Caught Being Good
Eli Broad
Billionaire philanthropist donates $23.3 million to help start 17 new charter schools in the Los Angeles district.
Charles Clotfelter
Duke University economist study suggests that teacher absences lead to lower student test scores—even when substitutes fill in.
Kitchen Table Math
Iconoclastic, fun and edgy. Welcome to the Core Knowledge blogroll!
Names on the Chalkboard
Everyday Math
Texas State Board of Education rejects Everyday Math for lack of rigor but sets off a firestorm. Can they reject any book?
Culture-based Teaching
Lovely idea. Too bad there’s no evidence it improves achievement in reading and writing.
Clowns
Researchers in England find “clowns are universally disliked by children.” Kids as old as 16 find them scary.
On the Board With Checkmarks
Boys
Boys are five times more likely than girls to be reprimanded in elementary school, even though girls are just as likely to misbehave, according to new research from the U.K.
Before we can do our jobs as educators, students must see what’s going on in our schools and classrooms as a means to some viable end. That many do not is the powerful subtext of Lynn H. Fox’s essay (“Getting students out of the halls and into the classrooms”) in Maryland’s gazette.net. A tip of the hat to Joanne Jacobs for pointing out this gem.
A high school teacher, Fox finds the story of contemporary education in a single moment — a choice his student makes between “classroom cuture” and “hallway culture” as class begins one morning. “So much depends on the choice David, and every other American student, will make. In or out? Classroom or hallway?”
Hallways, Fox observes, are “the meeting and greeting ground where young people play out popular fantasies of violence, sexuality, and, especially, consumerism. The hallway rules are easy, the rewards immediate, and the rituals provide culturally approved media roles young people have been fed since birth.” By comparison classrooms “for most of our school’s young people, are places of crushing boredom.” David — predictably, inevitably — chooses the hallway.
What Fox knows that we need to come to terms with is that delayed gratification, the essential valuable proposition of education, is a heroic choice in a world that seldom reinforces it. It’s a brilliant, powerful essay that deserves a wide audience.
There’s a new sheriff at the influential Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and it would seem to presage a closer focus on K-12 education. Anthony S. Bryk was named earlier this month to run the California-based foundation. Education Week describes him as someone with “a strong national reputation as a precollegiate education researcher,” having helped found the Center for Urban School Improvement in Chicago, which now runs charter schools there.
Bryk also won the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation Prize for Distinguished Contributions to Education and Scholarship in 2003. His reform credentials are further burnished by by Thomas Toch of Education Sector, who tells Ed Week, “he is an inspired choice. He has a gift for recognizing important research questions before others do, and for finding creative ways to examine important questions.”
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