The meeting is dead, long live the meeting
A few weeks back, New York City Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza said that principals would not be required to attend district meetings this coming September.
A few weeks back, New York City Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza said that principals would not be required to attend district meetings this coming September.
The past quarter-century has included dramatic progress of America’s lowest-performing students, many of whom are also low-income and children of color. But how’s the vast middle class doing? It’s a mixed bag: They still don’t read very well, but their math skills have improved a bit and they are graduating from college in higher and higher numbers.
During a political campaign, the savviest candidates excel at two things. First, they offer a compelling message that differentiates them from their competitors. Second—which demands true skill and sophistry—they ascribe all their own failings to those very same competitors, forcing them to answer for political, policy and social issues for which they are not responsible.
Controversy surrounds New York City’s selective-admission high schools and Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to change the time-honored path by which students gain entry to them; the dispute largely concerns how to ration the limited supply of a valued commodity in the face of mounting demand.
A new report by William Johnston and Christopher Young from the RAND Corporation examines the perspectives of teachers and principals about their pre-service training programs, with an emphasis on their preparation for work with non-white and low-income students.
Ten years ago, then U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan issued a clarion call to turn around 5,000 of the nation’s most distressed schools, serving nearly three million students. It was an audacious goal set by an audacious leader—the likes of which are in terribly short supply these days. A decade later, states have fallen far short of his challenge, and the sticky problem of failing schools refuses to go away. But experience has provided three lessons to those who would make these efforts.
For more than half a century now, back-to-school time has brought another Phi Delta Kappan survey of “the public’s attitudes toward the public schools.” They invariably recycle some familiar questions (e.g., the grades you would give your child’s schools and the nation’s schools). Other topics, however, come and go.
The education solar system is endlessly distorted by the extraordinary presence within it of two separate suns with gravitational fields that tug the policy planets in different directions.
In the last decade, states have experimented with many new assessment systems in math and reading. A new Bellwether brief by Bonnie O’Keefe and Brandon Lewis examines recent innovations used or proposed by states that could serve educators well.
As I belong to the legion of education professionals that’s usually on the receiving end of the term “top-down,” I’m not too keen on the enterprise’s more top-down improvements.
The case for content cannot be made too often or too emphatically, but it’s also been made repeatedly for thirty years, to little avail. Natalie Wexler’s new book, "The Knowledge Gap," offers a strong argument for offering a knowledge-rich education to every child, but also documents our frustrating lack of progress. It's one hell of an indictment of American education.
The Fordham Institute’s recent survey of teachers has brought the issue of discipline reform back to the forefront. But even as teachers say that discipline policies are leading to unsafe educational environments, a new federal rule threatens to further exacerbate the issue.
Good teachers are warm and compassionate people, and like parents, they tend to love all their kids equally. Nevertheless, they also have a special tenderness for the students who struggle in their classrooms and feel a particular urgency about meeting their needs. This often means less attention paid to high flyers. Educators tend to believe these children will be fine no matter what. But they’re are their own “high-needs” subgroup because they’re at the greatest risk for extreme boredom.
Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of speaking on a panel at the Education Writers Association’s (EWA) National Seminar, the largest annual gathering of journalists covering the education beat. With over five hundred education reporters in attendance, it was an opportunity to talk (on the record, of course) about the ins and outs of state accountability systems in the ESSA era, and to meet face-to-face with an assortment of folks I’ve long admired from afar and only previously known through social media.
Each year, the Education Commission of the States (ECS), based in my adopted home of Denver, reviews the governors’ State of the State addresses and offers an analysis of their main education components. Mentioned by at least thirty-six governors, this year’s top education priority was school finance, followed by workforce development, teacher quality, early learning, postsecondary financial aid, and school safety.
In the U.S. we call it “math phobia”; in the U.K. they call it “maths anxiety.” Either way you dub it, a negative emotional reaction to mathematics, which can manifest as a fear of or aversion to doing math-related work, is a real threat to mathematical competency. A new summary of research from the University of Cambridge adds a huge amount of detail to the picture of what causes math phobia in young people and what if anything can be done to mitigate its effects.
Three years ago, two districts with similar enrollments, proficiency scores, and student demographics—not twenty miles apart—chose the same curriculum for middle school English language arts: Expeditionary Learning. But that is where the similarity in this story ends.
The new study from the Harvard Center for Education Policy Research was clearly a herculean effort, with data collection across six states, surveys of thousands of teachers, and the participation of some of the nation’s leading researchers.
Shifting ed reform’s focus to improving practice is an acknowledgment that underperformance is not a failure of will, but a lack of capacity. It’s a talent-development and human capital-strategy, not an accountability play. Forcing changes in behavior, whether through lawmaking or lawsuit, may win compliance, but it doesn’t advance understanding and sophistication. Teachers need to understand the “why” behind evidence-based practice to implement it well and effectively.
By Brandon L. Wright
By Robert Pondiscio
By Tim Daly and Elliot Regenstein
Three years into his first gig as a recruiter/trainer at a job skills program in San Francisco, Mauricio Lim Miller recognized a striking contradiction that changed the trajectory of his life and work.
NOTES: John Mullaney is the Executive Director of the Nord Family Foundation. Both authors were part of the Straight A Fund advisory board in FY 14-15.This piece originally appeared in a slightly different form in the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
A new report from the RAND Corporation examines trends across 27 counties in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia where fracking is a booming business. Nine of these counties are in Eastern Ohio, including Mahoning, Stark, Belmont, and several others.
On this week's podcast, Checker Finn, Alyssa Schwenk, and Brandon Wright discuss the drafting of an ESSA plan and what comes next for states that recently submitted theirs to the U.S. Department of Education. During the Research Minute, David Griffith examines the long-term effects of same-race teachers.
As students and teachers settle back into school routines, thousands of high schoolers are getting their first taste of classes that are supposed to prepare them for college. Some of them are sitting in Advanced Placement courses, while others have enrolled in district-designed advanced courses.
By Andrew Scanlan