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.
Blog Posts By Charlotte Williams
In a recent Slate article, Dana Goldstein argues that “Michele Bachmann's growing popularity among the Republican base signals . . . a sea change in the party's education agenda.” I would add the same goes for Rick Perry’s popularity, and for the general abundance of Tea Party affiliated candidates among GOP nomination hopefuls.
Goldstein contrasts the common Republican positions of a decade ago—an era defined largely by George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind—as often bipartisan, and emphasizing standards-and-accountability in order to make America more competitive in the global marketplace. Now, however, Goldstein notes that the GOP has shifted to cater to “the anti-government, Christian-right view of education epitomized by Bachmann, in which public schools are regarded not as engines for economic growth or academic achievement, but as potential moral corrupters of the nation's youth.” ...
Kenneth C. Davis is a New York Times best-selling author who has written about a myriad of significant popular issues—from American History, to geography, to literature, to the Bible, to mythology. His books, for both adults and children, provide an accessible and entertaining guide to these topics. For this interview, we focus on the latest revised edition of his book, Don’t Know Much About History: Anniversary Edition—which is now out in hard cover from HarperCollins. He contrasts this book with what he considers boring approaches in most history textbooks, and emphasizes that Americans are highly interested in history when it’s relayed in an engaging, realistic way.
Public School Insights: Why did you decide to write this book?
Kenneth Davis: To make history as interesting and exciting as I always thought it was! The book looks at 500 years of American History, from the voyages of Columbus, right up to the year 2000. I wrote the ...
Lately there have been unsettling reports about increases in children living in poverty in the U.S. For one, a recent article out of Boston features an emergency room survey that found doctors in the city are seeing more hungry and underweight young children in the emergency room than any time in more than a decade. The survey revealed a sharp increase in the percentage of families with children who reported not having enough food each month (going from 18% in 2007 to 28% in 2010), and a 58% increase in the number of severely underweight babies under the age of one. An expert in the article points out that this level of malnourishment “is similar to what is more typically seen in developing countries.” The article relays that pediatricians in other cities like Baltimore, Little Rock, and Minneapolis are also reporting increases in malnourished children. ...
A recent Salon article by Natasha Lennard discusses the central role of women’s issues in the current Wisconsin political saga, including this week’s recall elections. For six months, since Governor Scott Walker sought to strip public workers of collective bargaining rights—among other measures curbing public worker benefits and reducing the state’s expenditures, workers and their advocates have voiced vehement protest, culminating in the recall elections for some of the representatives who supported Walker’s policies. Women’s rights have been central to the debate over teachers’ unions in Wisconsin since the beginning, since Walker targeted teachers and nurses—professions in which the vast majority of workers are women. He exempted the male-dominated (and Republican-leaning) fields of firefighters and police. It’s unclear whether Walker was consciously trying to target women, but, regardless, that is the effect of his policies. ...
Recently the Wall Street Journal featured an interview with Bill Gates in which Gates conceded some missteps in his philanthropic efforts toward public education. $5 billion dollars after his debut into public education affairs, Gates admits “It’s been about a decade of learning.” It’s a common concern that private dollars toward education can actually be counterproductive when they direct attention and commitment to misplaced priorities, and so it’s somewhat gratifying to hear Gates acknowledging this.
Gates offered a more tempered view on education than the WSJ interviewer (who in the article described public education in cities as “dysfunctional urban school systems run by powerful labor unions and a top-down government monopoly provider”), but despite his avowed learning from past mistakes, he still seems naïve in some respects. ...
Education news coming out of Texas lately seems to depict a large-scale comedy of errors. There are misplaced funding priorities (here, here and here) and hard-fought battles to include mainstream science curriculum. Texas is the lone (star) state to pull out of a significant education council that collaborates on state-directed (optional) common standards, and it does not ascribe to the trend to more specifically delineate student racial demographic information for data and research purposes. But at least the most recent debacle may provide a silver(ado) lining: according to Edweek, in explaining the need for the new Supportive School Discipline Initiative, Attorney General Eric Holder said that the numbers from a recent study finding that 60 percent of Texas school children are suspended or expelled between 7th grade and graduation “are a kind of wake up call,” and that “it’s obvious we can do better.”
In short, the initiative is a joint undertaking by the Departments of Justice and Education, and it targets curbing school discipline policies that push students into ...
In two recent Salon.com articles (here and here) political commentator David Sirota has pointed out key differences between Finland and the U.S. that he believes account for education discrepancies between these nations. It essentially boils down to differences in: 1) systemic equity, 2) incentives for and recruitment and support of teachers 3) focus on standardized testing, and 4) bipartisan support among all relevant stakeholders.
To open Sirota asks, “How has one industrialized country created one of the world's most successful education systems in a way that is completely hostile to testing”—and, I’ll add, that does not even attach consequence-based evaluation to teachers or schools? For answers, he refers readers to the documentary film "The Finland Phenomenon: Inside the World's Most Surprising School System” which paints the picture of an educational system that completely contrasts with what he calls “the test-obsessed, teacher-demonizing orthodoxy of education ‘reform’ that now dominates America's political debate.”
Some background to set the stage:
It’s clear by now that while the U.S. tests students more than any other nation, our students perform significantly worse in math and science than students in other industrialized countries. Nevertheless, Sirota points out that ...
The American Prospect recently featured an article by Sharon Lerner that details an exemplary pioneering effort to combat racial segregation in schools in Omaha, Nebraska, called the Learning Community. It pools resources and allows student movement to help make schools more socioeconomically diverse. But while Lerner argues that this “radical experiment” could serve to be a national model, local resistance may be indicative of potential animosity to similar efforts in other places. If better racial integration in schools is a focus we want to make to improve public education (and I think it should be), this situation provides a prime example of why appropriate legislation, funding, and winning hearts and minds are all integral to success. ...
Benefits of high-quality early learning programs are clear, particularly for the country’s neediest children. For one, research into brain development shows that the period between preschool and third grade is critical for learning language skills, developing the ability to self-regulate behavior, and being able to work with peers. For another, there is the alarming number of children not proficient in reading by the end of third grade—a benchmark increasingly considered important. Further, fewer students are referred to special education programs when they receive proper early learning backgrounds, and research indicates a significant association between a poor early child educational experience, and dropping out of middle or high school. ...
The College Board has undertaken a new initiative focused on male minority members. The goal, as their website puts it, is to collect “research around the Educational Experience of Young Men of Color, to understand the issues behind the data, and to provide an overview of the legal landscape within which solutions must be developed.” More specifically, the College Board aims to “isolate and identify the factors that contribute either to the persistence or to the attrition of young men of color from high school to higher education.”
The “color” groups they designate are African American, Asian American and Pacific Islanders, Hispanic/Latinos and Native American, and Alaska Natives. I think this grouping scheme is problematic since it assumes a level of group homogeneity and lumps populations together in questionable ways—i.e. that Hispanics and Native Americans should be in one category, likewise with Asians and Pacific Islanders, whereas Alaska Natives get their own category. But the information still looks valuable in various ways. ...
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