04.06.10
Posted in Education at 9:02 am by Travis
Diane Ravitch – A new agenda for school reform – washingtonpost.com.
This is an excellent article uncovering the shear ignorance, misrepresentation and oversimplification of educational reform. Parents, I hope you read this article and allow it to be the basis for your continuing education on education and reform. It’s time out for speeches, half-truths, and catch phrases. Everybody loves children, not just the “reform at any cost” crowd. The RAAC crowd do not love children any more than anybody else.
If you truly love children, then inform parents and the community with real knowledge about what it take to educate a child not just hit a benchmark number. Remember, there is a difference between achievement and true learning. Inform the people instead of catch phrases to make them feel good while capitalizing on their ignorance.
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03.10.10
Posted in Education at 6:43 am by Travis
“The policy center concluded that the restructuring models promoted by Obama are an improvement over No Child Left Behind but warned that because they include “specific directives that are not supported by research, it is unwise to prescribe them” to schools. “The federal government should be careful about directing people to do things when it doesn’t have the evidence,” says center President Jack Jennings.”
via Firing teachers: First step to reform or useless effort? – USATODAY.com.
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09.23.09
Posted in Education at 7:58 pm by Travis
Taking Technology Out of the Classroom
via Techtonic Shifts : Taking Technology Out of the Classroom.
Okay, I am a little confused. Jose’ Bowen talks about taking technology out of the classroom, but he uses podcast to engage his learners. His justification for taking out the technology is as he stated, “Just because you have a PowerPoint presentation doesn’t mean you have a good lecture.”
Let me explain something. Educational technology is not about teaching; it’s about learning. It’s about engaging the students with the technology so that they collaborate, create and take ownership of their learning. If you spend more time trying to figure out if your PowerPoint should fly in or out, or you go to the conferences to find the latest, “cool” gadgets to wow your students then you are wasting your time. Your students have already seen the latest gadgets and have them and been using them for about six months. Technology was never meant to replace curriculum, classroom management, planning, differentiation and attention to diversity. If you think that this is what technology is about in the classroom, please leave now.
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08.21.09
Posted in Education at 7:24 pm by Travis
Out of all of the shouting, gun toting and reminiscing for the 1940’s, we have largely ignored one casualty in the heath care debate, education. Arne Duncan, President Obama, Rev. Sharpton, and Speaker Newt Gingrich have come together to tackle education reform. Secretary Duncan has the brand new “Race To The Top” Program which I like to call NCLB v.2.0 beta. Standards and assessments, everything a growing child needs to succeed in the market place. No attention to curriculum and instruction, but oh, I forgot. Those items are understood to automatically be there and work in favor of all children.
The issue I am raising is how poverty which is not truly figured into the administration’s formula for success. According the rhetoric, it’s the teacher’s fault that the little poor kids can’t pass the test. These sorry teachers are holding the educational system back. Fire ‘em! Fire ‘em all I say!
Now I’m not the smartest person in the world, but I think you have to actually be in school to be taught anything which brings be to my point. What are we going to do about the number of uninsured families and children?
According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities,
Findings about Children
- The number of uninsured children under age 18 rose by 600,000, from 8.05 million in 2005 to 8.66 million in 2006. The percentage of children who lack health insurance also rose from 10.9 percent to 11.7 percent.
- As Table 2 indicates, the number and percentage of children who are uninsured declined from 1999 through 2004, but that trend stopped and began to reverse in 2005.[3]
- Rising enrollment in SCHIP and Medicaid was the main factor that drove down the number and percentage of uninsured children from 1998 to 2004. These enrollment increases more than offset the declines in employer-based coverage of children that began in 2000.
- From 2004 to 2006, the percentage of children covered by public insurance remained unchanged and thus could not offset the continued reduction in the percentage of children covered by employer-sponsored insurance. The result was an overall reduction in children’s coverage.
This Washington Post article explains it best here.
Children without health coverage are three times as likely as insured children to lack a regular doctor, according to a report released last month by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Research from the American College of Physicians in 2000 found that uninsured children were less likely to be up to date on immunizations and to receive treatment for sore throats, earaches and other common childhood illnesses. A University of Texas study found that kids with insurance tend to have fewer school absences.
Kids with insurance stay in school. It doesn’t matter if you are a “highly qualified” teachers who never needs on-going professional development, ever again. Who comes into the classroom with a near divine-like discernment for the diverse needs of the student and thus can reach all of the children every time they teach with Jedi-like abilities. Who do not need a curriculum that addresses the diverse needs of the learner or effectively use technology within the curriculum. It doesn’t matter that they can have every child hitting those numbers, and walk away with enough merit pay to make athletes jealous.
The kids have to be in school to learn. What does the assessment data say about that? Get on with it already!!
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07.15.09
Posted in Education, social justice at 8:36 am by Travis
Regional Shift Seen in Education Gap – NYTimes.com.
According to the article,
Historically, the achievement gap between America’s black and white students was widest in Southern states, where the legacies of slavery and segregation were reflected in extremely low math and reading scores among poor African-American children.
Oh happy day! Test scores for black students have come up in the south! Bless my soul! Is it the Obama effect? Have black kids gotten the message? Were the conservatives right, personally responsibility is the key? Are the southern chapters of the NAACP more effective than the northern chapters? Who cares, right? Its all about the data, numbers and stats. Anytime you start talking about data, I am going to have to refer to Dr. Deming. Deming told us that we have to know what we are doing when we look to numbers for answers. He said that the purpose is not for us to use data to make determinations, but to ask questions. Ironically, no one has an answer although we are led to believe that the “dirty south” may have just come to its senses.
Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust, a nonprofit group in Washington that works to close achievement gaps, said principals in Wisconsin were “stunned” when shown the results.
Before we schedule the block party, let’s consider this. I remember hearing this Sunday night on the local news. During the same time as this event, another article from CNN for the Black in America 2 program states that black have been migrating back to the South from the North.
According to the NY Times article,
The study plotted the evolution of average scores of black and white students on the series of federal tests known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress that were administered every two to four years in both math and reading from 1992 to 2007. Nationwide, the average math score in 1992 for white fourth graders was 227 on a 500-point scale, compared with an average score of 192 for black fourth graders that year, resulting in a black-white gap of 35 points.
By 2007, the most recent year included in the new study, the average math scores for white fourth graders had risen to 248, but the average scores for black students had risen to 222, thus narrowing the black-white gap to 26 points, about the equivalent of two and a half years of schooling.
According to the CNN article,
Around 1970, many African-Americans began moving back to the South, historians and demographers say. The trend accelerated during the 1990s and this decade, according to William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think-tank.
From 1965 through 1970, the South experienced a net migration loss — the number of people who moved into the region compared to the number of people who moved out — of more than 287,000 African-Americans.
Thirty years later, the numbers were nearly the opposite. From 1995 through 2000, the South saw a gain of nearly 350,000 African-Americans.
You don’t have to be a statistician to realize that although this may not be the cause, it definitely has an effect. What may have made the difference was the quality of life for the northern families who left the South in the first place. Poverty is and will always be a major factor in student achievement. It looks like we have a shift in those families who’s incomes were an advantage to those students which is reflecting in the scores down South. Just consider it.
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03.12.09
Posted in Education at 10:52 pm by Travis
Pew Research Center: Writing, Technology and Teens.
If you think that students are not aware of their writing skills and abilities in the classroom, you’re wrong. In the past few days, there has been a lot of discussion concerning what’s wrong with our educational system. The problem is not the teachers directly, but the curriculum. A curriculum that, in most cases, is not differentiated for all learners, addresses diversity and includes technology.
This report shows a disconnected of what we think teens know or think about education. According to the report, teens are more aware than what we give them credit for.
“Even though teens are heavily embedded in a tech-rich world, they do not believe that communication over the internet or text messaging is writing.
“Despite the nearly ubiquitous use of these tools by teens, they see an important distinction between the “writing” they do for school and outside of school for personal reasons, and the “communication” they enjoy via instant messaging, phone text messaging, email and social networking sites.
- 85% of teens ages 12-17 engage at least occasionally in some form of electronic personal communication, which includes text messaging, sending email or instant messages, or posting comments on social networking sites.
- 60% of teens do not think of these electronic texts as “writing.”
The report goes on to say.
“Teens are motivated to write by relevant topics, high expectations, an interested audience and opportunities to write creatively.
In our focus groups, teens said they are motivated to write when they can select topics that are relevant to their lives and interests, and report greater enjoyment of school writing when they have the opportunity to write creatively. Having teachers or other adults who challenge them, present them with interesting curricula and give them detailed feedback also serves as a motivator for teens. Teens also report writing for an audience motivates them to write and write well.”
Here is what Carol Ann Tomlinson has to say concerning differentiation in the classroom.
“We learn more enthusiastically those things that connect to our interest, and we learn more efficiently if we have a suitable background of experience. We also lean more efficiently if we can acquire information and express our understanding through a preferred mode.” – Tomlinson, C. A. (1999). The Differentiated Classroom- Responding to the Needs of All Learners. Alexandria: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Teens and Technology Integration
“Teens believe that the writing instruction they receive in school could be improved.
Most teens feel that additional instruction and focus on writing in school would help improve their writing even further. Our survey asked teens whether their writing skills would be improved by two potential changes to their school curricula: teachers having them spend more time writing in class, and teachers using more computer-based tools (such as games, writing help programs or websites, or multimedia) to teach writing.
Overall, 82% of teens feel that additional in-class writing time would improve their writing abilities and 78% feel the same way about their teachers using computer-based writing tools.
What I find most encouraging is that a lot of teens write outside of the classroom especially black teens.
“Non-school writing, while less common than school writing, is still widespread among teens.
Black teens are also more likely to write music or lyrics on their own time.
- 47% of black teens write in a journal, compared with 31% of white teens.
- 37% of black teens write music or lyrics, while 23% of white teens do.
- 49% of girls keep a journal; 20% of boys do.
- 26% of boys say they never write for personal enjoyment outside of school.”
We have a lot of work to do. Let’s put that stimulus money to good use.
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12.23.08
Posted in Education at 11:29 am by Travis
Top News – Technology key to award-winning district’s excellence.
This district won the prestigious Baldrige Award for excellence. The Baldrige has a very rigorous criteria for meeting excellence. Organizations apply to receive the award and are encouraged to apply even if they know that they will not win. Just going through the process of preparing allows the organization to take a serious inventory of its purpose, mission and goals. The rigors of the award forces the organization to look at aspects that they never considered important to the process, and causes them to take a look at the long term goals set for the organization and how they plan to reach them.
Interestingly enough, the Baldrige is the American counter part of and created as a result of the Deming Award initiated by the Japanese after Edward Deming helped them rise to manufacutering supremacy. Florida Power and Light is one of the few American companies to receive a Deming Award.
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