LFA's Education Week blog, Transforming Learning, will explore how to transform public education to support student achievement for lifelong success in the global community.
Blog Posts By obriena
Tomorrow is the inaugural Digital Learning Day, a nationwide celebration of innovative teaching and learning through digital media and technology. New technologies are the future of learning, and it is inspiring to see how some teachers and schools are transforming the educational experience.
While celebrating these accomplishments, we must not forget that there are still a number of children who lack access to the promise that digital learning offers. Often, these children are also disadvantaged by virtue of their socioeconomic status.
Nick Pandolfo’s recent piece for The Hechinger Report really drives this point home. He highlights Bronzeville Scholastic Institute, a school that (according to the article) shares a homework lab with two others at Chicago’s DuSable High School campus – 24 computers for nearly a thousand students. Many of the school’s students (93% of whom receive free or reduced price lunch) cannot afford computers at home, and they do not have much access to them at school. Pandolfo writes that “Bronzeville Scholastic students born into a digital era struggle with basic skills, such as saving work to a flash drive and ...
Updated 1/31/12
In the State of the Union, President Obama made several references to education, reiterating its importance to his administration and to a healthy economy.
While k-12 education was not a primary focus of the speech, he did touch directly on a few major education issues. He pointed out that nearly all states have raised their academic standards in recent years. He also made one very specific policy proposal: He called on all states to keep students in school until they either graduate from high school or turn 18.
In addition, the President emphasized the importance of good teachers. As he put it:
Teachers matter. So instead of bashing them, or defending the status quo, let’s offer schools a deal. Give them the resources to keep good teachers on the job, and reward the best ones. In return, grant schools flexibility: To teach with creativity and passion; to stop teaching to the test; and to replace teachers who just aren’t helping kids learn.
What did the education community have to say about this speech?
Gayle Manchin, president of the National Association of State Boards of Education, was pleased that ...
Earlier today a press release for a study in the January 2012 issue of Sociology of Education caught my eye: Study Suggests Junk Food in Schools Doesn’t Cause Weight Gain Among Children.
According to the press release (I’m not a subscriber of the journal, so I didn’t have access to the full text of the study), “While the percentage of obese children in the United States tripled between the early 1970s and the late 2000s, a new study suggests that—at least for middle school students—weight gain has nothing to do with the candy, soda, chips, and other junk food they can purchase at school.”
To me, this makes a lot of sense. As one of the study’s authors, Pennsylvania State University Professor Jennifer Van Hook, points out, “Schools only represent a small portion of children’s food environment.”
But something in the release disturbed me: Van Hook’s comments that, in light of the focus in the media on the money that ...
1/19/12 Update: NEA Today has the latest on the situation in Chester Upland.
Educators in Pennsylvania’s Chester Upland School District were forced to make that very difficult decision recently, when the district announced that without an infusion of new cash from the state, it would not be able to make payroll starting January 18.
But members of the Chester Upland Education Association and the Chester Upland Education Support Personnel Association are doing all they can to keep schools running as long as possible. These educators and education support personnel have passed a resolution vowing to stay on the job for as long as they are individually able, even if the district fails to pay them in the near future.
Why? Commitment to students. As elementary school teacher Sara Feguson said in The Philadelphia Inquirer, ...
Making international comparisons about education systems was all the rage in 2011. Rhetoric suggested that America’s education system is performing so poorly that we as a nation have lost our competitive edge, and that the world’s emerging economies are out-educating us, which will result in the further decline of our nation.
I’m not sure if that rhetoric will stop in 2012, but it is time we move beyond it. How can we do that?
First off, in talking about our education system, we need to acknowledge that, as Dan Domenech (executive director of the American Association of School Administrators and chair of the Learning First Alliance Board of Directors) points out, it is actually the best that it has ever been. Graduation rates, college attendance rates and performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) are at their highest levels ever. Domenech also points out that when educators and education leaders travel internationally, they find that “overseas colleagues refer to our school system as the gold standard” and “parents in every corner of the world want to send their children to American schools.” ...
Getting families engaged in their children's education, using social media, turning around struggling schools, the morale of our nation's premiere teachers, and progress (or lack thereof) in efforts to improve the nation's major federal education legislation...This year, our most-viewed posts covered these topics, and much more. Here are our ten most-read posts of 2011 (as indicated by our trusty Google Analytics tracking system). Enjoy!
10. New Models for Family Engagement
9. Seeing the Future for Public Education
8. The Importance of Trust and Morale in School Turnarounds ...
Have you checked out our collection of public school success stories lately?
Since December 2007, we at the Learning First Alliance have posted more than 150 stories about what is working in our public schools. Some come from our member and partner organizations. Others have been submitted by educators, parents and other community members proud of what is going on in their local public school.
Criteria for inclusion are relatively simple: A story must show that a public school or district (or even state) recognized a challenge, addressed it, and had some results. Often those results come in the form of standardized test scores, reduced dropout rates or increased graduation rates. Other times they recognize positive changes to student behavior, classroom grades, student health, or parental engagement.
In the spirit of the “best of” lists that tend to circulate this time of year, here are the top five of these stories from 2011*, as determined by you, our audience (as indicated by our trusty Google Analytics tracking system). Enjoy!
5. Cleveland Program to Close Achievement Gap Shows Proof of Success
A Cleveland Metropolitan School District program provides personal attention and assistance to low-achieving black eighth grade males who are deemed most likely to drop out of school.
4. Alabama’s Graduation Coaches
Thanks in part to an initiative showing the success of school-level “graduation coaches," Alabama is ...
Editor's note: This post was originally written for Edutopia.
As 2011 winds to a close, we are about to turn the page on a year that saw new evidence suggesting that the education reform policies du jour aren't really working. Most charter schools perform no better than traditional public schools (at least in Chicago); value-added modeling does not produce consistent, reliable measures of teacher effectiveness; and the school curriculum is narrowing, in part because of the pressures of state tests (according to teachers).
Student performance on standardized assessments has remained stubbornly flat during the past few years (though much more progress has been made in math than reading). And despite all our efforts over the past decade to dictate down school improvement through governance and accountability policy, the achievement gap between disadvantaged students and their middle- and upper-class peers is actually growing. We must be doing something wrong.
In looking ahead to the education agenda of 2012, I hope that we can learn from what hasn't worked in school improvement over the past few years, as well as what has ...
Yesterday I wrote about Mark Schneider’s belief that to significantly raise student achievement in this nation, we need to “shock” the system. Today, I learned about a partnership aiming to do just that in a rural West Virginia district.
West Virginia Governor Earl Ray Tomblin, State Board of Education Vice President Gayle Manchin and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) have announced Reconnecting McDowell, a public-private partnership with more than 40 partners aimed at enhancing educational opportunity for children in McDowell County, a district that has ranked lowest in the state in academic performance for most of the past decade.
As a community, McDowell County faces a number of challenges in addition to a low-performing educational system. According to the Washington Post, while historically the area has produced the most coal in the state, with the collapse of the coal and steel industries in the 1960s, the unemployment rate has risen dramatically. Nearly 80% of children in the school district live in poverty; 72% live in a household without gainful employment. The area has a high incarceration rate. It also has a large number of residents struggling with addition, and it leads the nation in ...
Have we hit a plateau in student achievement in this nation? In a paper released today, Mark Schneider suggests that yes, we have.
Schneider was asked to study student achievement in Texas over the past few years, at the time their Governor Rick Perry was a leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. Education Secretary Arne Duncan had suggested that Perry ran an inadequate school system, and the Fordham Institute wanted to determine whether or not that was true.
As Schneider reviews, Texas’ performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) over the past few years has been relatively flat, after a few years of rapid improvement. But in his research, Schneider uncovered a larger trend. And rather than blame stagnant performance on the governor, he suggests that it’s somewhat inevitable.
There’s a concept in biology known as punctuated equilibrium. It posits that systems typically exist in a steady state (equilibrium) in which little change occurs. Occasionally there is a shock to a system from ...
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