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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While the national debate rages over the benefits of early childhood education, an innovative, district-wide early childhood education initiative is bearing fruit in Bremerton, Washington. Since the initiative's founding, the percentage of Bremerton children entering Kindergarten knowing their letters has shot from 4% to over 50%. The percentage of Kindergarteners needing specialized education services has plummeted from 12% to 2%. And the share of first graders reading on grade level has risen from 52% to 73%.
Last week, I spoke with a woman at the center of the program: Linda Sullivan-Dudzic, the district's Director of Special programs. She described some keys to the program's success. The district:
- Aligns existing school and community resources
- Raises the quality of existing preschools rather than creating new ones
- Focuses on literacy and numeracy
- Heeds the research, and
- Holds all providers to high standards of quality
Read extensive highlights from our interview with Sullivan-Dudzic:
PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS: What are the major goals of Early Childhood Care and Education Group, and what do you believe you've accomplished in striving towards those goals?
SULLIVAN-DUDZIC: We have two goals. [The first is] to increase the number of children entering kindergarten with early literacy skills--and now we've added early math foundation skills. And the second goal is to decrease the number of children, students, with learning disabilities or learning differences associated with reading.
PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS: And do you feel like you've made headway in reaching your goals?
SULLIVAN-DUDZIC: Yes. In literacy definitely. We're just starting in math. We have decreasing numbers of kids qualifying as learning disabled, and we have increasing numbers of kids entering kindergarten with early reading foundation skills.
PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS: So you have all kinds of community partners?
SULLIVAN-DUDZIC: Sure. I started 29 years ago with Head Start, as a ...
Editor’s note: We wondered what ideas accomplished teachers might have about good ways to invest stimulus funds. Answering our call, members of the Teacher Leaders Network to give us their straight-from-the-classroom perspectives. The ideas, of course, are their own and do not necessarily represent those of LFA or its member organizations. In the first of four teacher contributions, Ariel Sacks offers her thoughts:
This June will complete my fifth year of teaching at a high-need public middle school in New York City. At age 30, I’ve developed skills as a teacher and a leader, and I’m looking to advance my career. But the only way, it seems, to move up in the field of education is to leave my students and move out of the classroom.
This year, startling numbers of my colleagues across the city with three, four or five years of experience will leave teaching. They aren’t leaving because they feel ineffective or because ...
In less than 5 short years, "Teachers TV" has grown from an idea harbored by a British Schools Minister into a popular and influential British television channel devoted solely to education. Now, there are efforts afoot to help something similar take root in American soil.
We recently spoke with Andrew Bethell, Teachers TV's CEO and creative director. Bethell described the accomplishments of the television channel, which has broadcast thousands of often riveting mini-documentaries about what's happening in British schools.
The documentaries offer authentic accounts of successful practice and real-life struggles to improve. They also feature broad education reform strategies--without ever losing sight of those strategies' impact on actual schools and students. As Bethell is careful to point out, Teachers TV focuses on more than just teachers: It highlights the work of ...
The National Staff Development Council (NSDC) just released a report reviewing the the status of teacher professional development in the United States. Their conclusion: We're making incremental progress in teacher induction and mentoring programs, but we lag woefully behind other nations in providing the kinds of professional development that improve student learning.
Surveys of teachers reveal that disjointed, one-time, "drive-by" professional development workshops remain the norm for large majorities of American teachers. This, despite strong research demonstrating the benefits of intensive, on-going professional development that is tied closely to teacher practice, focuses on student learning, supports school improvement priorities and forges strong working relationships among teachers. NSDC's findings could have profound implications for how schools allocate teachers' time and structure the school day.
The report describes the striking differences between teacher professional development practices here and abroad. NSDC's press release sums up these differences:
The United States is far behind [other nations] in providing public school teachers with opportunities to ...
The National Staff Development Council (NSDC) is inviting schools to apply for membership in the Learning School Alliance, "a network of 100 model schools committed to professional development practices that promote student achievement. The educators from these 100 schools will support one another in applying the principles and standards of professional development grounded in NSDC’s definition of professional learning, its standards for staff development, and its principles for professional learning identified in The Learning Educator: A New Era for Professional Learning."
"Participants will learn together in their own schools, with other schools through webinars and facilitated conversations, and at convenings hosted by NSDC. They will share openly their goals, their progress--and over time--their results."
You can learn more about the Learning School Alliance here. ...
The Great Expectations School, Dan Brown's harrowing and touching memoir of his first year teaching at an elementary school in the Bronx, has won high praise from heavy hitters in education, including Susan Fuhrman, Randi Weingarten, Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch.
Dan recently took the time to speak with me about the lessons of his experience teaching low-income children who could be by turns loving, enraged, vulnerable, brazen, curious and deeply disaffected. He shared his thoughts on the support new teachers need to function in this environment, specific strategies for serving children in poverty, and policy implications of day-to-day challenges in urban schools.
Hear five minutes of highlights from Dan's account of his first year:
Or, listen to about four and a half minutes of highlights from his discussion of education policy:
...
In a story that has received remarkably little media attention so far, eight urban public schools in Connecticut are participating in an experiment to give teachers, parents and communities greater autonomy over curriculum, governance and budgets. The Connecticut Alliance for CommPACT Schools is helping these formerly struggling schools reorganize.
Among the hallmarks of this effort: ...
It's no secret that schools serving the most disadvantaged students face the toughest challenges in attracting and retaining effective teachers. As a result, the poorest, most vulnerable students--those who need our help most--are least likely to attend schools with fully qualified staff members.
One promising solution is attracting attention: Urban Teacher Residency programs. These programs combine master's-level education coursework with clinical teaching experience in actual urban classrooms. According to a recent article in Voices in Urban Education, these programs are showing early success in poor urban schools. Ninety percent of graduates from a Boston program--and 95 percent of graduates from a similar program in Chicago--are still teaching three years after graduation. Compare that to national urban school retention rates, which typically run between 30 and 50 percent.
The programs succeed by combining some essential ingredients of successful teacher retention programs: mentoring, professional collaboration, school/university partnerships, on-going support for teachers, and concrete links between research and classroom practice. ...
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. ...
In late May, this blog reported that best-selling author Dave Eggers, Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Vanessa Roth and 826 National executive director Ninive Calegari were working on a documentary that aims to inspire public support for teachers' work while offering an unvarnished view of the challenges teachers face every day. (See our recent interview with Eggers for more information about their plans.) ...
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A VISION FOR GREAT SCHOOLS
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