Friday, January 6, 2012
Today's Big Education Ape - PostRank Top Late Nite Posts #edreform #ows
Why I Am A Liberal | Addicting Info
Why I Am A Liberal
Why I Am A Liberal
“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.” ~ Greek proverb
I saw this posted on a reader’s page (thanks, Rita!) and I realized it perfectly summed up why I am a Liberal. Conservatives like to paint liberals as lazy, greedy people intent on taking away their freedoms and money. That’s bullshit. That’s not what being a Liberal is about. Being a Liberal is about making sure everyone gets a fair shake. Being a Liberal is about sharing with everybody our good fortune or relying on others when our fortunes are bad. Being Liberal is about pulling together, not just when a disaster strikes a community but when it strikes the individual in their everyday life.
School Tech Connect: I'm With Michelle On This One
I'm With Michelle On This One
The first lady never confronted the advisers directly — that was not her way — but they found out about her displeasure from the president. “She feels as if our rudder isn’t set right,” Mr. Obama confided, according to aides.
Rahm Emanuel, then chief of staff, repeated the first lady’s criticisms to colleagues with indignation, according to three of them. Mr. Emanuel, in a brief interview, denied that he had grown frustrated with Mrs. Obama, but other advisers described a grim situation: a president whose
“The message is to fire people sooner rather than later” | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…
“The message is to fire people sooner rather than later”
The headline for this post is from a researcher quoted in today’s front page article in The New York Times headlined Big Study Links Good Teachers to Lasting Gain.
Here are some quotes from this ringing endorsement of using value-added measures to evaluate teachers:
Replacing a poor teacher with an average one would raise a single classroom’s lifetime earnings by about $266,000, the economists estimate. Multiply that by a career’s worth of classrooms.
“If you leave a low value-added teacher in your school for 10 years, rather than replacing him with an average teacher, you are hypothetically talking about $2.5 million in lost income,” said Professor Friedman, one of the
Sticks, carrots, and familiar policies in state’s NCLB waiver plan | GothamSchools
Sticks, carrots, and familiar policies in state’s NCLB waiver plan
New York will get new terms for high- and low-performing schools — and new ways to define good and bad performance — under a proposed accountability plan designed to replace the requirements of No Child Left Behind.
The proposal, which was released in draft form late today and will be discussed by the Board of Regents on Monday, is the result of two months of planning in response to the Obama administration’s offer to waive some of the decade-old federal law’s requirements, including one that requires full proficiency by 2014. In exchange, states must to commit to prioritizing college readiness, setting guidelines for teacher and principal evaluations,
Here We Go Again « InterACT
Here We Go Again
Big news today in education policy and research – or was it?
- The Gates Foundation-funded Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project continues to update its research findings, and continues to argue that standardized tests and value-added measurement would be useful in teacher evaluations. (Washington Post article).
- A study by Harvard and Columbia researchers uses value-added measures to quantify the effects of good teaching in various outcomes for students, well into adulthood. (NY Times article)
A friend of mine sent a Facebook message this morning to ask what I thought of the latter study, but let me say a bit about each of them. In both cases, I remain skeptical regarding the use of standardized tests to suggest so much about students and teachers. In the MET project, I actually like much of what I’ve seen reported and summarized regarding their work. We should definitely pursue ongoing rather than intermittent evaluations, the involvement of multiple evaluators, and try to find ways to include student feedback. If reformers and politicians would compromise on the use of standardized tests, we would overcome the main policy obstacle in teacher evaluation reform efforts and find much to agree on. I share Randi Weingarten’s concern, however, that as long



