Everybody’s Doin’ The Best They Can Perhaps the most valuable lesson I have learned in my life is that everyone really is doing the best they can all the time.
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Steve Peha responded to Tying Title I To College- And Career-Ready Standards on March 5, 2010 12:42 AM
Title I and Transforming Education I agree with President Obama that it’s a good idea to tie federal Title I aid to a requirement that states work in partnership to adopt rigorous common standards or career-ready and college-ready graduation requirements. In Rhode Island, we have developed and adopted academic standards in partnership with three other states (Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont) through the New England Common Assessment Program (NECAP), the only regional partnership in the country. Though we are confident that we have adopted high-quality standards, we want to be sure that our standards are rigorous enough to prepare all…
Wait a Minute, Friends I think some of the posted criticisms of the Administration’s proposal are unfair and misguided. Some say that we don’t know enough now about college/ career ready standards, and, thus, we shouldn’t go down this path in reauthorization. But we do know a lot about college/career ready expectations
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Sandy Kress responded to Tying Title I To College- And Career-Ready Standards on March 3, 2010 07:55 AM
CCR is the norm?! How can something that does not yet exist and has not been reviewed or tried out in practice become the “norm”? This may become a new definition of insanity.
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Diane Ravitch responded to Tying Title I To College- And Career-Ready Standards on March 2, 2010 01:53 PM
Obama’s Jumping the Gun I have been advocating for the creation of national academic standards for many years and even wrote a book about why we should have them and the difficulties in getting there. But I think the President has jumped the gun.
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Diane Ravitch responded to Tying Title I To College- And Career-Ready Standards on March 1, 2010 10:22 AM
WiZiQ’s Moodle module has just been updated with a lot of usable features and improvements like easy module installation, more Virtual Classroom features, recordings, rescheduling, scheduling for groups, etc.
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WiZiQ’s Best Web Conferencing Moodle Module Ever – Now Available
Middle Schools Are Underserved The nation’s middle schools are often treated like middle children: overlooked and underserved. There is a critical relationship between middle school and postsecondary success, and the education community should seize the opportunity to make middle schools the next focus of school reform. Middle schools provide a critical link to ensuring that all students receive an education that provides them with 21st century skills
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Dennis Van Roekel responded to What Can Be Done For Middle Schools? on February 25, 2010 10:44 AM
They reject the Kool-aid I would just note that Trish Williams seems to be saying that the middle schools that produce academic success are those that have rejected the tenets of “middle school-ism” and reoriented themselves to academic achievement. I’m not a bit surprised.
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Chester E. Finn, Jr. responded to What Can Be Done For Middle Schools? on February 24, 2010 07:56 AM
More Demanding Curriculum for Middle One of the big problems in middle schools is the absence of a genuine, coherent, substantive curriculum. It would help students in middle school if they had a solid program in history, the arts, science, civics, geography, mathematics, and literature. Unfortunately, many “experts” think that the problems of adolescence preclude any real engagement with challenging ideas and insist that adolescents should study the problems and issues of adolescence
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Diane Ravitch responded to What Can Be Done For Middle Schools? on February 22, 2010 11:26 AM
Despite fierce opposition from the local teachers union, the Houston Independent School District approved a policy last week to use value-added test scores, a statistical method used to measure teachers’ and schools’ impact on students’ academic progress rates from year to year, as one of the criteria for teacher evaluation and teacher dismissal (some details about the policy are available here and here ).
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Houston’s Teacher Evaluation Policy
Groping Our Way to the Future Honestly, the big point isn’t the relative strengths and weaknesses or technical features of Houston’s particularly approach.
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Chester E. Finn, Jr. responded to Houston’s Teacher Evaluation Policy on February 16, 2010 09:31 AM
Here’s some good news for academic teachers. We have just launched an academic teachers’ special for teachers who are associated with: An academic institution A government organization Non-profit organization This is a limited period offer and it ends on Feb. 28, 2010
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When students show up for Kevin Gaugler’s Spanish in technology class at Marist College, they don’t have to lug around a textbook. The entire class is done electronically
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Digital textbooks cut costs, expand lessons – Michael Woyton, Poughkeepsie Journal
While the explosion in online college education has received a lot of attention, a new state report says that enrollment in high-school and even elementary-school courses offered over the Internet is also growing rapidly in Colorado. Enrollment in online courses offered by Colorado schools is up 12.5 percent in the 2009-2010 school year from the previous term, the Colorado Department of Education reports. There were 13,093 Colorado K-12 students enrolled in online programs for the 2009-2010 term as of October 2009, versus 11,641 as of October 2008.
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Student enrollment in online K-12 courses up 12.5% in Colorado – Mark Harden, MSN
In his 2010 annual letter, recently posted to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation website, Bill Gates makes a pretty strong case for incorporating different elements of the Internet—specifically, online video and interactive lessons—into both K-12 and higher education.
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Online Learning Gets High Praise From Bill Gates – Zach Miners, US News
The six schools and colleges that reside within the University of Minnesota’s Academic Health Center are rapidly beefing up their e-learning offerings — a trend experts say only makes sense when it comes to health education. “E-learning is becoming incredibly core to what we do here,” said Barbara Brandt , assistant vice president for education in the AHC
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E-learning changing the face of health care education – Tara Bannow, University of Minnesota Daily
Have President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan breathed new life into the effort to renew the No Child Left Behind law this year? Although congressional action this year had seemed unlikely, the Obama administration has pushed hard in recent days for lawmakers to move forward on reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
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ESEA In 2010?
Get the Dropout Numbers Right! Ms. Browne-Dianis keeps repeating the allegation that graduation rates hover around 50% for children of color and that NCLB hasn’t helped. I don’t know whether NCLB has helped or not, but the real data are much better than she says and they’ve improved since NCLB passed.
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Sandy Kress responded to ESEA In 2010? on February 2, 2010 02:38 PM
Build Momentum I don’t think that Secretary Duncan and President Obama are breathing new life into the effort to reauthorize NCLB as much as using their leadership to build momentum for Congress to undertake the task. Both the president and secretary have been promoting changes in education on an ongoing basis. Education is an important domestic issue and the longer it takes to fix the problems with NCL, the more states will have to deal with a growing number of school districts falling into the sanctions provision of the law
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Gina Burkhardt responded to ESEA In 2010? on February 2, 2010 11:36 AM
Politics and substance create divisions Reauthorizing NCLB in 2010 will be a very difficult task. One reason is the many other time-demanding issues occupying Congress. Did you note how often President Obama asked the Senate to pass something the House had passed
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Monty Neill responded to ESEA In 2010? on February 1, 2010 05:01 PM