Albert Einstein
Organizations will only improve as the people who work there improve their practices. Much of what we currently do in terms of people development is isolated, ever-changing, and rarely related to organizational goals.
How can we begin changing the face of professional development?
Effective professional development occurs at the intersection of meeting both organizational needs and
In "Harry Potter: The Order of the Phoenix" (2007), villain Dolores Umbridge ("You know, I really hate children.") informs Hogwarts students that their course on Defense Against the Dark Arts will be "carefully structured" and all theoretical, with no actual use of the spells. When students complain, Umbridge says " … a theoretical
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Across Atlanta Public Schools, staff worked feverishly in secret to transform testing failures into successes.
Teachers and principals erased and corrected mistakes on students’ answer sheets.
Area superintendents silenced whistle-blowers and rewarded subordinates who met academic goals by any means possible.
Superintendent Beverly Hall and her top aides ignored, buried, destroyed or altered complaints about misconduct, claimed ignorance of wrongdoing and accused naysayers of failing to believe in poor children’s ability to learn.
For years — as long as a decade — this was how the Atlanta school district produced gains on state curriculum tests. The scores soared so dramatically they brought national acclaim to Hall and the district, according to an investigative report released Tuesday by Gov. Nathan Deal.
Sen. Tim Skinner and his wife, Mary Lou, threw in the towel on teaching careers that spanned a combined 46 years after lawmakers passed a series of education changes this year.
A sweeping voucher system, the potential for more charter schools, merit-based pay for teachers and reduced collective bargaining rights left the Terre Haute Democrat with a blunt assessment of legislators' work:
"This last year we got kicked in the teeth every day the General Assembly was in session," said Skinner, who taught government and politics at West Vigo High School until July 1.
Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels and state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett say the changes lawmakers passed this year will position a state whose schools were ranked 14th in the nation by Education Week this year to become a national leader in education.
But Skinner, who had been teaching for 21 years and was close to retiring, contends Daniels and Bennett have left a far different legacy than what they tout.
"His and Tony Bennett's legacy is going to be the destruction of what I think is one of the best public school systems in the nation," he said.
Skinner says the new laws
The Save our Schools March on Washington is looking to get to 1,300 Twitter followers. You can be number 1,300 by going here.
Another day, another Obama cave-in. News is that he won’t appoint Elizabeth Warren to head Consumer agency because of corporate objections.
Schooling in the Ownership Society gives us the list of power philanthropies. Who gives and who gets.
The Chicago Tribune writes the biggest BS piece in all creation about CPS school’s CEO JC Brizard. It’s
As the nation’s schools struggle to thrive and the need for high quality teachers goes unmet there is National Louis University (NLU) who is answering the call one teaching student at a time with its 125 year history producing outstanding educators. Recently it developed a program in Chicago, the Harrison Fellowship, to identify potential educators that can serve their community and who otherwise would not have the opportunity to attend college.
And within the confines of this program there is a Hispanic standout, Arturo Pedraza, who is a teacher extraordinaire in the making.
Arturo, inspired by his older sister who is a teacher and the desire to provide a college-educated role model for his daughter, decided to leave the music business and go to school at the ripe old age of 33. Of course like a lot of aspiring Latino college students there were the realities to contend with, like paying for school and providing for family while going to school full-time. This did not deter Arturo and the community that came together to
July 16, 2011 - A Christian conservative group has begun the process of repealing California's controversial gay history bill.
California Governor Jerry Brown on Thursday signed the measure which mandates the inclusion of the historical contributions of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Americans in the state's textbooks.
Starting as early as the 2013-2014 school year, the FAIR Education Act, sponsored by state Senator Mark Leno, a Democrat, requires the California Board of Education and local school districts to include the curriculum in their lesson plans.
The Associated Press on Friday reported that the Sacramento-based group Capitol Resources Institute has started the process for a statewide vote to overturn the law.
Ditch Testing: Lessons from the Cheating Scandal in Atlanta (Part 1)
Last week a state investigation in Georgia confirmed massive cheating in Atlanta Public Schools. A total of 178 educators in 44 elementary and middle schools in the district were named in the report as participants in cheating on the state’s standardized test mandated by NCLB. This is not the first and certainly won’t be the last case of corruption in the nation’s schools. There are ongoing investigations in many other locales, most recently, Philadelphia. While laying blame on these educators, …
Not an Anomaly: Systemic Ills Caused by Test-based Accountability Policies
Secretary Duncan is not the only who tries to minimize the scale of the problem and reduce it to a technical issue. Chester E. Finn, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. He is a former assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Education under President Ronald Reagan, tries to do same. In his essay entitled Don’t ditch testing after Atlanta cheating, boost test security and published as a CNN special on July …
Ditch Testing: Lessons from the Atlanta Scandal (Part 3): No Technical Fix: Human Nature?
Chester E. Finn says cheating on test scores “is about human nature.” Assuming cheating is human nature, then it would be logical to accept one of two assumptions: a) everyone cheats or has the tendency to cheat or b) some people are more likely to cheat than others by nature. But applying either one to the Atlanta situation raises more questions.
Fact 1: 80% of schools, nearly 200 educators, and 1,508 classes participated in cheating that had been ongoing …
“The answer here is very simple, you just have a culture of integrity and you have better security measures in place,” said Secretary Arne Duncan in response to the Atlanta cheating scandal. Other testing proponents offered similar suggestions. “A culture of integrity” is not easy because of the corruptive power of test-driven accountability as I have discussed in previous posts and “better security measures” will only incur more costs to tax payers without stop cheating.
In response to increased cheating reports, many states have stepped up their test security measures. For …
Walter’s blog archive: http://surfaquarium.com/blog.htm
Mirror site: http://surfaquarium.blogspot.com/2011/07/is-thinking-differently-new-wrong.html
Yes I have my Google+ account and I’ve been slowly easing into it. I still have my Facebook account going strong. And Posterous and Twitter and LinkedIn….each has their role based on design. LinkedIn is streamlined for career development. Twitter disperses significant information in bite-sized chunks. Posterous threads discussion visually and chronologically on a timeline. Facebook is a waterfall of friends, families and colleagues washing down one of several very public walls. And Google+ offers more granularity and exclusivity in managing public and private connections.
This idea of funneling exclusive content from the free-flowing social media spigot is the
“The answer here is very simple, you just have a culture of integrity and you have better security measures in place,” said Secretary Arne Duncan in response to the Atlanta cheating scandal. Other testing proponents offered similar suggestions. “A culture of integrity” is not easy because of the corruptive power of test-driven accountability as I have discussed in previous posts and “better security measures” will only incur more costs to tax payers without stop cheating.
In response to increased cheating reports, many states have stepped up their test security measures. For example, Texas Education Agency (TEA) introduced a 14-point Test Security Plan in 2007.
The plan includes a very broad range of measures to ensure the integrity of the state tests. According to the revised recommendations for implementation of the Plan released by TEA in 2010, tightened test security measures include analyzing scrambled blocks of test questions to detect answer copying, assigning independent test monitors, requiring districts to implement seating charts during tests, using statistical
"We need to be cautious about talking too much about these activities," Dick DeVos warned in a December 2002 speech at the Heritage Foundation. DeVos was introduced by former Secretary of Education William Bennett and then proposed a stealth strategy for promoting school vouchers in state legislatures. DeVos and his wife Betsy had already spent millions promoting voucher initiatives that were soundly rejected by voters. Pro-privatization think tanks had concluded that vouchers were the most politically viable way to "dismantle" public schools; the DeVoses
When the U.S. Department of Education announced the original Race to the Top competition in 2009, critics charged that the administration was rewarding some reform options at the expense of others. States with policies aligned with the administration’s agenda received extra points in the peer review process, so if they wanted a real shot at the billions of federal dollars up for grabs, they had to take legislative action and remove limits on charter schools, reconsider the use of data to evaluate teachers and more.
The new Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC) is likely to take a similar approach – rewarding states that fit the administration’s definition of making progress – if the guidelines announced last week are preserved in the final draft. And the broad strokes are similar too, with foci on effective programs, data, standards and assessment.
Differences emerge in the details, especially because of the major differences in design between birth-to-5 programs and how education is delivered in public schools. By comparing specific priorities within the two competitions, we can start to see that the administration views early education reform as an opportunity for building better infrastructure (creating data systems and multi-domain statewide standards, for example), but places less of a premium on dictating exactly how that infrastructure should be used.
Here’s a side-by-side comparison:
