This Week In Education: Thompson: Teaching Attention -- Intentionally

This Week In Education: Thompson: Teaching Attention -- Intentionally

Photo: Will Learn For Food [image: Will learn for food] In the not too distant future, or perhaps this is already happening.

Thompson: Teaching Attention -- Intentionally [image: Eduwonk]On yesterday's Fresh Air, Andrew Rotherham described " intention" as the key to the schools that prove effective despite student poverty. They are intentional in everything they do because they must teach students a mindfulness and a ...

Quote: Money-Saving Vouchers [image: Quotes2]*Surely everyone from Tea Partiers to Democrats can see that when it costs less to give a student a private school voucher than to educate him or her in a traditional public school, everyone wins. * - Robert Enlow, Foundation for ...

Read the School Reform Pact voiceofsandiego.org: Education

voiceofsandiego.org: Education

Read the School Reform PactComments | 9:57 am

Want to see what the San Diego Unified, its teachers union and a local nonprofit agreed to when they decided to create pilot schools for community-based school reform? Here's the pact that the school board gave the green light in January. Check it out.

The agreement specifically spells out that the pilot schools would keep following their labor agreements, which means that becoming a reform school isn't a get-out-of-your-union-contracts-free card. You'll also notice that the pilot program was supposed to start last month; it's April and it's still in the works.

My latest story focuses on the how the rift between the teachers union and school district has disrupted the reform plan, which was built around unity.

Please contact Emily Alpert directly at emily.alpert@voiceofsandiego.org or 619.550.5665 and follow her on Twitter: twitter.com/emilyschoolsyou.

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What Does School Reform Look Like? Here’s One ExampleComments | 9:48 am

My newest story explores how the rift between San Diego Unified and its teachers union might impact the big reform push.

When I write about these reforms, one of the biggest challenges for me as a reporter — and one of the challenges for the school district in rolling it out — is explaining what it might look like. Because each school comes up with its own reforms, every school could reform itself differently.

But if you want a peek into what reform-from-the-inside looked at one San Diego school, check out this article I wrote last year about Euclid Elementary in City Heights. Teachers there teach the same things at the same time, share data about how kids are doing and meet frequently:

Being open and sharing problems has helped Euclid zero in on solutions. Teachers realized that their kids were tripping over the word "which" on tests because they had only been exposed to "what" or "that." So they started teaching "which," a simple step they might have otherwise overlooked. (Second grade teacher Starla) Ortiz saw that another teacher had knockout homework assignments, so she copied them. Data about how kids are doing, including scores for each grade level, are publicly posted. It all hinges on trust.

(National Center for Urban School Transformation Director Joseph) Johnson said that trust is one of the key ingredients in surprisingly successful schools: Teachers focus on getting kids to master their classes, not just finish them. They work together and share problems and successes. They back each other up — but they don't let each other slack off. While reformers often talk about school accountability, Johnson said, they often fail to understand how school culture can be a powerful form of social accountability. Teachers don't want to let fellow teachers down.

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The Stephen Jay Gould Prize Evolution Society

Evolution Society

The Stephen Jay Gould Prize

Dr. Kenneth R. Miller

The Stephen Jay Gould Prize is awarded annually by the Society for the Study of Evolution to recognize individuals whose sustained and exemplary efforts have advanced public understanding of evolutionary science and its importance in biology, education, and everyday life in the spirit of Stephen Jay Gould.

The winner of the 2011 Stephen Jay Gould Prize is Kenneth R. Miller, a Professor of Biology at Brown University. Through his writings, teaching and appearances in court, Dr. Miller has proved an eloquent and passionate defender of evolution and the scientific method. Dr. Miller received his PhD in Biology from the University of Colorado and taught from 1974 to 1980 at Harvard University. While at Harvard he frequently interacted with and was inspired by Stephen Jay Gould. He first became aware of antievolutionism as a beginning professor at Brown University. His passion and skill at rebutting the claims of creationists eventually led him to serve as a key witness in several important and high-profile evolution-creationist court cases, including the well-known Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School Districtcase in 2005, the decision for which effectively forestalled further attempts to mandate the teaching of intelligent design in high school science curricula. Dr. Miller is also well known for his widely used high-school biology textbook, Biology, co-authored with Joseph Levine. With its strong unifying theme

A talk to parents: Why laptops? | Dangerously Irrelevant | Big Think

A talk to parents: Why laptops? | Dangerously Irrelevant | Big Think

A talk to parents: Why laptops?

Scott McLeod on April 29, 2011, 10:24 AM

You’re about to hand laptops over to their 12– and 13–year-old children. What do you tell your school’s parents? Here are some excerpts from what Rob McCrae, ICT Director for the Diocesan School for Girls in Auckland, New Zealand, told his…

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“Most of us went through school and, by and large, succeeded. When we had education done to us, we experienced what I call the "just in case model" of education. We learned things just in case they might be useful. Just in case they might be on the test. Just in case we might look for a job in that area. Just in case you might study physics later on.

And a key reason that education developed this model was that the predominant mode of

The Perils of Favoring Consistency over Validity: Are “bad” VAMS more “consistent” than better ones? « School Finance 101

The Perils of Favoring Consistency over Validity: Are “bad” VAMS more “consistent” than better ones? « School Finance 101

The Perils of Favoring Consistency over Validity: Are “bad” VAMS more “consistent” than better ones?

by schoolfinance101

This is another stat-geeky researcher post, but I’ll try to tease out the practical implications. This post comes about partly, though not directly in response to a new Brown Center/Brookings report on evaluating teacher evaluation systems. From that report, by an impressive team of authors, one can tease out two apparent preferences for evaluation systems, or more specifically for any statistical component of those evaluation systems to be based on student assessment scores.

1. A preference to isolate as precisely as statistically feasible, the influence of the teacher on student test score gains;
2. A preference to have a statistical rating of teacher effectiveness that is relatively consistent from year to year (where the more consistent models still aren’t particularly consistent).

While there shouldn’t necessarily be a conflict between identifying the best model of teacher effects and having a model that is reliable over time, I would argue that the pressure to achieve the second objective above may lead researchers – especially those developing models for direct application in school districts – to make

Schools Matter: Rick Snyder Targets 23 Michigan School Districts for Privatization

Schools Matter: Rick Snyder Targets 23 Michigan School Districts for Privatization

Rick Snyder Targets 23 Michigan School Districts for Privatization

If you still know anyone who doubts that handing over our public schools to Wall Streetwalkers is a huge component of of the anti-democracy movement's agenda in the U. S., send them this clip. No, Jerry Bracey was not a prophet, he had a helluva sense of smell.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

4LAKids - some of the news that doesn't fit: L.A. MIDDLE SCHOOL STUDENTS PROTEST PROPOSED CUTS TO MUSIC PROGRAM

4LAKids - some of the news that doesn't fit: L.A. MIDDLE SCHOOL STUDENTS PROTEST PROPOSED CUTS TO MUSIC PROGRAM

L.A. MIDDLE SCHOOL STUDENTS PROTEST PROPOSED CUTS TO MUSIC PROGRAM la tIMES | http://lat.ms/aqgFbE April 28, 2011 | 9:21 am Aly Ung, left, and Xavier Zapata, giving a shout, take part in a demonstration outside Florence Nightingale Middle School, in the Cypress Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. The ...

BROWN VOWS TO FIGHT FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION FUNDING AT PTA CONVENTION By GILLIAN FLACCUS Associated Press/FROM THE SAN JOSE MURCURY NEWS |http://bit.ly/kFHpdg 04/28/2011 06:56:55 PM PDT - LONG BEACH, Calif.—Gov. Jerry Brown on Thursday vowed to fight to protect public education funding as he worked to wrangle a deal with ...

GOVERNOR BROWN JOINS THOUSANDS TO CONNECT FOR KIDS AT KICKOFF OF ANNUAL PTA CONVENTION PTA PRESS RELEASE PRESS RELEASE: April 28, 2011 For Immediate Release Contacts: Linda Mayo Vice President for Communications (916) 261-1715 communications@capta.org Alison apRoberts Communications Manager (916) 261-5286 ...

ASCD Inservice: For the Love of Learning

ASCD Inservice: For the Love of Learning

For the Love of Learning

"Teachers who blame students for being bored is the equivalent to yelling at the hammer after you strike your own thumb," declares Joe Bower, the man behind the convention-bucking blog For the Love of Learning.

At the heart of Bower's writing is a desire to rethink some of our most commonly held assumptions about teaching and learning in an effort to become more effective educators. Posts like "Blaming the Kids" challenge teachers to look inward at their own classroom practices, while "The Suits" explores the importance of experienced-based leadership and the problems with over-reliance on data.

A proponent of abolishing grading and rethinking homework, Bower nicely organizes his posts into handy tables of contents so that readers can quickly access his many posts on these controversial topics. If you're in the market for a thought-provoking read from a clearly devoted educator, this blog is worth the visit.

Schools Matter: Harvard's Ed Doctoral Students Protest Dumping of Social Justice Scholar

Schools Matter: Harvard's Ed Doctoral Students Protest Dumping of Social Justice Scholar

Harvard's Ed Doctoral Students Protest Dumping of Social Justice Scholar

by Jim Horn

When Gary Orfield moved the Civil Rights Project from Harvard to UCLA, that move acknowledged a major shift that had been going on for a long time at Harvard's Graduate School of Education. Simply put, Harvard's GSE is more aligned today with William Bennett than Harvard alum, William James.

I congratulate the brave doctoral students who have begun an increasingly vocal protest to call for a return to research on social concerns at Harvard, rather than a laser focus on economic ones. Doctoral students are also calling for a return to human research using qualitative methods rather than the abstracted empiricism used to dote on the dumbest of data, test scores. But even more troubling to future scholars at Harvard is the dumping of scholars committed to social justice research agendas. The latest denial of tenure to Mark Warren was the

Education: A Profit Making Endeavor for Some « A "Fuller" Look at Education Issues

Education: A Profit Making Endeavor for Some « A "Fuller" Look at Education Issues

Education: A Profit Making Endeavor for Some

by Dr. Ed Fuller

OPINION PIECE:

I have become increasingly concerned with the trend in education of privatizing services and for-profit companies entering education with the sole purpose of making a profit. Profits by themselves are not bad, but often the goal of the company or organization is to maximize profits rather than to do what is best for the “customer”–in this case, students, parents, teachers, and administrators.

This is one reason I am uneasy about Charter schools. We have too many examples of charter schools in Texas reaping large incomes for those running the charters with absolutely no evidence whatsoever of any educational benefits to the students. Remember the charter school that falsified enrollment data and absconded with all the money without actually educating any children?

Here is the latest! Education Week is reporting that the Gates Foundation and Pearson (Yes, the company that makes and scores the TAKS), is now offering complete curricula and professional development for teachers that is aligned with the common core standards. So, the Gates Foundation uses its money and influence to push

Jersey Jazzman: Crazy Uncle Paul Gets Dumberer

Jersey Jazzman: Crazy Uncle Paul Gets Dumberer

Crazy Uncle Paul Gets Dumberer

by Duke

On most days, if you asked me who the biggest dumb-ass in New Jersey is, I'd say Bob "Hoover" Ingle.

Every now and then, however, Paul Mulshine puts down the crazy and picks up the stupid:

Nothing amuses me more than the tendency of my readers to defend public schools.

There is no defense. Imagine if the computer industry were like the education industry. We'd still be using Commodore 64's. But now we'd be paying $3,000 for a computer that cost $1,000 when it was new 30 years ago.

That's the public school system - only worse.

Believe it or not, the annual per-pupil cost of education in this state in 1970 was a

Daniel McMeen: Exam scores belie idea that unions bad for education

Daniel McMeen: Exam scores belie idea that unions bad for education

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Daniel McMeen | Posted: Friday, April 29, 2011 4:15 am

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Dear Editor: We’ve all heard the idea that teachers’ unions protect bad teachers and thusworsen the quality of education. But here is a report that is hard to reconcile with that theory: Michael Moore, a professor at Georgia Southern University has reported that the five states that have outlawed collective bargaining for teachers have some of the worst performance results for their high school graduates. The results are as follows, with rankings for high school seniors taking the SAT and ACT college entrance exams:

South Carolina 50th

North Carolina 49th

Georgia 48th

Texas 47th

Virginia 44th

In contrast, states that allow collective bargaining show up at the other end of the spectrum; for example Iowa and Minnesota tied at first place, and Wisconsin in second place.

In light of the above facts, I would sincerely appreciate it if someone would explain to me how collective