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Empowering Professionals
Blog Entries
Dave Eggers found sudden and early fame when his 2000 Memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, quite nearly won the Pulitzer Prize. Since then, he has produced a prodigious body of work in both fiction and non-fiction, cementing his position as one of the nation's best young writers.
Eggers has also made a name for himself among public educators by founding and promoting 826 National, a
network of 8 urban writing programs that offer tutoring to thousands of American students.
Recently, while fighting off a nasty infection, Eggers generously made time to tell me about the program, his strategy for motivating reluctant writers, and his plan to advocate for public school teachers.
Over the next week, Public School Insights will publish the interview in several installments. In today's installment, Eggers describes 826 National, its use of community resources, and its collaboration with public schools in the San Francisco Bay area. ...
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. ...
Teacher, author, and Huffington Post blogger Dan Brown sent me the following explanation of his remarks on the dangerous, yet increasingly common, assumption that education reform requires "de-Baathification" of American public education: ...
I've been following Ed in '08's Blogger's Summit out of the corner of my eye. A sentence from Alexander Russo's most recent posting from the Summit caught my attention: "Blogger, teacher, and author Dan Brown has asked the most intense questions so far--one about high stakes testing and the about the dangers of taking an extreme de-Bathification approach to bypassing educators."
While the "de-baathification" reference raises an unwelcome comparison between educators and Iraqi Baathists, the broader point--the danger of attempts to pursue education reform without the educators--deserves attention. I look forward to reading about the answers to Brown's questions.
Update (5/16/08)
Well, I expected to read a flood of blog postings on Dan Brown's question, but, as Assorted Stuff remarks, the Edin08 Blogger Summit spawned precious few blog postings--and next to nothing on "de-Baathification." I guess I'll have have to ask Dan himself. Bear with me. ...
The National Association of Secondary School Principals has just released a new position statement on "Professional Compensation for Teachers." Though the statement's authors carefully avoid openly endorsing such systems, they describe their statement as "a template for states and districts considering the implementation of such systems."
The statement's guiding principles are too numerous to list here, but at least three warrant special notice: ...
Yesterday, the Council of Chief State School Officers named Michael Geison the 2008 Teacher of the Year. We at Public School Insights are quite happy with the choice, because Geison personifies the best of 21st-century education. He tailors his instruction to individual students' interests and needs, he engages them in hands-on work, and he promotes greater collaboration among members of the school community.
(We're talking about the guy in the middle.)
CCSSO executive director Gene Wilhoit clearly agrees: ...
On this 25th anniversary of Nation at Risk, a chorus of education commentators has lamented that
serious problems persist even after a quarter century of education reform. Rather than allow such gloomy assessments to stifle faith in reform, we should consider this oddly reassuring point: We've sooner pantomimed than truly enacted the most promising reforms. Many of our best systemic reform ideas have yet to be thoroughly tested on a large scale. ...
Just last week, the Forum for Education and Democracy issued an important report on the federal role in K-12 education: Democracy at Risk: The Need for a New Federal Policy in Education. With its obvious nod to Nation at Risk, the publication joins a long line of reports that raise the alarm over American students' declining standing in international assessments. Unlike many of those reports, however, Democracy at Risk strongly criticizes recent reform efforts' almost exclusive focus on "mandates and sanctions." ...
Stephanie Hirsh and Joellen Killion of the National Staff Development Council have written a must-read Education Week Commentary calling for far greater national commitment to professional learning. Already in their first paragraph, they drive home a point Public School Insights has been harping on lately: namely, that recent education reform efforts have squandered much of their promise by focusing more on incentives (or disincentives) than on continuous support for excellent instruction. Hirsh and Killion write: ...
Where There's a Will, There's a Way
If you haven't heard of Will Steger, you should have.
He mounted the first unsupported dogsled expedition to the North Pole, the longest unsupported dogsled trek
in history (1,600 miles through Greenland), the first dogsled expedition across Antarctica (all 3,471 miles) and the first Antarctic crossing on foot (!). Along the way, he has witnessed at close hand the dramatic effects of rapid climate change in some of the world's remotest places. He recently spoke with Public School Insights about his ongoing work to share the impact of climate change with K-12 teachers and students nationwide. ...
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