A new report by LFA and Grunwald Associates, with support from AT&T, examines how parents perceive the value of mobile devices, how they see their children using mobiles, and what they think of the possibilities for mobile learning.
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The October 10, 2012, edition of Education Week features a commentary titled “Public Schools: Glass Half Full or Half Empty?” with both disturbing and hopeful statistics on public education in the United States. The most disturbing part of the article describes the results of a recent Gallup poll showing that public confidence in public K-12 education has fallen to 29 percent – a drop of 29 percentage points from 1973, when Gallup first began including public schools in its survey and public confidence in schools measured 58 percent. The irony in this dismal lack of confidence in such a crucial public institution is that an analysis of performance data on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP—the “nation’s report card”) and high school dropout rates shows that results have actually improved over the past two decades.
NAEP scores for both 4th and 8th graders have been trending upward since the 1970s. Compared with an average scale score of 219 in 1973 for 4th graders, 2008’s average scale score of 243 represents significant progress in math performance. The illustrative graphs included in the Education Week article provide a dramatic visual to illustrate this trend and ...
A new report, Democratic School Turnarounds: Pursuing Equity and Learning from Evidence, suggests that government agencies and policy-makers, including the U.S. Department of Education, should rely more on research to guide their efforts in school reform and turnaround strategies. The report, authored by Tina Trujillo at the University of California, Berkeley and Michelle Renee of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University, and produced by the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) at the University of Colorado, Boulder, asserts that research shows that the top-down, punitive reform efforts that are currently in vogue are ineffective and cause more harm than good in turning around troubled schools.
While the current administration’s efforts to improve troubled schools are well-meaning, the reform strategies mandated destabilize schools and exacerbate the problems troubled schools already exhibit of high staff turnover and frequent change in leadership. The administration’s efforts to turn around 5,000 of the nation’s lowest performing schools through creation of the federal School Improvement Grant program (SIG) channeled increased federal dollars into states and struggling schools under the condition that a narrow choice of ...
With the recent release of the movie Won’t Back Down and the high-profile Chicago teacher union strike, it seems US public education is, once again, getting negative coverage in the mainstream media, with parents pitted against teachers or teachers pitted against administrators. Committed education professionals, in their advocacy on behalf of our nation’s public schools, continually highlight the importance of collaboration among teachers, administrators, parents and community members when it comes to ensuring high-performing public schools. The belief is that we are all in this endeavor together and we each have an important role to play. One inspiring example of effective parent-teacher engagement can be found in the Academic Parent-Teacher Teams (APTT) model. ...
Few would argue with the notion that public education in America needs to improve to ensure that our country remains prosperous in the coming years. And we should look wherever we can for ideas on how we can increase student achievement for each child in the nation.
One possible source for these ideas: charter schools. Last week, the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution released “Learning from the Successes and Failures of Charter Schools,” in which Roland Fryer discusses his efforts to learn what works in the world of charter schooling and implement it in traditional public schools.
By studying 35 charter schools of varying performance levels in New York City, Fryer and his colleagues identified five practices that are consistently found in higher-achieving schools and that together explain roughly half the difference in effectiveness between charter schools:
- More human capital (how often schools give teachers feedback on their instructional practice)
- Data-driven instruction (whether teachers alter instruction to
...
NBC is to be commended for its support of the third annual Education Nation Summit, a gathering of leaders from government, education and business in New York City this week to consider the challenges and future outlook for America’s public education system. And, to be sure, included in this year’s event were a handful of case studies of real schools and districts that are successfully addressing challenging problems and finding solutions that support student growth and success. For me, the most impressive and knowledgeable presenters about public schooling, student achievement and local realities were the educators themselves, who displayed a thoughtful, articulate approach to their work and provided practical, solution-oriented initiatives that are proving successful in meeting the needs of an increasingly diverse student population.
So, the good news is that the Summit featured impressive public educators and education researchers who provided real world information and experience to the event. On the down side, too many of the program presenters were people famous in other walks of life whose contributions to the education conversation provided little value. This is not to say that former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice doesn’t have a compelling personal story about ...
The purple shaded area in a Venn diagram of two overlapping circles – one blue and one red – is the sometimes uneasy but always necessary connection between traditional public schools and the business community. The extent to which healthy public-private partnerships develop depends entirely on how those partnerships are ultimately managed by those at the local level.
It’s not surprising that public schools and businesses may have an inherent distrust of each other. After all, their missions are very different; public schools exist to provide every child a quality education and businesses exist to make a profit. But the economic recession is forcing schools to do more with less, which is in turn pushing more districts to look at ways to finance their operations, including by forming partnerships with businesses and other community stakeholders that may not have existed in the past. ...
The Democratic National Convention is currently taking place in Charlotte, North Carolina and the Republican National Convention just wrapped in Tampa last week. It’s a presidential election year and the majority of dialogue, consequently, revolves around the national political scene – from the implications of veep picks and endorsements to super PAC contributions and the influence of political ads. Certainly, inside the Beltway, organizations and entities are caught up in a fierce dialogue around two competing visions for the country. Local contests, school board elections for instance, are just one casualty of the national hype, yet they are crucial to the vitality of our democracy.
We know that only a very small percent of registered voters typically participate in local school board elections. Lack of information is a significant explanatory factor for low voter participation in school board elections. First, what do school boards do? Who can be elected? And when are elections? (You might not be able to vote for your school board at the same time as you vote for President.) It’s not unusual, according to ...
In the August 19, 2012, edition of my home town paper The Washington Post, the Opinion page featured a column by James C. Roumell, founder of Roumell Asset Management, LLC, titled “What I built with government help.”
In his column, Roumell described growing up in a working class family in Detroit with a single mother who supported them with a unionized job with decent pay made possible by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. Roumell subsequently went to college with the help of Pell Grants and government loans made possible by the Higher Education Act of 1965. His now successful business was made possible by the Investment Company Act of 1940 and the Investment Advisers Act of 1940. ...
Change is hard – something that those in the education community may know better than most. Whether it is changing a school culture, a child’s life prospects, policymakers’ thoughts on accountability, or voters’ minds on a bond referendum, educators are constantly on the lookout for evidence that they are succeeding as change agents. Sometimes that evidence seems scarce, particularly at a national level, as policymakers push education in ways we don’t always like and rhetoric indicates that we are to blame for a great number of society’s problems.
So as I read through the results of the 44th annual Phi Delta Kappa (PDK)/Gallup Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools, I was on the lookout for evidence that we are succeeding in changing the conversation around public schools in this nation. And I was pleased to see that (while not always in the direction I personally would advocate) American’s views on public education are evolving.
The Biggest Problem Facing Schools
The first question asked on the poll each year is an open-ended one: What do you think are the biggest problems that the public schools of your community must ...
Remember the Super Committee? Formally known as the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, it was a bipartisan congressional committee established by the Budget Control Act of 2011 tasked with identifying $1.2 trillion in federal budgetary savings (through spending cuts, revenue increases and program reforms) over ten years.
If you remember the Super Committee, you also remember that it failed. And the consequence of that failure is looming on the horizon: Sequestration.
Sequestration refers to the across-the-board budget cuts of approximately nine percent that are scheduled to take effect on January 2, 2013. It is a blunt instrument, applying budget cuts to all discretionary spending programs, from defense to education and medical research to housing, regardless of program effectiveness or return on investment.
The most widely discussed aspect of sequestration is cuts to defense spending. Almost immediately after the Super Committee failed, talks began among some lawmakers as to how sequestration could be reformed to ...
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A VISION FOR GREAT SCHOOLS
On this website, educators, parents and policymakers from coast to coast are sharing what's already working in public schools--and sparking a national conversation about how to make it work for children in every school. Join the conversation!
