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.
District wide strategies
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A new article in the January issue of School Administrator examines a concept conspicuously absent from many recent reform discussions: transparency. The article profiles four school districts whose "openness" and "ongoing communication with the public" helped them win critical bond and finance elections. All four received Gold Medallion awards from the National School Public Relations Association.
The school districts won public support by reaching out to their communities. They learned about the public's aspirations and concerns, and they gave the public a stronger voice in decision-making. They also became much more open about how they spent their money, dispelling common public concerns that public schools will squander any new dose of funds.
School districts that use this approach can point to more than just victories at the polls. They boast stronger, more sustained public engagement in their work, which can in turn fuel critical gains in ...
Like others in the media, David Brooks is composing an epic about a battle for Barack Obama's soul. It's the education "reformers" against the education "establishment." The good guys against the bad guys.
This may make for good copy, but it certainly doesn't help his readers come to grips with the complexity of challenges facing public education. (Indeed, Brooks himself doesn't always know what side he's on.)
Take, for example, the question of "merit pay for good teachers," which Brooks characterizes as a major weapon in the reformers' arsenal. The Quick and the Ed, a blog that has been nothing if not supportive of performance pay for teachers, just posted a long piece on the unreliability of the "value added" student performance measures central to most proposed performance pay systems. In other words, current measures of teacher quality offer an unstable foundation for teacher compensation decisions.
Should we therefore abandon the question? Of course not. But we should at least acknowledge that this reform, like most others, involves difficult tradeoffs and real risks. It is possible to have principled ...
Larry Cuban's thoughtful op-ed in Sunday's Washington Post has received remarkably little attention in the education blogosphere. That's surprising, because he assesses the performance of DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, whose name is usually catnip to education bloggers everywhere.
Cuban argues that Rhee is a sprinter in a world where marathon runners are most likely to succeed. He faults her and other sprinters for attempting to tackle the unions far too early while paying little attention to other critical ingredients of long-term school reform:
[Sprinters] suffer from ideological myopia. They believe low test scores and achievement gaps between whites and minorities result in large part from knuckle-dragging union leaders defending seniority and tenure rights that protect lousy teachers. Such beliefs reflect a serious misreading of why urban students fail to reach proficiency levels and graduate from high school.
As important as it is to get rid of incompetent teachers, doing so will not turn around the D.C. school system or any other broken district. The failure of urban schools has more to do with turnstile superintendencies, partially implemented standards and other ...
Tackling "the Empowerment Gap": An Interview with Jefferson County, KY Superintendent Shelley Berman
As the celebrated superintendent of Hudson, Massachusetts schools, Dr. Sheldon Berman distinguished himself as one of the nation's leading champions of civic education. Since coming to Louisville, Kentucky a year ago, Berman has maintained his passionate commitment to civics, though he has altered his approach somewhat to meet the specific needs of students in his large urban district.
Berman recently spoke with us about his work in Jefferson County Public Schools. He told us about the impact of No Child Left Behind on civics education, the consequences of the "Empowerment Gap" for low-income students, and the implications of this historic presidential election for civics education.
Download the full, 15-minute interview here, or listen to five minutes of highlights:
A number of blogs have recently picked up the trailer for Whatever it Takes, a documentary about a high-performing urban school in the Bronx. If the 10-minute trailer is any indication, the film will be powerful and inspiring. Still, like many fictional or documentary films that celebrate a set of heroic students and educators working against all odds, the film raises some important questions.
For one, we should be careful not to absolve entire systems--school systems, communities, voters and policymakers--of their shared responsibility towards the nation's most vulnerable children. After all, it takes systemic solutions--advanced through collaboration among leaders, front-line educators, communities and, yes, policymakers--to spread the wealth beyond disconnected islands of excellence. (Indeed, the Learning First Alliance report Beyond Islands of Excellence focuses on lessons on systemic improvement drawn from five successful districts.) ...
When Krista Parent arrived in rural Cottage Grove, Oregon in the mid 'eighties, it was a timber town whose students regularly dropped out of high school to work in the lumber mills. Academic achievement was not among the community's top priorities. Now, over 20 years later, students in Cottage Grove's South Lane School District perform well above state averages in assessments of reading and mathematics, and the district's high school graduates more than 95% of its students.
We were recently lucky enough to interview Parent about how she and her colleagues at South Lane worked with the community to transform the district's schools. Parent describes how South Lane's educators reached out to their community to transform the academic culture. They attended meetings of civic organizations, parent groups, church groups and other groups that had a stake in the schools' success as the lumber mills fell on hard times. Parent and her colleagues won community members' trust by listening to--and honoring--their aspirations and expectations for their children and their schools. ...
The NEA has just released a major new paper on the federal role in education entitled Great Public Schools for Every Student by 2020.
In doing so, they join a number of other groups that have deemed it high time to clarify the federal role after seven years of NCLB--and before a new administration arrives in January. (See, for example, the recent report by the Forum for Education and Democracy and the even more recent statement released by a distiguished task force calling for a "Broader, Bolder Approach to Education.")
NEA's report begins with the premise that NCLB has thrown the federal role out of whack, creating "top-down, command-and-control, federally prescriptive testing and accountability mandates" that have narrowed curricula, robbed assessment of its power as an instructional tool and failed to close achievement gaps.
With the aim of ensuring universal access to great public schools by 2020, the NEA document outlines six priorities for federal involvement in education: ...
Currently a professor of practice at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, Tom Payzant has been around the educational block. He has served as an Assistant Secretary of Education under President Clinton, and as superintendent of schools in Boston, San Diego, Oklahoma City, Eugene (Oregon), and Springfield (Pennsylvania). In Boston, he was credited with narrowing achievement gaps and presiding over the largest improvement in mathematics scores of any major urban district participating in the National Assessment of Education Progress Trial Urban District Assessment. He has received many leadership awards, including Massachusetts Superintendent of the Year, and published extensively, promoting academic reforms to both professional educators and policymakers. Recently, he also served as co-chair of the task force that released a statement promoting "A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education." ...
Pedro Noguera is a professor at NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, a leading authority on school reform, and a co-chair of the task force that recently released a statement promoting "A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education." As I wrote in an earlier post, the statement calls for policies to reduce the educational, economic and social disadvantages that depress the academic achievement of our most vulnerable students.
Noguera recently took some time to tell me about the content and goals of the task force's work, and to address criticisms of the statement that have been circulating through some education policy blogs: namely, that the task force is letting schools off the hook and shying away from hard-hitting education reforms. ...
On Friday, The Center on Reinventing Public Education and Education Sector released a new report detailing how federal, state and local school funding policies conspire to enrich schools that already have money and further impoverish schools that don't.
The report begins with a comparison of two elementary schools of similar size that enroll mostly low-income students: Cameron Elementary School in Virginia and Ponderosa Elementary in North Carolina. One crucial difference between the schools: Cameron receives approximately $14,040 in combined federal, state and local per-pupil funding, and Ponderosa receives only $6,773. Not surprisingly, Cameron teachers earn much more money than their counterparts at Ponderosa, Cameron attracts and retains many more experienced teachers, Cameron's average class size is substantially smaller, and Cameron's students fare far better on state assessments, meeting or exceeding state averages in mathematics and science. ...
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