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.
Professional Development
Blog Entries
Yesterday, we published our conversation with Christopher Cross about the Broader, Bolder Approach (BBA) Campaign’s new accountability recommendations. Today, we’re releasing an interview with another member of BBA’s Accountability Committee: Diane Ravitch, who followed Cross as Assistant Secretary of OERI during the administration of George H.W. Bush.
Like Cross, Ravitch requires no introduction. A long-time supporter of standards-based reform, she has become one of the nation’s most vocal critics of No Child Left Behind. Here are her thoughts on the BBA recommendations:
PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS: You have argued that "a few tweaks here and a little tinkering there cannot fix" No Child Left Behind. How do BBA's accountability recommendations depart from the NCLB model?
RAVITCH: NCLB is a punitive approach to school improvement. It mandates that test scores must increase or else! If they don't go higher, schools will be sanctioned, and the sanctions will get more onerous with each year that the schools fail to meet their targets. Each year, the targets get higher, and the number of schools that slip over the precipice increases. As schools fail, they are threatened with closure, restructuring, staff firings, or other consequences that may or may not improve the school.
In contrast, BBA suggests accountability that goes far beyond test scores. Test scores matter, but so does student engagement in a broad range of academic subjects, as well as students' health, well-being and civic behavior. Where NCLB is punitive, BBA seeks constructive ways to measure the condition and progress of ...
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: This week, we are continuing a series of guest blogs in which accomplished teachers offer ideas for how to spend stimulus funds. Last week, Heather Wolpert-Gawron and Ariel Sacks shared their thoughts. Today, Mary Tedrow offers her contribution. The opinions she expresses are, of course, her own and do not necessarily represent those of LFA or its member organizations.
True reform happens one student at a time: a single student finally participates in his own learning, reflects on growth, incorporates new knowledge into his life, and uses new knowledge to serve both his immediate needs and the needs of the community. The tool for achieving this revolution already exists but is widely neglected and even undermined by the current emphasis on standardized tests. (see: http://www.writingcommission.org/prod_downloads/writingcom/neglectedr.pdf)
MY PROPOSED STIMULUS INVESTMENT: Spend funds to develop writing across all curricula in all grade levels and in all schools in the nation.
Award stimulus dollars to districts that pursue the placement of at least one writing coach in every building, supported and trained through ...
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 ...
The title of this interview, which is also the title of Robyn Jackson’s recent ASCD book, is sure to raise a hue and a cry among those who believe we should urge teachers to work more, not less. Yet Jackson is far more concerned with how teachers work than with how much they work.
We recently spoke with Dr. Jackson, a National Board Certified Teacher and former school administrator, about her book’s big lessons. She uses an old adage to sum up an overarching message: “The person working hardest in the room is the only person learning.” Even the most dedicated teachers fall short if they do the work their students should be doing. Master teachers, by contrast, inspire students to do the important work on their own.
By no means does Jackson excuse teachers from hard work. Master teachers,
she argues, must understand where students are, where they need to go, and what support they need along the way. They must hold themselves to very high expectations for promoting student success and seek feedback on their performance.
Jackson’s work holds important lessons for policymakers, not just teachers: Support educators’ capacity! Simply urging people to work harder is not a feasible reform strategy.
You can download the entire audio interview here or listen to six minutes of interview highlights:
[A transcript of these highlights appears below]
Alternatively, download the following excerpts from ...
The battle over traditional and alternative teacher preparation programs is distracting us from a much more important conversation about teacher quality: How do we substantially increase teacher capacity and effectiveness? That's the conclusion Linda Darling-Hammond and David Haselkorn reach in a new Education Week commentary.
To make their case, Darling-Hammond and Haselkorn cite a Mathematica study that found few differences between the impact of traditionally and alternatively certified teachers on student performance in hard-to-staff schools. While this study is bound to "fuel the debate" about traditional vs. alternative routes, they argue, many commentators are missing the more important point:
The real story, however, is that none of the teachers in these high-need schools did well by their students. The students of teachers from what the study called “low coursework” alternative programs actually declined in their reading and math achievement between fall and spring, while those taught by their traditional-route counterparts improved little. Students of teachers in the "high coursework" alternative programs, and those of their traditional-route counterparts, improved by only 1 and 2 percentile points, respectively—not nearly enough, given how far behind these students already were.
Put bluntly, no one who is serious about raising standards and closing achievement gaps can find these outcomes acceptable. It is time to put aside the tired debates over routes into teaching and focus on a clearer destination: substantially higher levels of teacher effectiveness, especially for those teaching ...
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. ...
In the past few years, we've heard a great deal about the religious and ethnic intolerance tainting school curricula in Middle Eastern countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia. We hear less about the growing push in countries like Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to promote tolerance in schools.
I had the privilege of speaking with His Excellency Dr. Hanif Hassan, the UAE's Education Minister, when he was in Washington about two weeks ago. (For those of you who don't know, the UAE is a small, prosperous and progressive country on the Persian Gulf, between Oman and Saudi Arabia.) ...
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