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.
Empowering Professionals
Blog Entries
The ASCD Inservice blog offers educators five reasons why educators should vote, and they bear repeating. I quote them directly:
- Your vote is uniquely informed by the needs of the hundreds, maybe thousands, of students you have touched. Give them a voice in this election.
- A vote for education is a vote for the economy, national security, and the environment.
- Ensuring that our children are healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged requires the commitment of policymakers. Schools alone cannot accomplish this task.
- By voting, you lead by example and model for your students how to be a responsible and civically engaged citizen.
- The next president and Congress will decide the course of No Child Left Behind.
...
Several commentators have worried that many state plans to achieve universal student proficiency by 2014--a requirement of No Child Left Behind--resemble balloon mortgages. Soon after the law passed in 2002, many states required relatively small student gains in the first years, demanding most of the gains after 2008. The predictable result: More and more schools are falling short of their targets as the 2014 deadline looms. We're told to brace ourselves for the Fannie Mae of NCLB. ...
Dan Brown's riveting memoir of his first year teaching in the Bronx has just come out in paperback. The Great Expectations School: A Rookie Year in the New Blackboard Jungle also includes a new foreward from AFT president Randi Weingarten, who writes:
The Great Expectations School is an honest account of what teachers-- especially new teachers-- face every day. Dan's story is a valuable one to share and analyze, because it is a story that is constantly replayed in various forms in classrooms all across America. Though new teachers like Dan bring optimism and the best of intentions to their work, they are also, alas, too often woefully unprepared for the experiences yet to come.
... ...
The NEA Foundation has just created an easy online application process for grants to support public school educators' innovative work to improve teaching and learning. Just apply here to have a shot at joining the distinguished list of grantees past.
One past grantee used her NEA Foundation money to send students aloft in hot-air balloons and deep into subterranean caverns--all in the name of science. Needless to say, many more students are signing up for her advanced mathematics courses. Read more about her story here. ...
A growing chorus of voices is calling for federal education policies that support, rather than seek to prescribe, good practice. Groups like the Forum for Education and Democracy, the National Education Association and the "Broader, Bolder Approach" Coalition have published manifestos on the federal role in
education. We at the Learning First Alliance joined that chorus on Monday, when we published our own statement on the federal role.
A common thread in these manifestos is that schools generally do their best work if given the capacity to succeed. Yesterday, I came across two vivid examples of this point. ...
Today, the Learning First Alliance (LFA), which sponsors Public School Insights, released a statement calling for a new federal role in supporting success for all American public school children. Transforming the Federal Role in America's Public Schools offers a framework to help a new president, administration, and Congress align federal policies with the needs of America's more than 50 million public school students.
The statement emphasizes support for students in need, as well as more effective and transparent accountability among key players in the system. The principles also call for greater collaboration among the federal government, states and districts. ...
Reading the opinions of some think tank dwellers can get pretty discouraging. Many focus almost all their energies on teacher compensation or hiring models and seldom worry overmuch about how to build teachers' capacity for success.
Luckily, two items yesterday buoyed my spirits.
The first is a current Phi Delta Kappan article by Elena Silva, who attributes the success of Tennessee's Benwood Initiative to strong support for teachers. (See our profile of Chattenooga's "Benwood Schools," which boast impressive, long-term gains in student learning.)
Yes, pay incentives and some new teachers helped. But Silva argues that the district got the biggest bang for its buck from teachers who received "support and recognition from the whole community, resources and tools to improve as professionals, and school leaders who could help them help their students."
According to Silva, supporting teachers already working in low-performing schools pays off: ...
Every couple of weeks, we give our readers an update on new stories we've published about public schools and school districts that are succeeding against tough odds. Here's our most recent batch:
- A Middle School Aims for a Blue Ribbon in Alabama's Black Belt, 10/3/2008
- An Elementary School is Taking Flight in Queens, 9/25/2008
- Partnership of Expertise and Knowledge is Empowering Teachers in a Virginia School District, 9/17/2008
- A Full-Service Elementary School is healing students and communities in New York, 9/9/2008 ...
Imagine a country where no one evaluates teachers, no one evaluates schools, and individual schools' test results remain confidential. You've just imagined Finland, which regularly bests all other developed nations in international assessments of student performance.
How can Finland pull this off without undermining quality? According to Dr. Reijo Laukkanen, a 34-year veteran of Finland's National Board of Education, "We trust our teachers."
In a recent interview with Public School Insights, Laukkanen assured us that this trust is well deserved. Finland draws its teachers from the top 10 percent of college graduates, and teaching regularly beats out law or medicine as a top career choice among high performers. "We can trust that [teachers] are competent," Laukkanen told us; "They know what to do." ...
Even the best-intentioned policies can go off the rails if they don't build the capacity for success. Witness the recent finding from Brookings Institution scholar Tom Loveless that over 100,000 eighth graders currently enrolled in algebra class lack basic arithmetic skills. This is bad news for California, which plans to mandate algebra for all eighth graders. Loveless attributes the rise in innumeracy among algebra students to recent efforts to enroll many more students in advanced math.
Don't get me wrong. I believe many more American students should master algebra by the end of eighth grade. But I also believe that universal algebra policies depend on a host of other supporting reforms. Nancy Flanagan reminds us that teachers must have a strong voice in those reforms: ...
SIGN UP
Sign up for our e-newsletter on public school success.
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!
