Can a few years’ data reveal bad teachers? The New York Times‘ Room for Debate takes on value-added analysis.
‘You can do anything’
January 17, 2012 By 2 Comments
Saturday Night Live celebrates the self-esteem of the YouTube generation in this skit.
Self-esteem is making your kids weak and dumb, warns Gawker.
A bachelor’s isn’t always better
January 17, 2012 By 2 Comments
Texas needs skilled workers with two-year technical degrees, say educators and employers. A bachelor’s isn’t always better.
Also on Community College Spotlight: From jail to a job.
Secondary teachers are smarter
January 16, 2012 By 10 Comments
While would-be elementary teachers have below-average SAT and GRE scores, aspiring secondary subject-matter teachers compare well to other students, writes Education Realist.
The Richwine-Biggs study (pdf), which concludes teachers have lower cognitive skills than workers with similar education levels, combines elementary and secondary teachers, Realist complains.
Secondary teachers specializing in a subject — English, history, math, science — have “much stronger academic histories” than elementary, special education and phys ed teachers, ETS reports (pdf).
Fooling the inspector
January 16, 2012 By 2 Comments
Britain’s school inspectors are easily deceived, writes Theodore Dalrymple in City Journal, citing the Times Educational Supplement.
. . . once the principals know that an inspection is coming, many employ techniques such as paying disruptive pupils to stay home, sending bad pupils on day trips to amusement parks, pretending to take disciplinary action against bad teachers, drafting well-regarded teachers temporarily from other schools, borrowing displays of student work done in other schools, and so forth.
The inspectorate will begin making unannounced inspections.
Britain’s school inspectorate should be a model for the U.S., argues a recent Education Sector report.
High school or college?
January 16, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Michigan’s early college program sends 11th graders to community colleges to take classes, but not necessarily college-level classes.
It’s the curriculum, stupid
January 16, 2012 By 21 Comments
Education reform has ignored curriculum, writes Beverlee Jobrack, a retired editorial director for McGraw-Hill, in Tyranny of the Textbook: An Insider Exposes How Educational Materials Undermine Reforms.
Mediocrity is the norm, according to Jobrack, writes Erik Robelen in Ed Week‘s Curriculum Matters.
• School and district committees for curriculum selection filled with teachers and others who lack the appropriate expertise, motivation, and time to make the best choices;
• State textbook adoptions focused on whether curricular materials meet state standards, line by line, with little or no attention to whether they actually are of high quality and represent a coherent and well-designed instructional approach; and
• A radically consolidated publishing industry, driven by sales and marketing tems, that has “resulted in a dearth of customer choice, a reluctance to innovate, and huge [curricular] programs that are barely distinguishable from one another.”
Graphics win favor. Innovation does not. ”A group of very experienced teachers selects the textbook that is most like what they are already doing so they don’t have to change their lesson plans or procedures,” she writes.
Common standards won’t change teaching and learning “without real and meaningful changes in the curriculum,” Jobrack believes. The industry will resist change, she says in an interview.
“They’re not changing anything in the curriculum. They are simply relabeling. … If there’s anything missing in a textbook series, the publishers will simply add a paragraph or add a lesson to address that particular standard.”
When publishers produce an incoherent, standard-stuffed curriculum, it’s not surprising that teachers cherry-pick what they want to teach and ignore the rest.
Massaging the Regents
January 15, 2012 By 7 Comments
Getting students to pass the Regents exam is “damn near everything,”, writes a Bronx high school teacher in New York Magazine‘s Workplace Confidential.
As teachers, we massage the tests to make sure if a kid is close to passing, he or she does. We don’t take a 30 and make it a 65, but we do our best to make that 62 a 65.
. . . This test is a requirement to pass high school and graduate. If the student doesn’t pass, the parent comes in screaming that he was a mere three points from passing. The principal hears it. Then we hear it. Then he ends up passing anyway. This is the norm. Seniors are the worst, because they feel so entitled that we have to cover our asses nineteen different ways to fail them. There have been stories of guidance counselors’ flat-out changing grades and passing seniors who should have failed but miraculously walked on graduation day.
Teachers are cogs in the system, the anonymous teacher writes.
D.C. may require college application for all
January 15, 2012 By Leave a Comment
All Washington D.C. students would have to take the SAT or ACT and apply to college, proposes Council Chairman Kwame R. Brown. Even students who don’t plan to go to college would have to go through the motions, reports the Washington Post.
Brown said it’s imperative that D.C. public schools, with a drop-out rate of 43 percent, standardize how students view post-secondary education. . . . ”I’m not saying everyone should go to college, but my goodness, we have to get more young folks prepared to go to college if they want to go to college,” Brown said in an interview. “A lot of them don’t even know how to prepare and apply to college.”
Eleven states now require high school students to take the SAT or ACT, Brown said.
It’s a win for the college-industrial complex, writes Jonathan Robe.
Come to think of it, perhaps the way Brown could improve the idea is to force all colleges and universities to be open-enrollment and then mandate all persons apply to college and finally require all colleges to graduate any and all students who enroll. Voilà! Completion problem solved! It all reminds me of the joke that the best way to cure unemployment is to make it illegal to be unemployed.
D.C. hasn’t persuaded all students that it’s important to finish high school.
Cyberbullying or free speech?
The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to hear three cases involving students suspended for malicious online comments.
School boards and principals had hoped for guidance on the clash between free speech and civility, reports the LA Times.
All three students were suspended and filed suit, claiming their free speech rights had been abridged. The two students who charged their principals with misconduct won in the lower courts. The girl who mocked a classmate lost.