Big 8 on ESEA: Nothing New Big 8 on ESEA: Nothing New Big 8 on ESEA: Nothing New Ed Week’s Alyson Klein caught up with the ‘big 8′ (key lawmakers with jurisdiction over education) after their meeting yesterday regarding reauthorization of ESEA. Basically, they had nothing new to say. The sentiments about progress on the bill are more or less identical to what was said back in January when they first met to get this process started.

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Eliza Krigman responded to Should Congress Delay Reauthorization Of The Elementary And Secondary Ed Act? on June 17, 2010 09:55 AM

Do It Right, Do It Now Delaying action on ESEA is in no one’s interest, especially the children and educators who are laboring under an almost ten-year-old law. Most of the gains from No Child Left Behind (NCLB) have already been realized; it is time to build on what has proven positive and do what happens with every major piece of legislation—review strengths and weaknesses and draft legislation for current needs and conditions. NCLB was groundbreaking in 2001; almost a decade later, it is a compact disc in an iPod world

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Gov. Bob Wise responded to Should Congress Delay Reauthorization Of The Elementary And Secondary Ed Act? on June 14, 2010 07:37 AM

Don’t Delay — This Will Take Time No—Congress shouldn’t cease and desist further work on ESEA just because prospects for completing the bill this year are increasingly slim. Reauthorizations do not happen overnight

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Gary Huggins responded to Should Congress Delay Reauthorization Of The Elementary And Secondary Ed Act? on June 14, 2010 07:35 AM

After two and a half years of emotional and controversial negotiations, the Washington, D.C., teachers union ratified a new contract last week that dilutes the strength of seniority protections and introduces a voluntary pay-for-performance program. Union members approved the new agreement overwhelmingly in a 1,412-425 vote. The new contract includes a pay raise of 21.6 percent over five years (retroactive to the expiration of the old contract) that will raise average annual salary from $67,000 to $81,000

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What Effect Will D.C. Teachers’ New Contract Have?

New ways to thrive in education desert The new DCPS contract is interesting mostly because of the non-traditional way officials seemed to get the deal done.

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Chad Wick responded to What Effect Will D.C. Teachers’ New Contract Have? on June 11, 2010 12:06 PM

Not a National Model–For Many Reasons It’s not just funding that makes Washington, D.C.’s collective bargaining agreement for teachers an unlikely model for school districts that have little in common with D.C. While all communities share the goal of helping students in a way that meets their individual needs, and while most recognize that schools need better tools and conditions to accomplish this, communities use different approaches to meet this goal. And, most important, those differences must be accounted for in school policies and local laws.

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Randi Weingarten responded to What Effect Will D.C. Teachers’ New Contract Have? on June 11, 2010 09:29 AM

The Devil Went Down to Georgetown Johnny rosin up your bow and play your fiddle hard. The new DC contract is both fantastic and Faustian.

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Steve Peha responded to What Effect Will D.C. Teachers’ New Contract Have? on June 10, 2010 05:11 PM

No mo’ money Education philanthropists are putting a lot of money into D.C. but they’re not going to be able to do that in more than one or two cities

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Joanne Jacobs responded to What Effect Will D.C. Teachers’ New Contract Have? on June 7, 2010 02:23 PM

Daniel Weisberg Responds Daniel Weisberg, vp of policy and general counsel at The New Teacher Project, submitted the following: Ending the Widget Effect in DC Schools Last year, we published a report called The Widget Effect, which documented how meaningless teacher evaluations encourage school systems to ignore differences in teacher effectiveness and treat teachers like interchangeable parts. This keeps them from recognizing and rewarding their best teachers, providing support that helps all teachers improve, or addressing poor performance

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Eliza Krigman responded to What Effect Will D.C. Teachers’ New Contract Have? on June 7, 2010 11:44 AM

Virginia decided last week not to apply for the second round of the Obama administration’s Race to the Top competition, in large part because of the requirement to adopt a common set of academic standards. The administration backs the Common Core initiative, a movement spearheaded by the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers that has developed a set of math and English language arts standards.

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Trouble For Common Standards?

We’re Pretending to Educate All Children At the Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for a Competitive Workforce (ICW), we constantly hear from employers that their new hires are not adequately prepared, that they spend too much time teaching them information and skills they should have already learned in high school. Those who hire from more than one state face the additional burden that different states – and even school districts – are teaching different things and defining proficiency in different ways. We are confident, however, that the new common core standards just announced yesterday should help in solving these problems

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Arthur J. Rothkopf responded to Trouble For Common Standards? on June 3, 2010 08:53 AM

Kenneth Bernstein, teacher at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Greenbelt, MD, submitted the following: As a high school social studies teacher in Maryland, I am not directly affected by the proposed Common Core Standards, even though the state has just signed on to them.

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Eliza Krigman responded to Trouble For Common Standards? on June 1, 2010 07:04 AM

by BusinessWire With Classroom Boredom and Distractions Topping the List of Daily Challenges, Schools Integrate Online Learning to Re-Engage High-Tech, High-Touch Students. Since their earliest memories, today’s “iGeneration” has been wired, Wi-Fied, mobile, virtually augmented and i-computed like no other generation before them.

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“iGeneration” Student Survey Reveals a Shift in the Way Teens Learn

By Sara Israelsen-Hartley, Associated Press The NCAA said Tuesday it no longer will allow teenagers to use online high school course credit from BYU to beef up their grades in key classes. The NCAA also announced it won’t recognize transcripts from the American School correspondence program in Illinois

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NCAA bars BYU online learning credits for high school athletes

By Yasmin Anwar, UC Berkeley Enrollment in summer school at the University of California, Berkeley, is shaping up to be a record-breaker. At least 1,000 more students are enrolled today than were at this time last year. Meanwhile 1,400 students have signed up for online courses, a 50 percent increase over last year

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Led by online learning, enrollment in summer school projected to be the highest ever

by Betty Cheng, Brandeis Justice Stanford University offers online classes at the graduate level. Some departments allow fully online degree programs, while others have a few on-campus requirements. The requirements for the degree are determined by the department.

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Distant learning offered by online classroom settings can be effective

by Kevin YEE and Jace HARGIS, TOJDE  The Internet sensation YouTube (http://www.youtube.com) has become such a force online that it was estimated in 2006 to account for a full tenth of the bandwidth by the entire Internet in the United States (WebProNews, 2007), and to use as much bandwidth in 2007 as the entire Internet had done in 2000 (Carter, 2008). Like many technological tools created with entertainment or profit in mind, YouTube can now be easily and usefully adopted by instructors for educational purposes, and indeed many professors use YouTube in their classroom teaching already (Brooks, 2000).

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Online Learning: YouTube and Video Quizzes

by James Kelly, the Missoulian By now, parents are accustomed to the sight of their kids parked at the computer, uploading YouTube videos, plugging rounds into their enemies in virtual war games, and Skype-dialing friends across the country. But what if they fired up their Mac or Dell to master the quadratic equation, brush up on the conjugation of Spanish verbs or learn the atomic mass of beryllium? And what if it meant they didn’t have to set one foot in school?

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MCPS to experiment with online learning

By Shelley Widhalm, Loveland Reporter-Herald Whether you live in Loveland or Sterling, Grand Junction or Colorado Springs, Colorado Christian University is offering a new type of nursing program that combines online learning courses with classroom studies. The program is geared toward working adults who want to earn a Bachelor of Science in Nursing. “We’re offering a unique program,” said Diann DeWitt, nursing professor and program director at the college

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CCU classroom/online courses are geared toward working adults

  By Paul Fain, Chronicle of Higher Ed UMass at Lowell turns a $10-million profit, and SUNY at Delhi attracts nursing students. For-profit colleges are facing increasingly stiff online competition from regional public universities. Those revenue-hungry campuses are using the degree programs to attract both local students and those hailing from beyond state and national borders.

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Two Regional Public Universities Beat For-Profit Colleges at Online Learning