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Why most professional development for teachers is useless
There has been a strong reaction to my recent post titled ”A video that shows why teachers are going out of their minds,” which revealed Chicago teachers being led in a professional development session in which they sound like kindergarteners, repeating words in unison. Some commenters on the post defended the practice but most of the […]
A video that shows why teachers are going out of their minds
The video below is not a parody. It shows Chicago Public School teachers in a professional development session that will make you understand why teachers are going out of their minds and to what extent administrators have infantilized teachers. Here is the video’s description on YouTube: This presenter was one of several consultants flown in […]
Winning videos from first White House Student Film Festival
President Obama is hosting the White House’s first ever Student Film Festival, an event aimed to showcase technology in learning, and below are some of the 16 short films selected to be screened, all of them made by students from elementary through high school. Some of the winners come from students in Maryland, Virginia and […]
Why preschool critics are wrong
W. Steven Barnett is the director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University and he is annoyed. At what? People who keep arguing that preschool has not lasting benefits — despite evidence to the contrary. In this post he takes on the critics and their interpretation of the research. By W. […]
Why NAEP isn’t really ‘the nation’s report card’
The National Assessment of Educational Progress is known across the country as “the nation’s report card” because it is the largest nationally representative and continuing assessment of what America’s students know in different subjects. The body that oversees NAEP, the National Assessment Governing Board, this week marked its 25th anniversary with a conference in Washington, at which […]
FEB 27
Gates Foundation opposes release of teachers’ VAM scores in Florida
Readers of this blog know that I am not a fan of the “value-added method” of evaluating educators. VAM uses student test scores and adds them into complicated formulas that can supposedly figure out the “value” teachers add to student learning. (Can a complicated formula really factor out the post traumatic stress that affects a […]
Gov. Christie’s new crisis: Protests grow over state control of Newark schools
There’s a new crisis in New Jersey, and it isn’t about traffic jams. Public protests in Newark are growing over an effort by Superintendent Cami Anderson, who was appointed to run the state-operated district by Gov. Chris Christie, to reshape the city’s school system. She plans to close some traditional schools, lay off more than […]
What D.C. schools are doing right – and how to make it better
There is a lot to celebrate about the pre-kindergarten program in the D.C. public schools. In fact, some aspects of the program are so strong that school officials would be smart to borrow them for application in later grades. This is all explained in the following post by Elaine Weiss, the national coordinator for the Broader Bolder […]
FEB 26
Chicago charter schools expel many more kids than district schools — new data
New data released by the Chicago Public School system reveals that the city’s public charter schools — whose expansion has been pushed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel for several years — expelled about 12 times the number of students last year than did traditional public schools. The Chicago Tribune reported that in 2013, charter schools with a total […]
Education reform and the corrosion of community responsibility
The law of unintended consequences essentially states that individual and government actions always have some unintended consequences. In the following post, Arthur H. Camins writes about the unintended consequences of many education reform policies. Camins is the director of the Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J. […]
They were once teachers
View Photo Gallery —The “Duck Dynasty’’ patriarch, Britain’s Princess Diana and Jon Hamm of “Mad Men” fame: These notables and others spent time leading a classroom.
FEB 25
First black female Ole Miss student body president reacts to newest racial incident at university
Kimbrely Dandridge was elected as the first black, female student body president at the University of Mississippi in 2012, and now is a first-year law student at Texas Southern University’s Thurgood Marshall School of Law. A recent racial incident at Ole Miss caused her to write the following piece, which was published on the Hechinger […]
The most meaningless teacher evaluation exercise ever?
If ever there were a meaningless exercise in the annals of evaluation, it would be this one. The Florida Times-Union newspaper sued the state Education Department to get access to what are called “value-added” scores of teachers that are used to make high-stakes decisions about their jobs. These scores come from student standardized test scores, […]
The forgotten factor in student achievement: the student
Will Fitzhugh is the founder and editor of The Concord Review, believed to be the world’s only English-language quarterly review for history academic papers by high school students. The Review, founded in Massachusetts in March 1978, comes out four times a year and has published more than 1,000 history research papers — with an average of […]
FEB 24
Oscar-nominated ’12 Years a Slave’ to be distributed to high schools
After I saw “12 Years a Slave” late last year, I wrote that it was a film that mature high school students could and should see to help understand the realities of the horrors of slavery in the United States. The movie, based on an 1853 memoir of the same name by Solomon Northrup, tells with […]
Class size matters a lot, research shows
Every now and then someone in education policy (Arne Duncan) or education philanthropy (Bill Gates) or the media (Malcolm Gladwell) will say something about why class size isn’t really very important because a great teacher can handle a boatload of kids. Not really. A new review of the major research that has been conducted on class […]
One way to help solve America’s major curriculum problem
Common Core State Standards, accountability, benchmarks, teacher quality, evaluation, test design and uses, value-added measurement, Race to the Top, international comparisons — all of these are at the center of fierce debates in the education world. Marion Brady argues in this post that they are all sideshows to the real problem in American schools — […]
FEB 23
Why test-based school reform isn’t working — by the numbers
Award-winning Prinicipal Carol Burris of South Side High School in New York has been exposing the problems with New York’s botched school reform effort for a long time on this blog. (You can read some of her work here, here, here, here, and here.) In the following post she looks at irrefutable data to show that the test-based reforms […]
Study: High school grades best predictor of college success — not SAT/ACT scores
A three-year national study of colleges that do not require applicants to submit ACT or SAT scores found only “trivial” differences in the college graduation rates or the cumulative grade point average of students between those who do and those who do not send in their standardized test results. The study, titled “Defining Promise: Optional Standardized […]
FEB 22
You think you know what teachers do. Right? Wrong.
You went to school so you think you know what teachers do, right? You are wrong. Here’s a piece explaining all of this from Sarah Blaine, a mom, former teacher and full-time practicing attorney in New Jersey who writes at her parentingthecore blog, where this first appeared. By Sarah Blaine We all know what teachers […]