Thursday, August 8, 2019

The Eight Ps of Parent Engagement - NEA Today

The Eight Ps of Parent Engagement - NEA Today

The Eight Ps of Parent Engagement



Big Education Ape: BACK TO SCHOOL: A parent’s guide to K-12 school success - http://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2019/08/back-to-school-parents-guide-to-k-12.html

Getting parents more engaged in school is a necessary variable in the equation of student success. In fact, parent engagement can have a direct impact on student engagement itself. Multiple studies prove that students whose parents are actively engaged in their schooling typically show the following:
  • Higher grades
  • Higher test scores
  • Greater social skills
  • Better reported behavior
  • Easier adaptation to school
  • Greater likelihood of continuing into post-graduate education
It’s only logical that involved parents positively impact student achievement. According to an NEA 2008 report, when schools, parents, and families work in partnership to support students, then those students succeed at a higher level. It’s also important to note that when a school engages more parents, all children benefit, according to a 1995 study called A Generation of Evidence: The Family is Critical to Student Achievement.
That’s great, Heather. You might be saying to yourself. But how? How do we engage parents in our schools when they themselves are busy and stressed and many are just struggling to get their students to school on time?
So I’ve developed what I’m calling The Eight Ps of Parent Engagement. These are meant to help guide a teacher or school or district in making outreach decisions to increase parent engagement.
Of course, it’s easy to know how to increase parent engagement, but it’s not as easy CONTINUE READING: The Eight Ps of Parent Engagement - NEA Today
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John Thompson: OKCPS name conflicts do not help students

OKCPS name conflicts do not help students

OKCPS name conflicts do not help students

Only a couple of weeks before the scheduled start of its academic year, Oklahoma City Public Schools announced it was opening Putnam Heights Academy, the new home for the closed Seeworth alternative school program.
The same day, OKCPS board member Charles Henry, Rep. Ajay Pittman (D-OKC), Rep. Jason Lowe (D-OKC) and community leaders held a press conference condemning the school name change accompanying the closure of Northeast Academy and relocation of Classen SAS High School to the Northeast building. 
These conflicts come at the tail end of what Superintendent Sean McDaniel calls “an unbelievable lift to get schools ready so that our kids can enjoy that first day.” They also raise the question about what our community is really fighting over.

‘The culture and the name mean something’

It’s complicated, but these two battles boil down to a dispute over how patrons and communities express their love for their schools.
Given the challenges facing OKCPS, it makes no sense to argue over these deep emotional attachments for public schools. Such commitments should be seen as assets, not battlegrounds.
As the Oklahoman reported from Henry’s press conference, he argues: “It’s not fair for a CONTINUE READING: OKCPS name conflicts do not help students
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The Great I Am | The Jose Vilson

The Great I Am | The Jose Vilson

THE GREAT I AM

The essential question: how can we reflect the changes we want to see in the world?
Because I don’t have students in front of me during the summer, I have time to ask myself existential questions that offer space for self-congratulations and self-flagellation. In Dominican culture, we laugh with friends and relatives about the accuracy of household weaponry like belts and sandals. It also taught me to be overly suspicious of where kudos come from and what vulnerability looks like. The crack and the slap call to ancestors in percussion and oppression, and my genes remember and remind, curdling my blood yet fortify my bones.
No more was this truer than two days ago at the NYC Panel for Education Policy meeting on July 31st, where dozens of attendees came to either support the Department of Education’s definition for culturally responsive / sustaining education or denounce Chancellor Richard Carranza’s very existence. Many of the supporters included an amalgam of citizens led by the Coalition for Educational Justice who proposed the definition as a first step towards interrogating our education system through the lens of our most marginalized and ignored citizens in our city.
While I won’t speak negatively about the detractors here, I felt it critical for me to be there. I sat with supporters in front of me, and with detractors filling up the rows behind me. As they began their “Fire Carranza” chants, I turned towards them and said, “We want textbooks in Cantonese, too! We want books in Mandarin, too! Don’t you think we should have characters that look like your children in the CONTINUE READING: The Great I Am | The Jose Vilson

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What's New California Department of Education

California Department of Education



What's New California Department of Education


News Releases

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First-Year Writing and the Gauntlet of Academic Citation | radical eyes for equity

First-Year Writing and the Gauntlet of Academic Citation | radical eyes for equity

First-Year Writing and the Gauntlet of Academic Citation

“How much we should emphasize academic citation in the first-year writing classroom has long been a matter of debate,” explains Jennie Young, director of the first-year writing program at University of Wisconsin at Green Bay. Then Young argues: “However, I’d like to take it one step further: I suggest that we stop teaching it entirely.”
I taught high school English for 18 years, much of that instruction focusing on teaching writing and preparing students for college. Since then, I have been a professor in higher education, including over a decade teaching (and briefly directing) first-year writing.
woman writing on notebook
Photo by J. Kelly Brito on Unsplash
Young’s provocative and compelling proposal speaks to many of the problems I have experienced with teaching first-year writing as well as with providing faculty the guidance and support they need to teach first-year writing (and writing in general)—especially those faculty outside the CONTINUE READING: First-Year Writing and the Gauntlet of Academic Citation | radical eyes for equity

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Pennsylvania Law Meant to Forbid Arming Teachers May Have Done Just the Opposite | gadflyonthewallblog

Pennsylvania Law Meant to Forbid Arming Teachers May Have Done Just the Opposite | gadflyonthewallblog

Pennsylvania Law Meant to Forbid Arming Teachers May Have Done Just the Opposite

TNZWTTHKKNGUNMYFEENTOEFBME
Pennsylvania teachers, don’t forget to pack your Glock when returning to school this year.
Despite warnings from gun safety activists, the bill, SB 621, was approved by the legislature and signed into law by Gov. Tom Wolf this summer.
The legislation explicitly allows security guards – independent contractors who are not members of law enforcement – to carry guns in schools if they go through special training.
And that’s bad enough.
Why you’d want glorified rent-a-cops with guns strapped to their hips running around schools full of children is beyond me.
That’s not going to make anyone safer. It’s going to do just the opposite.
But that’s not even the worst of it.
Commonwealth law already allowed for armed police and school resource officers in CONTINUE READING: Pennsylvania Law Meant to Forbid Arming Teachers May Have Done Just the Opposite | gadflyonthewallblog

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CURMUDGUCATION: Ed Reform vs. Democracy

CURMUDGUCATION: Ed Reform vs. Democracy

Ed Reform vs. Democracy

 It was not that long ago that I wrote a piece about how school choice, by shifting the locus of control for the education purse strings, tends to undermine democractic processes. After all, if only parents of school age children, or only rich folks who contribute to tax credit scholarships, get to decide which schools get paid, then the non-parent taxpayers who are footing the bills don't really have much say, and the duly-elected school board has nothing much to do or say, either. School choice is, often, literally taxation without representation (a topic that I could swear has come up before in US history).

Still, it's not always so subtle.

One of the most famously unsubtle incidents would be Reed Hastings (Netflix), who in 2014 told the California School Boards Association in fairly clear terms that elected school boards were a scourge and should be done away with. Hastings has been plenty active in the charter sector, managing to help push through the California law that not only did away with charter caps, but made it possible to run a chain of charters with just one (unelected) board.

But education reform has generally found democracy to be an obstruction. After all, if Bill Gates thinks he knows how to fix education, why should he have to run for some sort of public office when he can just grab power and finance cooperation? Much of ed reform has been powered by movers and shakers and corporate power guys who like (and undoubtedly feel justified by) the all-powerful CEO model. As Hastings once put it when discussing Netflix, "We’re like a pro sports team, not a kid’s recreational team. Netflix leaders hire, develop and cut smartly, so we have stars in every position."

These guys hate unions and government regulation for the same reason guys like Carnegie and Rockefeller hated them-- not just because they cost them money, but because they hampered their ability to be visionary leaders who could control all the elements of their business and make the corporation operate CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Ed Reform vs. Democracy


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A Gift That Never Stops Giving–Being a Teacher* | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

A Gift That Never Stops Giving–Being a Teacher* | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

A Gift That Never Stops Giving–Being a Teacher*


I wrote this post five years ago and re-post it now as both children and youth get prepared for the next school year. And teachers –both rookies and veterans–gear up for 2019-2020.
A dear friend and I exchanged emails recently and she mentioned that she had heard from a student she had in 1960. She had taught in the New York area for a number of years before returning to graduate school but recalled with much warmth how fine a group of sixth graders she had that particular year. The then 11 year-old, now a grandma, had stayed in touch with my friend over the years. She had become a teacher and had just retired and was now writing about the adult lives of classmates.
I began thinking of the often unspoken psychic rewards that accrue (in business terms, I would call it: the return on investment) to experienced teachers who have had many groups of students pass through their classroom over the years and how some of those students (such as Steven Strogatz) make a point of visiting, writing, and staying in touch with their former teachers. Fortunately, that has happened to me when a few former students at Glenville High School in Cleveland and from Cardozo High School in Washington, D.C. have stayed in touch. Ditto from some former Stanford graduates. When letters or pop- in visits occur, I get such a rush of memories of the particular student and the class and the mixed emotions that accompany the memories. Teaching is, indeed, the gift that never stops giving.
Those former students who stay in touch over the years, I have found, attribute far too much to my teaching and semester- or year-long relationship with them. Often I am stunned by their recollections of what I said and did. In most cases, I cannot remember the incidents that remain so fresh in their memories. Nor had I tried to predict which of the few thousand high school students I have taught would have reached out to contact me, I would have been wrong 75 percent of CONTINUE READING: A Gift That Never Stops Giving–Being a Teacher* | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

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Jersey journalist roughed up at session sponsored by charter school groups |

Jersey journalist roughed up at session sponsored by charter school groups |

Jersey journalist roughed up at session sponsored by charter school groups
An independent New Jersey journalist was roughed up, his video camera was seized, and he was ejected from a New Brunswick conference sponsored by a number of pro-charter school organizations.
The incident involving Charles Kratovil of New Brunswick Today at last Saturday’s session of what was billed the “Fourth Annual New Jersey Parents Summit” was caught on tape. Kratovil said he was injured during the scuffle and will file criminal charges against a security guard for radio journalist April Ryan, a speaker at the conference. The tape shows Ryan assenting to the guard’s action against Kratovil shortly after she began to speak.

Charlie Kratovil

Another internet-based news organization– news franchise TAPInto–apparently did not consider interfering with the work of a journalist at a public event newsworthy. TAPInto reported on the speech that was interrupted by the incident involving Kratovill but did not mention the scuffle.


TAPInto has refused comment on its role (or lack of one) in the incident, apparently witnessed by its New Brunswick editor Chuck O’Donnell whose byline CONTINUE READING: Jersey journalist roughed up at session sponsored by charter school groups |
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