How important are school gadgets?
Some educators wonder how much high-tech tools raise achievement.
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Summer books for reluctant teen readers
Summer is the best time to entice reluctant readers to enter and learn to love books. It can happen, but there’s a trick: You have to let kids pick out their own books. To help you, the American Library Association has a great 2010 list of books for teens ages 12-18. Here it is.
The principal who created a wellspring of innovation
Despite the school’s disadvantages, Jackson has produced one of the highest levels of Advanced Placement test participation in the country — top 2 percent. Thirty-seven percent of Wakefield seniors have passing scores on those tests, more than twice the national average. Wakefield has reached its federal achievement targets, unusual for a school with so many impoverished students, but also made itself a national model for imaginative instruction, outdoing even the most affluent public schools.
Rhee to NYC: Just be like me
There was a time in the fairly recent past when Michelle Rhee was the protege and Joel Klein was the mentor. Rhee was the little-known head of a teacher recruiting non-profit in 2007 when Klein, head of the New York City school system, recommended her to Mayor Adrian M. Fenty for the D.C. chancellor's post. But now, fresh from striking what she describes as a "revolutionary bargain" with the Washington Teachers' Union, she's instructing Klein and New York's United Federation of Teachers (UFT) on how to negotiate a new contract.
In a piece in Sunday's New York Daily News, Rhee urges Klein and UFT president Michael Mulgrew to craft a contract that includes the main features of the D.C. accord. That includes pay for performance, personnel decisions based on quality, not seniority, and allowing principals to decide how to staff their schools. She called for an end to New York's Absent Teacher Reserve Pool, into which the city pays tens of millions of dollars to retain teachers who have lost their posts as a result of declining enrollment or other changes in school programs.
Rhee negotiated a one-year grace period at full pay for District teachers who can't find new spots in the system, with the option of a $25,000
Senior Bertrand Ngampa gives a presentation on an interactive whiteboard at W.T. Woodson High in Fairfax County. (Dayna Smith/Post)