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Eduwonkette cheekily points out there’s a gender gap in edublogs. “The ed policy blogosphere bears striking resemblance to “The Bachelorette,” says EW. “75% of teachers are women, but 75% of ed policy bloggers are men. I’m just saying.”
Yes, but Eduwonkette, Joanne Jacobs, Michele McNeil and Bridging Differences (Diane Ravitch and Deborah Meier) alone guarantee the ladies have a better signal-to-noise ratio.
Newsweek has a familiar-feeling piece on breaking up big behemoth high schools into smaller, more personal schools. To describe the approach, as Newsweek does as “the biggest wave of school reform to hit that classic American institution, the comprehensive high school, in 30 years” seems a bit breathless in its hyperbole.
Critics say that creating small high schools out of large ones merely masks the real problem: coming up with a national consensus on what children should be learning in high school and making sure they learn it. “The size of the school matters less than the quality of the curriculum,” argues Brookings Institution scholar Diane Ravitch, an educational historian. Although small high schools may be moderately beneficial for the most impoverished kids, who do better in a more personal environment, real improvement in high school won’t begin “until we come up with a universal curriculum.”
After that speedbump, it’s acres of the usual anecdotes about the personal touch, teachers and administrators getting to know students and “education on a human scale” before getting around to noting that “at small high schools across the city and across the nation measures of student achievement have flatlined, and some schools have even seen dips in math scores.”
(Amusing sidenote: Newsweek describes NYC Schools Chancellor Joe Klein as “a small, bespectacled former Justice Department lawyer.”)
I’m all for shuttering lousy schools and tend to favor small small schools reflexively, but let’s talk about which ones work and why.
Pittsburgh police say a public high school teacher nabbed in a heroin sting returned to school for the rest of the day before she was suspended with pay.
A longtime high school wrestling coach has lost his job amid concerns a former assistant coach tried to convert Muslim students to Christianity.
The lawyer for a suspended Greenwich elementary school principal confirms that the key issue in the dispute involves cupcakes.
Great moments in labor relations…Members of an Australian Teachers Union have been offered $17 an hour to clean classrooms, empty garbage cans and wash floors at the end of the school day. Rubbish, said the union members.
For the second time this week, a ghastly-sounding story of a teacher verbally abusing a five-year-old child. And this time, it’s on tape. The parents of an Indiana kindergartener sent the child to school with a tape recorder in his pocket after suspecting problems:
I’ve been more than nice to you all year long and you’ve been ignorant, selfish, self-absorbed, the whole thing! I’m done!” Indiana teacher Kristen Woodward says to Gabriel on the tape. She continues: “Something needs to be done because you are pathetic! If me saying these words to you hurt, I hope it does because you’re hurting everyone else around you.”
Subject matter expertise or pedagogy? Which matters more for a teacher? Arizona says subject matter matters, at least enough to allow the experts to teach with a mere modicum of training, according to the Arizona Republic:
Beginning this fall, working engineers and scientists will sign on as adjunct teachers in a new pilot program. These professionals can teach one class of calculus or algebra daily after 36 hours of teacher training and a background check. Unlike adjunct instructors in universities, professionals teaching in high schools will not get paid. The state calls the new volunteer program the “Adjunct Teachers Initiative. Arizona’s teachers union calls it insulting.
“What I see coming from the adjunct teaching proposal is that teaching isn’t really more than some kind of community service that you do when you’re feeling generous,” Andrew Morrill, vice president of the Arizona Education Association tells the paper.
On the other hand, I’d rather have the expert than an “emergency teacher” with no subject expertise, apparently Arizona’s most common response to a shortage.
Student incentives seem to boost reading scores, according to a newly released piece of research. Critics have described plans to give cash, electronic gear or other rewards as bribery, but the study of charter school incentive programs from Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes finds “reward systems are found to have stable and consistent positive impacts for student learning in reading. The effect holds across grades and across network and non-network charter schools.”
“It’s not a silver bullet, but for very little investment, you seem to get a pretty consistent bump,” Margaret E. Raymond, the study’s author, said in an interview with Education Week.
Read a summary of the findings here. The full report, “Paying for A’s” is here.
The success of incentives will get all the ink, but this finding caught my eye: “Schools in which there is continuous or near-continuous assessment of student conduct produce larger gains in reading than schools that have reward systems.”
Great post by teacher blogger Jose Vilson (hat tip: Joanne Jacobs) on giving kids what they need, instead of what they want. This is what enforcing classroom consequences looks like. Or should.
I care for you, and that’s why you’re not going on the trip tomorrow. Other teachers may protect you at their leisure. They may argue that you need the attention, and that you’ve deserved it academically, and to an extent they’re right. Yet, something makes my head itch at the thought that I’d let a repeat cutter attend a trip with students who truly deserve it. And of course, we know it’s not just you. The crew you hang out with influences your decisions to miss out on my afternoon announcements, my calls to you for better behavior and respect for all teachers, not just the ones you feel like respecting.
Read the whole thing here. First-rate stuff. I hope his administration backs him up.
You won’t find a word about it in the papers, but Google ”Subway and homeschool” and you’ll see dozens and dozens of blog entries from HSers peeved that the sandwich chain has excluded their kids from a national essay contest. The “Every Sandwich Tells a Story” writing contest offers $5,000 in athletic equipment to the winner’s school. But it’s a disclaimer on the contest’s web page that wrankles.
Contest is open only to legal US residents, over the age of 18 with children in either elementary, private or parochial schools that serve grades PreK-6. No home schools will be accepted.
A letter from the Home School Legal Defense Association calls for Subway to reverse itself.
We understand that the competition is focused on traditional public and private schools because the grand prize of $5,000 of athletic equipment is designed to be used by a traditional school and not an individual family. A potential homeschool winner, however, could simply donate the grand prize to a public or private school of their choice or to a homeschool sports league.
Subway has reportedly responded to the pressure, but stopped short of changing the rules. A letter from the chain posted on the HSLDA site apologies “to anyone who feels excluded by our current essay contest. Our intention was to provide an opportunity for traditional schools, many of which we know have trouble affording athletic equipment, to win equipment. Our intent was certainly not to exclude homeschooled children from the opportunity to win prizes and benefit from better access to fitness equipment.”
The letter promises Subway will “soon create an additional contest in which homeschooled students will be encouraged to participate.”
One-hundred percent reading proficiency six years early. Last spring, all 184 students in the third and fourth grades at Ocean City Elementary School passed the Maryland School Assessment, or MSA, a battery of tests given by the state every year since 2003 to satisfy the law. “The school was the first in the state, apart from a few tiny special-education centers, to meet the goal that has defined public education this decade,” reports the Washington Post.
While not a disadvantaged school, neither Ocean City Elementary an affluent suburban school. The Post notes the student population, nearly 600 in total, is 89 percent white, 5 percent Hispanic, 3 percent black, 2 percent Asian and 1 percent American Indian. Twenty-nine students have limited English proficiency, and 134 qualify for subsidized meals because of low family income.
