If, as Bill Turque reports, the line being peddled by Michelle Rhee’s critics is “don’t worry, all of the progress we’ve made over the last three years in DCPS won’t be derailed if Fenty loses the election and Rhee steps down / is fired,” then why, exactly, are they her critics in the first place?
Inver Hills Community College
This is the time of year Inver Hills Community College Vice President Barbara Read stands in the door of the admissions office and greets a new student with a four-word question: “What is your goal?”
The question goes to the heart of the college’s five-year-old “Finish What You Start” effort to improve retention, completion and transfer rates. Whether a student is there to earn credits before transferring to a four-year
Last week, as part of the Race to the Top federal grant competition, the Education Department awarded two groups of states $330 million to develop the next generation of student assessments. The money, which will be disbursed over the next four years, goes to the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium. Together the winning groups represent 44 states; the others have declined to participate. The forthcoming assessments are the counterpart to the common standards in English and math that the administration is pushing states to adopt.
According to Education Secretary Arne Duncan, both of the winning applicants will develop evaluation systems that avoid pressuring teachers "to teach to a test that doesn't measure what really matters." Instead, Duncan maintains, the assessments will "measure real student knowledge and skills."
Given the information available from the applicants' proposals, does one group hold more promise than the other for delivering superior assessments? Will the new assessments succeed in Duncan's promise to measure real student knowledge and skills?
-- Eliza Krigman, NationalJournal.com
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Waiting for "Superman" is a paean to reformers like Washington, D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee (left), while it casts AFT president Randi Weingarten (right), in the words of Variety, as "something of a foaming satanic beast." (Photo: Mike McGregor) |
The Harlem-based educator and activist Geoffrey Canada first met the filmmaker Davis Guggenheim in 2008, when Canada was in Los Angeles raising money for the Children’s Defense Fund, which he chairs. Guggenheim told Canada that he was making a documentary about the crisis in America’s schools and implored him to be in it. Canada had heard this pitch before, more times than he could count, from a stream of camera-toting do-gooders whose movies were destined to be seen by audiences smaller than the crowd on a rainy
For many teachers and students in urban school districts this is the first day back. They join millions of other students and teachers who have been in classrooms for two weeks or more.
There are few things as goofy as the school calendar.
This year Chicago’s public schools began a program of so-called (Same number of days, just reconfigured) year-round schools. It has been brutal for working parents trying to coordinate childcare in a world of summers
Student projects can draw on student motivation to showcase critical thinking skills and content knowledge. These outcomes, however, are not a given. The "Research Says . . . " column in this month's EL sifts the data to deliver these guidelines for designing student projects: consider who and what is driving the assignment.
While choice is a motivator in student work, too many choices can actually demotivate students. Offer limited choices
Teachers are starting the school year with 37.5 more minutes a week to figure out how to raise test scores.
In an email sent to principals on Friday, Chancellor Joel Klein announced that schools are now allowed to convert one period of tutoring time into teacher planning sessions aimed at boosting scores. The four-times-weekly, 37.5-minute sessions were introduced in February 2006 for teachers to offer small-group instruction.
“This time must be used in a structured way to look at data and student work, to examine curriculum and
9.7.20 - Wearing neon yellow vests and packing cell phones, more than a dozen "community watchers'' will line the busiest street leading to Corliss High School for a mile today as a new Safe Passage program sweeps across the city's public high schools. These new "eyes and ears on the street" already have made some kids feel safer at Corliss, a year-round school that launched its Safe Passage program in early August when its classes began... FULL ARTICLE AT CHICAGO SUN-TIMES
A budding partnership between the city of Dallas and the University of Texas at Arlington looks to Oak Cliff as a land of opportunity.
There, three UTA graduate students with interests in municipal planning and design will soon begin addressing corridor redevelopment, transportation issues and public spaces in what's being called the Oak Cliff Storefront initiative.
Working from an office at Methodist Dallas Medical Center, the students will move beyond theory to the groundwork, analysis and
Tuesday, September 7th 2010, 4:00 AM
New Yorkers are giving Mayor Bloomberg a failing grade on his signature issue - improving the city's schools.
Asked whether Bloomberg has succeeded in "his top priority as mayor," nearly half, or 49%, said he'd "failed in his goal," a new Marist-Daily News poll finds. Thirty-eight percent said he'd succeeded.
But the majority of New Yorkers polled believe charter schools - key to Bloomberg's education reform efforts - are "good."
Results were more evenly split among New Yorkers who have kids in public school, with 46% saying he succeeded and 48% saying he hasn't.
"I would say no, based on the latest information about the
A UCLA environmental health sciences researcher whose appointment was not renewed this year has filed a whistle-blower retaliation complaint against the university, saying he's being punished for publishing politically incorrect research findings and for previous whistle-blowing against colleagues.
UCLA officials had planned to end epidemiologist James Enstrom's appointment August 30 but extended it until March 2011 after outside groups intervened, including a group of California Republican legislators and the
The American Civil Liberties Union is questioning Contra Costa officials over their implementation of a microchip tracking program in their preschool centers.
Nicole Ozer, the ACLU's technology and civil liberties director, told California Watch that she asked the county to provide more information about their program. She was especially interested in the technical specfications of
But in recent years, the American Dream seemed to slip away, because from Washington to Wall Street, too often a different culture prevailed. Wealth was valued over work, selfishness over sacrifice, greed over responsibility, the right to organize undermined rather than strengthened...It's why I support the Employee Free Choice Act-to level the playing field so it's easier for employees who want a union to form a union. Because when labor is strong, America is strong. When we all stand together, we all rise together.(Huffington)
RESPONDED ON SEPTEMBER 7, 2010 10:23 AM
While Waiting For The New Tests...
I am hoping that the new assessments will be better than the current crop of standardized tests. Many people (including Secretary Arne Duncan) agree that the current standardized tests are inadequate, that learning bubble-guessing is not a good use of students' time, and that we need tests that