A Florida charter school scandal gets worse
In the you-can't-make-up-this-stuff category: Do you remember the case of the charter school in central Florida that gave its founding principal a $519,453 payout in taxpayer money when it was forced to close because of academic failure? Well, it turns out, the school also paid more than $460,000 over five years to her husband, who resigned from its board in 2008 about the same time he was charged with soliciting prostitutes while serving as a sheriff's commander. Really.
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Common Core reading pros and cons
My colleague Lyndsey Layton wrote this Washington Post story about confusion at many schools about how to properly implement the Common Core State Standards in English. The trouble surrounds the standards' call for students to read more non-fiction; exactly how much and by when is at issue. Here's a related post about the pros and cons of Common Core standards for reading by a teacher, John T. Spencer, a sixth-grade ELL teacher in an urban, Title One School. He has written five books, including "Pencil Me In," an allegory for educational technology; "Teaching Unmasked," about the impact paradox; "Sages and Lunatics," a memoir and critique on factory education; and "A Sustainable Start," a realistic look at the first year of teaching. This appeared on a blog he co-authors called Education Rethink.
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A warning ed policymakers should heed
Here Carol Burris, the award-winning principal of South Side High School in Rockville Centre, New York, writes about a proposal by Tulane University’s Douglas Harris on how to fairly use “value added models” for teacher assessment (you can read it in the post below.) Burris is the co-author of the New York Principals letter of concern regarding the evaluation of teachers by student test scores, which has been signed by thousands of people from different walks of life. You can read the letter by clicking here.
By Carol Burris
In the fall of 2011, over 500 principals from Long Island, signed a letter that stated their concerns regarding New York’s newly enacted teacher evaluation system. Although the evaluation system was hailed by the New York State Education Department as a reform that would improve teaching and learning, the principals strongly, and very publicly
A valid way to use value added' in teacher evaluation
Whether and how value-added models for teacher evaluation -- which use student standardized test scores to assess teachers -- only becomes more controversial in education as time goes on. Here is a new approach on the subject from Douglas N. Harris, associate professor of economics and University Endowed Chair in Public Education at Tulane University in New Orleans. His latest book, "Value-Added Measures in Education," provides an accessible review of the technical and practical issues surrounding these models. This appeared on the blogof the non-profit Albert Shanker Institute.
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