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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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." ...
It took Checker Finn at the Fordham Foundation about a nanosecond to respond to the Community Agenda with an entirely over-the-top attack on community schools. Finn, whom friends and foes alike often respect for the integrity of his ideas, has apparently become a complete fantasist. In defiance of all evidence, he calls the community school idea "gooey and emotional" (it actually rests on sound evidence). He also describes it as an attempt "to turn the spotlight away from cognitive learning" (it actually marshals community resources in support of cognitive learning.) This is conspiracy theory, not argument.
And it gets worse. Finn believes that school-based services for parents--such as career counseling, parenting classes and medical services--merely "coddle" parents or "indulge [them] in their shortcomings." Where's the indulgence in helping parents find jobs, find health care or support their children in school? These services actually bring families into school buildings and empower parents to support their children's success. Simply telling parents to shape up ship out is hardly a promising alternative. ...
A coalition of over 100 education, youth, social services and health organizations have released "The Community Agenda for America's Public Schools," a call for more partnerships among public schools and other community or social service organizations that work to improve the lives of children.
Marty Blank of the Coalition for Community Schools made it clear that the agenda connects strong community supports with high academic achievement. "We are not in the 'either-or' category in this debate [between academic and social supports].... What we do is take the next step and we say how this can be done. We need to get past this conversation that says it's either one way or the other." (As Quoted in Education Week)
You can read more about the Community Agenda here. ...
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: ...
New York City public schools have received a new round of letter grades for their performance, and the results are either encouraging or bewildering, depending on whom you ask. NYC Education Department officials point to the overall improvements over last year, due in large part to the city's rising test scores in mathematics and reading. Critics of the Department point to large fluctuations in grades from one year to the next as evidence that the grading system is fundamentally flawed. ...
Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman--and his research on early childhood education--have been very much in the news in recent months. In late August, authors from the Reason Foundation distorted this research in a Wall Street Journal hit job claiming that pre-school actually harms children.
Heckman, a strong supporter of early childhood, quickly called them out on their distortions, and researcher David Kirp followed suit a few days later. In Sunday's New York Times Magazine, Paul Tough cites Heckman's conclusions that "specific interventions in the lives of poor children can diminish" the skill gap that separates them from their wealthier peers, "as long as those interventions begin early (ideally in infancy) and continue throughout childhood." ...
A week ago, New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein announced that the district would pilot a new reading program in 10 elementary schools. Created by the Core Knowledge Foundation for grades K-2, the reading program will focus on both phonics and content knowledge.
Core Knowledge founder E. D. Hirsch recently spoke with Public School Insights about the program, which marks a strong departure from current practice in New York City elementary schools. He describes his dismay that so many schools have narrowed their curricula in the wake of No Child Left Behind. Such tactics are inevitably self-defeating, he tells us, because children cannot develop strong reading skills when they lack content knowledge. Too many poor students with strong decoding skills fall far behind after 4th grade because they cannot thrive on the academic starvation diet of a narrow, skills-focused curriculum. ...
About six years ago, the superintendent of the Gainesville City School System (GA) told elementary educators to start dreaming: he wanted them to create their ideal learning and teaching environments. Each of the district's elementary schools would open with a unique focus, to be determined by the people who would work in them.
After extensive research, Principal Jill Goforth and other Gainesville educators decided to embrace the Core Knowledge Foundation's approach to education-an approach that emphasizes a rigorous, content-focused curriculum to help all students establish a strong foundation of knowledge that they can build on later in school and life. ...
On Saturday, the New York Times ran a fascinating story about a Florida science teacher's struggles to teach evolution to students raised on the biblical story of creation. (For the first time this year, the Florida Department of Education began requiring all public schools to teach evolution.) That teacher's struggles no doubt mirror struggles faced by thousands of teachers across the country.
Laws on evolution in public school classrooms will continue to swing back and forth as intelligent design advocates and their creationist kissing cousins keep pressing their case with policymakers. In the meantime, teachers simply have to make do without strong--and scientifically sound--guidance on how best to survive in this environment.
In 2002, Charles Haynes of the First Amendment Center offered some thoughts on a way forward. ...
Charles Murray is apparently at it again in his forthcoming book, Real Education.
Murray's 1994 book, The Bell Curve, infamously argued that demography is destiny. It held that members of certain racial and socioeconomic groups are poor because they're not smart enough to be otherwise. Real Education apparently applies this objectionable principle to education, with the expected results.
If the book excerpts in the Wall Street Journal are any indication, the book will argue that low-performing students lack the intelligence to perform well. It will counsel schools to put these students out of their academic misery by tracking them into less intellectually-ambitious, more strictly vocational courses. ...
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