This was originally posted at dailykos earlier todayThe material beneath the fold is a list of resources that are relevant to the two educational sessions I will be leading at Yearlykos, the panel Education Uprising: Educating for Democracy and the roundtable discussion Rethinking Educational Accountability There will be handouts of this material available as long as they last. It is included in the handouts for the panel, which include copies for the "plan" and statements from Marion Brady and Peter Henry (the latter is included in hyperlinked form at the end of this diary). If those run...
New Research: Test Score Progress Weaker and Advances in Narrowing Racial and Income-based Achievement Gaps Have Faded Since NCLB
If these damning research findings just published in AERA's Educational Researcher do not torpedo the reauthorization of the NCLB war on public schools, then nothing will--short of torches in the streets:New Research on Achievement Test Scores Slow Under No Child Left Behind Reforms, Gauged by States and the Federal Assessment WASHINGTON, D.C., July 30, 2007 – As Congress reviews federal efforts to boost student performance, new research published in Educational Researcher (ER) reports that progress in raising test scores was stronger before No Child Left Behind was approved in 2002, compared...
Jim Cummins dismantles NCLB
Comparing the research into instructional methods that work with what actually happens today in the schools, particularly in inner cities, it is "very clear," Cummins said, that the current approach in too many U.S. schools is 90% ideology and 10% science. Research is ignored, misunderstood, misinterpreted and distorted to favor that ideology. . . [read ...
Community Organizing and Urban Education XII: Locating a Target
[To read the entire series, go here.]A key term in the neo-Alinsky community organizing toolbox is “target.” Fundamentally, in this model, if you don’t know what (or preferably who) your target is, then you can’t really act in a coherent way. A target is “the institution or person who can make the change you want.” Imagine, for example, that you are a leader in a local action group that wants to get sports re-funded in your district. The first thing you need to do is find out who makes that funding decision. And this involves not only figuring out how power works in your district, but...
Testing: an examination of its effects on one school
crossposted from dailykosLet me start by noting that I am no fan of No Child Left Behind, and have opposed it since before it became law in 2002. I am actively involved in lobbying for major changes in the current efforts to reauthorize the law. As a high school social studies teacher I am not directly impacted by the law, because social studies does not count for Adequate Yearly Progress. I do have to prepare students for tests required for graduation, and I see the impact of NCLB in the lack of preparation in many of the students arriving at our high school. While I can write about my observations...
NCATE’s Professional Dispositions: To be determined.
"To Be Determined"That, literally, is what is written in the new NCATE standards (to go into effect fall 2008) in the glossary for professional dispositions. I just saw this in searching for some other materials.It used to read (from the 2006 edition):Dispositions: The values, commitments, and professional ethics that influencebehaviors toward students, families, colleagues, and communities and affectstudent learning, motivation, and development as well as the educator’s ownprofessional growth. Dispositions are guided by beliefs and attitudes related tovalues such as caring, fairness, honesty,...
Where is AESA?
In the most recent issue of Rethinking Schools, Kristan Morrison details what occurred in Virginia concerning the possible elimination of social foundations of education. (I wrote about this earlier here.) While Kurt Stemhagen and others were able to keep foundations coursework as a part of the teacher education curriculum, Morrison states that:According to the American Educational Studies Association, the major foundations organization, the process of eliminating or reorienting foundations courses has begun or has occurred already at teacher education programs in many states, including Connecticut,...
Community Organizing and Urban Education XI: Scholarly Participation in Organizing Campaigns: Research that Makes a Problem “Hit Home”
[To read the entire series, go here.][Note: post has been revised for more accuracy]Given the enormous gulf between the realities of life in the academy—even in relatively marginal research institutions like mine—how might education scholars contribute to organizing campaigns? First, I think it is important that scholars resist the urge to “help” by trying to turn organizers and leaders into scholarly researchers, into people like us. Organizers generally use research very differently than do scholars. In organizing, research done by participants is...
YEARLYKOS: Education Uprising / Educating for Democracy - the "plan"
note: I am crossposting here a diary from dailykos today. As you read it, you will note that two of the key players in creating that diary, and in the underlying work effort, are members of this blog, which I why I am sharing itFriday August 3, 1 PM:The design of American education is obsolete, not meeting the needs of our students and our society, and ignores most of what we have learned about education and learning in the past century. This panel will explore a new paradigm, including some specific examples, of how education in America can be reshaped in more productive and democratic fashions....
The Special Needs of Georgia's Voucher Advocates
"Private schools are private schools, they are not obligated to take all these students. There's nothing in the law that requires them to do that." --Jeff Gagne, Overseer of the new Georgia voucher programA significant cluster of all those children that conservatives do not want to leave behind is comprised of individuals with special needs. Since NCLB became law, these children, not to be left behind, have been forced to take tests that were not made for students with special needs and that, furthermore, do not assess learning that was supposed to accrue...
A higher education mess
Since I'm here in my office anyway, on a Saturday, I thought I'd take a brief break and describe some of the politics of Florida higher education... by video. Yes, Education Policy Blog is now including vlogging! I'm curious whether the video panel below will show up on RSS aggregators......
New Bush Version of NCLB: Privatization 2.0
From an earlier post at SM:. . . .when it became apparent in 2001 that a school voucher provision would not be included in NCLB, the White House’s inside man in the Senate, Sen. Judd Gregg, rallied support among disappointed Republicans. In doing so, he offered this glimpse into the Rovian education strategy to bring down public schools and, in the process, dump billions into the laps of tutoring concerns run by corporate and fundamentalist supporters:“Well, the supplemental services [tutoring] are a foot under the door for vouchers. They’re going to show that these schools aren’t working properly,...
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