadvantaged children, have been sitting around making excuses for poor performance when these children have gained a full standard deviation in test score improvement in a single generation.
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When are Racial Disparities in Education the Result of Discrimination?
"When are racial disparities in education *not* due to discrimination?"
Against Competitiveness
Lending an even more noxious twist to the habit of seeing education in purely economic terms is the use of the word “competitiveness”
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It took me awhile to realize that at the core of the current
“tougher standards” movement is a worldview characterized by artificial
scarcity -- along with the assumption that schooling is ultimately about
economic outcomes. A more reasonable and humane perspective is always hard
to come by when we’re told that we’re in a race. The prospects for critical
thought are particularly bleak if the race never ends.
Whose Problem is Poverty?
demands (like those of No Child Left Behind) that schools fully close achievement gaps not only will remain unfulfilled, but also will cause us to foolishly and unfairly condemn our schools and teachers.
eduwonkette: Do High School Exit Exams Pay Off in the Labor Market?
Proponents of exit exams often assert that these tests make the high school diploma more meaningful to employers. If this is the case, these policies should widen the gap in earnings and labor market outcomes between those who earn high school diplomas and those that don't.
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Analyzing data from both the Census and the Current Population Survey, they found no evidence that state exit exams positively affect labor force status or earnings. Furthermore, they found no evidence that the effects of these policies vary by race or ethnicity, or by the level of difficulty of the exit exam.
In short, exit exams do nothing to increase the labor market value of the high school diploma. At the same time, other evidence suggests that exit exams (especially more difficult ones) are associated with lower public high school completion rates
nel noddings - caring and education
The relational sense of caring forces us to look at the relation. It is not enough to hear the teacher’s claim to care. Does the student recognize that he or she is cared for?
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The relational sense of caring
forces us to look at the relation. It is not enough to hear the teacher’s
claim to care. Does the student recognize that he or she is cared for?
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