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President Obama's address on education yesterday elicited general cheers and jeers, but most discussion revolved around his call to "reward excellence in teaching with extra pay."
While supporters and critics of test-based pay-for-performance programs duel over the exact meaning of the President's words, Barnett Berry offers a welcome dose of reality: ...
The argument about 21st-century skills is heating up, with critics issuing a volley of op-eds and press releases warning against a disastrous retreat from academic content knowledge. In the hands of the national media, this debate might well amplify the phony opposition between knowledge and skills--and that's bad news for everyone.
The debate itself is substantive and complex. After all, the relationship between knowledge and skills is hardly simple, and that fact has profound implications for teaching and learning.
Unfortunately, many national commentators on education don't have much stomach for nuance, so we should probably brace ourselves for some well-worn caricatures. Any defender of content knowledge will be a soulless drone who traffics in facts the way a hardware salesman traffics in bolts or hinges. Any 21st-century skills proponent will be a wild-eyed revolutionary who yearns to toss centuries of human knowledge onto the bonfires.
Some of these caricatures are already appearing in editorial pages of major newspapers. That's too bad, because they risk derailing important ...
Linda Darling-Hammond remains a convenient bogeyman for too many education commentators looking to score cheap political points. That's unfortunate, because they make constructive debates about important education issues all but impossible.
Most recently, Kathleen Madigan cast Darling-Hammond as the chief vice in her education reform morality play: "A debate is raging about the future of academic standards in American public education," she writes: ...
Some radical reform zealots have used America's standing in international comparisons of student achievement to justify all manner of miracle-cure education reform propositions. (Abolish school boards! Abolish school districts! Abolish school buildings!)
Cooler heads have looked beyond mere rankings to examine practices common to the most successful countries. Most recently, Achieve, the National Governors Association and the Council for Chief State School Officers released a report on such practices.
As I read it, Benchmarking for Success offers some important (if implicit) lessons for reformers:
- Beware miracle cures that have little to do with what gets taught and how it gets taught;
- Seek coherence rather than erratic, disjointed interventions;
- Build public schools' capacity for success.
The report offers more specific recommendations for creating a world-class public education system. Here are a few highlights: ...
Dr. Susan B. Neuman has received much media attention recently as the apostate former Bush administration official who publicly opposes No Child Left Behind in its current form. As the Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education who presided over NCLB's early implementation, she certainly made waves by arguing that schools alone cannot close achievement gaps.
But Neuman has received less attention for her affirmative vision of what we can do to improve poor students' odds dramatically. Her new book, Changing the Odds for Children at Risk, lays out "seven essential principles of educational programs that break the cycle of poverty." On Wednesday, she talked to me about her book and her thoughts on current education policy.
The book uses extensive research on child development and effective programs to make the case for responsible, substantive investment in areas such as early care and education, comprehensive family supports, and after-school. (Not surprisingly, Neuman was an early signer of the "Broader, Bolder Approach to Education," a manifesto urging investment in more comprehensive supports for students' well-being.)
Neuman's thoughts on accountability deserve particular attention. She has famously criticized NCLB's accountability regime for emphasizing sanctions over support, but she is no critic of rigorous accountability. Rather, she argues that accountability structures should ensure sound program goals, adequate resources, timely course corrections, and strong outcomes.
You can download the entire interview here or listen to six minutes of interview highlights:
...
The new results of the 2007 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) seem at first blush very encouraging. U.S. 4th and 8th graders improved in mathematics, though their science performance remained essentially flat. In fact, improvement in U.S. 8th-graders' mathematics scores outpaced that of students in most other participating countries.
In 8th-grade science, apparently only Singapore and Taiwan outperformed Massachusetts.
Cause for celebration? Not so fast, says Mark Schneider from the American Institutes for Research. He points to yawning achievement gaps laid bare by the TIMSS results. He also notes that some high-performing OECD countries that bested the U.S. in the 2007 Programme for International Assessment did not participate in TIMSS, possibly skewing the results. ...
Time Magazine's cover story about Michelle Rhee is lighting up the blogosphere. One particular passage from the story is attracting special attention:
“The thing that kills me about education is that it’s so touchy-feely,” she tells me one afternoon in her office. Then she raises her chin and does what I come to recognize as her standard imitation of people she doesn’t respect.... “People say, ‘Well, you know, test scores don’t take into account creativity and the love of learning,’” she says with a drippy, grating voice, lowering her eyelids halfway. Then she snaps back to herself. “I’m like, ‘You know what? I don’t give a crap.’ Don’t get me wrong. Creativity is good and whatever. But if the children don’t know how to read, I don’t care how creative you are. You’re not doing your job.”
This quotation clearly unsettles Core Knowledge blogger Robert Pondiscio, who counts himself a supporter of many reforms Rhee champions. He worries that her bare-knuckles manner will backfire, and he objects that good teachers are by definition "touchy-feely."
I share his concern, and I'll add another. Are we so sure champions of standardized test data are NOT touchy-feely? Do current standardized assessment systems really offer reliable, objective ...
This cloak-and-dagger headline from Sunday’s Columbus Dispatch appears above an unexpectedly tame--though heartening--story about innovative teacher professional development in Ohio.
Apparently, some Ohio districts are using “value-added analysis” of student achievement data to guide school improvement and professional development efforts. The data allow teachers to estimate their impact on students’ academic progress from one year to the next. Teachers and principals can use these data to improve individual teachers’ practice.
The scores are “secret,” because neither the state nor Battelle for Kids, the private non-profit that supplies the teacher-specific data, are authorized to make them public. Administrators may not use the data to fire teachers. They do use them, however, to determine what teachers can do to improve their ...
At a conference last Monday, Geoffrey Canada raised a very important concern: In a sputtering economy, funders' single-minded focus on reading and math results could spell disaster for vital education programs. Canada pointed out a glaring double standard:
We're giving huge amounts of money to people who admit that not only have they failed but they almost destroyed the whole economic system of the world. Then somebody asks me if kids should take violin and do I have evidence?! [via the Core Knowledge Blog and Gotham City Schools]
The temptation to divest from anything that doesn't immediately inflate math and reading scores will grow as budgets shrink. Canada reminds us that divestment will create trouble over the long haul.
For years, business leaders have offered public educators all manner of advice--some for better, some for worse. Here, too, we can learn a valuable lesson from the business world: That an exclusively short-term "results-oriented" ...
DC think tank Education Sector just released an important new white paper on "Measuring Skills for the 21st Century." Here are some major points that grabbed my attention: ...
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