Tag Archive for 'performance'

What’s In It For Me?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 22, 2008 in Education Practice. 6 Comments

Rewarding students for high performance has been discussed here and elsewhere, now a pending California bill would authorize and encourage school districts to provide nonmonetary incentives to middle and high school students.

“What we’re really looking at is recognition and motivation and incentive to achieve,” Sen. Elaine Alquist, a Santa Clara Democrat who proposed the measure, tells the Sacramento Bee.  Not everyone agrees. “At some point, students need to be taught that every good deed does not require reward,” said Jon Coupal of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association.

I’m a pragmatist.  I favor whatever works.  But there will always be something that rubs me the wrong way about having to reward people for acting in their own self-interest.

Update:  The Gradebook, a really good edublog by the St. Petersburg Times’ Jeffrey Solochek, has more on this, including similar proposals in Florida and New York.

What It Takes: Mentors, Motivation, Moxie and Moms

Published by Leanna Landsmann on June 24, 2008 in Education Leadership, Parents and Students. 2 Comments

Every June we’re treated to cap and gowned seniors en route to their high-school graduations, proud families in tow. We smile and give them a ‘thumbs up.’ But we must also pause to see the drop outs as clearly as the graduates.

How did these students persevere when so many with so much more fail? What’s in their secret sauce? Can it be bottled for others?

One million students drop out of high school each year. The literature is packed with reasons: poverty, lack of college-bound culture at home, poor performing schools, low expectations and high pressure to reject academic success, too few great teachers and counselors. What more can the “village” it takes to raise a child do to prevent this?

As board chair of Greatschools.net, an organization that helps parents put their kids on a path to college, I stew about this more than your average Jane. After umpteen decades of ‘school reform,’ I’m angry we’re still slogging in place.

So I look forward each March to a call asking, “Do you want to review scholarship applications again this year?” I drop everything to pour over submissions from high-achieving, low-income New York City seniors who, if chosen, will get a generous four-year free ride to college from a family foundation with a bold-face name. From several hundred applicants, three-dozen are chosen to be interviewed. From that group, the foundation selects 25.

Continue reading ‘What It Takes: Mentors, Motivation, Moxie and Moms’

The Big Picture?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 12, 2008 in Assessment and Testing and Education Practice. 0 Comments

The Baton Rouge AdvocateGreat instruction and a strong curriculum is the best test prep, right? And research shows “drill and kill” doesn’t work? But look inside a struggling school and you see, well, lots of test prep. “Schools Turn Focus to the Big Picture,” an article from the Baton Rouge Advocate, looks uncritically at Roseland Elementary, which includes “some of Tangipahoa Parish’s poorest students and is one of its lowest performing schools on state accountability measures.” Note that no attempt is made to downplay or hide the big test prep push that’s going on. Indeed, the piece seems to assume that this is what schools are supposed to do. Perhaps school officials do too, since the “big picture” of the title refers to the school’s strenuous test prep effort—the announced “40 Days of Focus,” described as “an intense time of preparation for the Louisiana Educational Assessment Program tests for fourth- and eighth-graders and other tests given in March.”