Monday, March 22, 2010

Education - Everything you need to know about the world of education.

Education- Everything you need to know about the world of education.


















Inexcusable: Empty promises to a D.C. school

What can you say after you say that D.C. school officials have yet again let down a school community that has been trying for years to get decent conditions for its students and young children to learn in each weekday?
That it isn’t anybody’s fault, really, because the system never had enough money?
Even if it were true that the system didn’t have enough money, that’s no excuse. In fact, there isn’t any excuse anymore for what has happened to the community at Bruce-Monroe Elementary School.
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Principal, teacher clash on cheating

Last week’s column, full of practical suggestions on how to limit cheating, did not seem controversial to me. Many teachers sent their own ideas. Many recommended small adjustments, such as having the questions in different order for different students, to hinder copying.
So I was surprised to hear from Erich Martel, an Advanced Placement U.S. History teacher at Wilson High School in the District, that his principal, Peter Cahall, was critical of him doing that.
Martel’s classroom, 18 by 25 feet, feels like shoebox to him. Some days he squeezes in 30 students, plus himself. That is 15 square feet per student, which Martel has been told is well below the district standard of 25 square feet. The cramped conditions led to a disagreement when Cahall assessed Martel’s work under the school district’s IMPACT teacher evaluation system.
During one post-evaluation conference Martel told Cahall what he did to frustrate cheating when students are so close together. He created two versions of the same test by putting the pages in different sequences, a method many teachers endorse. He showed Cahall a quiz on which he printed the questions in a smaller font, making them harder to read from the next chair over.
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