this is being posted near simultaneously at Education Policy Blog, School Matters, and EduratiI recently received an email from Wade Tillett, a teacher, parent and activist in Chicago Public Schools, about a 2-minute statement he made he made June 24th, and included an additional statement he made at a public hearing at Arne Duncan's last Board meeting in December. He informed me that I spoke abouthow CPS is using test scores to fail individual students (the data Isent you and which you posted earlier), and to fail entire schools. CPS uses standardized test to override teachers, students, parents...
On the uses and misuses of Advanced Placement - a personal reflection
I teach 3 sections of Advanced Placement US Government and Politics, mainly to 10th graders. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it gives me access to some of the brightest students in our school, students who stretch me as a teacher. On the other hand, I have the responsibility of preparing them for the Advanced Placement test, which determines whether or not they will receive college credit. While this is a semester college-level course spread out over a year, I am more than a little restricted because of the necessity of preparing them to sit for the test.There are two recent...
How Does Our Language Shape the Way we Think?
from Edge, h/t neuroanthropology:For a long time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered at best untestable and more often simply wrong. Research in my labs at Stanford University and at MIT has helped reopen this question. We have collected data around the world: from China, Greece, Chile, Indonesia, Russia, and Aboriginal Australia. What we have learned is that people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world. Language is a uniquely human gift, central to our experience of being human....
Ed Links and Other Unrelated Stuff
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The Secret to Success is Staying in School And Studying Hard!
Study here, summary here.Recent graduates from Philadelphia's public high schools had higher employment rates and higher annual earnings than their classmates who dropped out, but many of them still did not have incomes above the federal poverty line, according to a new study from the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University. The report suggests that although it is essential to increase high school graduation rates, "without additional postsecondary education, the effect of a high school diploma on lives and livelihoods may be rather limited.". . .The study shows that only 35 percent...
Big Gains for Paying Kids to Do Well
See this article.To be completely non-PC, I think this is actually a good idea. As Alexander Sidorkin argues (paraphrasing badly from my memory of some of the articles this book is based on) in many places, especially in low-income schools focused on test prep, education is simply a form of forced labor. (It's no accident that you often have to look twice to figure out whether a building is either a school or a prison.) Okay, so let's pay them for it. Let's stop pretending we know how to make low income schools feel less like prison or a child-labor sweatshop. At least child-laborers get...
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