Greetings from Fordham's 7th Floor conference room, which is jam-packed with a standing-room-only crowd to hear a debate about the "21st Century Skills" movement, staged by Common Core. Here's the line-up: Panelists: Diane Ravitch, Research Professor of Education, New York University
Diane Ravitch, an historian of education, is carefully deconstructing the "21st Century Skills" movement by demonstrating that its key ideas are direct descendants of loopy nostrums from the past 100 years. "The cause that animated schools of education throughout the 20th century??was the search for the one discovery that would unshackle schools from teaching content," she said.
Don??Hirsch, founder of Core Knowledge and author of Cultural Literacy, says that students do, indeed, need these "21st Century Skills." But, he's arguing, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills is deeply misguided in its understanding of how students can develop these skills.
Dan Willingham is a cognitive scientist, and takes P21 apart step by step. The Partnership for 21st Century Skills assumes, he says, that first, knowledge and skills are separate. But research shows that not to be true.
Ken Kay, the head of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, is here to defend himself. He says that most of what we're doing in education is subject-matter focused. Most of the assessments are subject-matter focused. But we aren't producing enough students with critical thinking skills. So clearly subject-matter is not enough.
The latest Education Next is out, and its cover story is an excellent piece by Richard Lee Colvin previewing the Obama education agenda and contemplating the Democratic Party's schism over school policy.
Imagine, you have been laid off and you can't find another job earning anywhere close to what you were making. Your savings have been decimated by the disaster on Wall Street. You may be renting now that you lost your home. Maybe your pension is a lot less, too.
Do you wait anxiously for another Obama Reform-o-meter???Do you refresh the Flypaper homepage repeatedly or check your RSS feed hourly wanting to see how the Administration is doing? Well your prayers are answered: Obama Reform-o-meters 24-7.
As first reported by Politics K-12 yesterday, Stanford Professor Linda Darling-Hammond has decided to return to Palo Alto rather than seek a top position in the Obama Administration.
With the stroke of a pen on Tuesday, President Barack Obama's economic stimulus plan became the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. I'm no economist but I certainly buy the president's basic argument about the need for such a stimulus.
While you're waiting for the Gadfly to appear in your inboxes (who isn't, honestly?) next Thursday (February 26), you could attend this neat event at AEI: Jim Cibulka, recently elected president of NCATE, the National Council for Accreditation o
In this study of the No Child Left Behind Act system and Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) rules for 28 states, we selected 36 real schools that vary by size, achievement, diversity, etc. and determined which ones would or would not make AYP when evaluated under each state's accountability rules. If a school that made AYP in Washington were relocated to Ohio, would it still make AYP?
Ohio's governor is being assailed, and rightly so, for his education plan, with its preference for creating adult jobs over ensuring that students learn.
I spent the morning doing a "radio tour" of talk shows around the country, explaining our new Accountability Illusion report. A common question is why it matters that states are implementing NCLB so differently. After all, states had very different accountability systems before NCLB.
This just in, from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's office:
Take away all the jargon, emotion, envy, confusion, and embarrassment and much of the No Child Left Behind debate comes down to this: Which schools are good, which are bad, and does NCLB do a decent job of telling the difference?
Just last week, we learned that Michael "Noah" Bloomberg would pack his ark with four charter-converted Brooklyn Catholic schools. Unfortunately, though not unexpectedly, the seas for this journey are already proving stormy.
The Brits have taken voc ed to new lows. In an effort to encourage teens to sign up for courses more suited to their abilities, education officials have expanded the number of courses that count toward "league tables," i.e. how schools are evaluated and compared.
Gadfly tends to give AFT President Randi Weingarten a (deserved) hard time, so when she does something praiseworthy his antennae perk up. So it was this week, when she took a strong stand for national standards in the Washington Post. "[E]very child attending U.S. public schools should be taught to high standards, regardless of where he or she lives," she opined.
Jill Constantine, Daniel Player, Tim Silva, Kristin Hallgren, Mary Grider, and John DekeMathematica Policy ResearchInstitute of Education SciencesFebruary 2009
Paul E. Peterson and Matthew M. ChingosJohn F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard UniversitySpring 2009
Achieve, Inc.American Diploma Project NetworkFebruary 2009
To the editor:I continue to be both surprised and disappointed by the response ("Hurricane Wagner," February 5, 2009) by some conservatives to my book, The Global Achievement Gap, and their claims that I don't believe in testing, don't value academic content knowledge, and lack skills as a researcher.
At last, veritable proof that test prep pays real-life dividends. Seventeen-year old Geoffrey Stanford approached the Kansas state test just like his teachers told him to: "Every sentence. Every word.
I've been running a bit behind all week (we're getting ready for a MAJOR report release tomorrow...stay tuned) but this weekend's New York Times column by Nicholas
Democrats for Education Reform appears to be playing a big role staffing the Obama Administration because another one of its picks is getting a key job.
In the news business, reporters have a saying for a boiler plate quote an editor can remove to tighten a story. It's "throw-away" and that's exactly what the governor's response to the Fordham/Paul Hill study deserves.
