Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Diane in the Evening 6-25-13 Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all

Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all:





Anyone Can Teach, Right?

Dennis Hong has written an essay that is spreading like wildfire across the Internet.
It is called “The Hardest Job Everyone Thinks They Can Do.”
He used to be a molecular biologist. When he told his friends about his frustration with a failed experiment, no one told him how to do it right.
Then he became a teacher.
Now everyone knows his job–or thinks they

Oh, Those Overpaid Teachers in Tennessee!

A reader posted this comment:

I am a teacher in TN. I have 6 years of experience and a masters degree, and I don’t make even 40k a year. Our district already has a performance incentive program – the top level of merit pay, which I did earn last year, was $2,000 – about $1600 after taxes. Insulting. In fact, many teachers earned it. So what are they doing for this 

What My Mother Knows and Sanders Doesn’t

Angela Danovi’s mother taught in the Memphis public schools for 29 years. She just retired.
Angela knows how many lives her mother changed, how many daily acts of kindness shaped her students.
And she knows that William Sanders, the statistician who invented value-added modeling or VAM, has never 

How Pre-K Has Changed for the Worse

A teacher comments:
Arne Duncan cannot be taken at his word.
I sometimes teach things in Pre-K that I taught in K against what I know is right. My administrators want to see graphs, charts, accountable talk and levels of depth of knowledge.
When I hear the K teachers giving lessons on nouns and pronouns, verbs and adjectives (yes using that 

Wisconsin Invests in Super-Rich TFA

The Wisconsin legislature allocated $1million to pay Teach for America to send 70 we teachers to Wisconsin schools.
It gets tiresome to say this again and again: Teach for America is a wealthy organization that sends ill-trained recruits to teach in under-resourced districts. These poorly trained young people, with no experience as teachers 

North Carolina Legislature Puts a Few Limits on Charters

North Carolina’s SB 337 has been revised to add just a few limits to charter autonomy. There will not be a separate charter-friendly board to authorize charters; that responsibility will remain with the state board, which will likely be tilted towards charters anyway.
The original bill would have allowed all charter teachers to be uncertified. Currently, 75% of charter teachers in K-5 must be certified. The new bill drops that to 50%, instead of zero.
Charter teachers will be subject to criminal background checks. That’s a relief. And charters will be expected to 

LISTEN TO DIANE RAVITCH 6-25-13 Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all

mike simpson at Big Education Ape - 15 minutes ago
Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all: [image: Click on picture to Listen to Diane Ravitch] New Charter Study Shows Improvement, Raises Questions by dianerav CREDO, the organization at Stanford University that analyzes charter performance, released the results of its latest national study. Its earlier report (2009) showed disappointing results for charter schools, with only 17% outperforming traditional public schools. This was especially disappointing for the Walton Family Foundation, one of the main backers of CREDO. The new study shows that charters... more »