What poor children need in school
Yesterday I wrote a post about how public education’s biggest problem — poverty — keeps getting worse, with the news from a new report that a majority of students in public schools in the American South and West are low-income for the first time in at least four decades. Here’s a related piece by Jack Schneider which argues that policy makers own life circumstances affect the way they make school reform decisions for the poor. Schneider (@Edu_Historian) is an assistant professor of education at the College of the Holy Cross and the author of the forthcoming book From the Ivory Tower to the Schoolhouse: How Scholarship Becomes Common Knowledge in Education. Heather Curl is a lecturer at Bryn Mawr College. Both authors are former classroom teachers. Schneider also founded University Paideia, a pre-college program for under-served students in the San Francisco Bay Area. His research focuses on educational policy-making and school reform.
By Jack Schneider
Most educational policy elites, whether in government or in the nonprofit sector, mean well. They pursue careers in education, rather than in business, because they want to help children, and because they believe in the power of schools to promote opportunity. Certainly there are exceptions to the rule; entrepreneurial third-parties, for instance,
Montgomery school officials delay action on student transfer policy
Montgomery school leaders have decided to postpone action on proposed changes to the district’s policy that governs student transfers from one school to another. A school board committee voted this week to recommend further study of the issue, following a public comment period that raised new issues and amplified community concerns. More than 200 comments poured in, officials said. Read full arti
Strauss: Rats find Oreos as addictive as cocaine -- an unusual college research project
I have a thing for Double Stuf Oreos (I can’t eat just one, or five, for that matter), so I was naturally interested in a research project by faculty and students at Connecticut College that involved Oreos. Read full article >>
What science teachers need to know
Here’s an interesting post by cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham, a professor and director of graduate studies in psychology at the University of Virginia and author of “Why Don’t Students Like School?” His latest book is “When Can You Trust The Experts? How to tell good science from bad in education.” This appeared on his Science and […]
Can they be this obsessed with data?
Can they be this obsessed with data? Look at some of the data that U.S. Education Department is requiring organizations that receive Promise Neighborhoods grants to collect and report: The number of kids in the initiative who are getting five or more servings of fruits and vegetables a day. The number of kids participating in […]