Catch up post…

I was too busy to post yesterday (teaching…chemistry, as it turned out…). I mentioned the bookmarklet ‘read it later’ and I decided to show a few of the articles I got a chance to read up on yesterday (after school…).

So, here are a number of articles I found lately that generally relate to some of the issues I am interested in education:

From the New York Times…

0p-Ed Columnist

A Serious Proposal

By BOB HERBERT

The president of the American Federation of Teachers says she will urge her members to accept a form of teacher evaluation that takes student achievement into account and that the union has commissioned an independent effort to streamline disciplinary processes and make it easier to fire teachers who are guilty of misconduct.

the rest of this article…

This is another article from the. NYT…

January 12, 2010

As School Exit Tests Prove Tough, States Ease Standards

By IAN URBINA

A law adopting statewide high school exams for graduation took effect in Pennsylvania on Saturday, with the goal of ensuring that students leaving high school are prepared for college and the workplace. But critics say the requirement has been so watered down that it is unlikely to have major impact.

The situation in Pennsylvania mirrors what has happened in many of the 26 states that have adopted high school exit exams. As deadlines approached for schools to start making passage of the exams a requirement for graduation, and practice tests indicated that large numbers of students would fail, many states softened standards, delayed the requirement or added alternative paths to a diploma.

People who have studied the exams, which affect two-thirds of the nation’s public school students, say they often fall short of officials’ ambitious goals.

“The real pattern in states has been that the standards are lowered so much that the exams end up not benefiting students who pass them while still hurting the students who fail them,” said John Robert Warren, an expert on exit exams and a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.

read the rest of this article here…

Here’s an article from Time magazine (online)…

Thursday, Jan. 07, 2010

Holding Colleges Accountable: Is Success Measurable?

By Gilbert Cruz

With almost 40% of the nation’s college-age students in some form of post-secondary education — and tuition costs as high as they’ve ever been — we don’t really have a handle on what students learn at university. Or whether they’re learning anything at all. Kevin Carey, policy director at the Washington think tank Education Sector, believes that many colleges do a bad job of 1) teaching students and 2) getting them to graduate. An essay he wrote for the December issue of Democracy is making waves in the higher-ed world because it describes how a lot of colleges are keeping student-assessment data confidential. He spoke with TIME education correspondent Gilbert Cruz about why parents — and public officials — should demand more accountability from colleges. (See TIME’s special report on paying for college.)

you can read the rest of this article here…

This is another New York Times editorial about substitute teaching! Who would have guessed! I have to admit that it does paint a darker picture of this activity than I have experienced, but I may have been lucky in working for a lot of nice people…

January 3, 2010

Op-Ed Contributor

The Replacements

By CAROLYN BUCIOR

Milwaukee

TWO years ago, during lunch with a second-grade teacher in the Chicago area, I mentioned that I was going to substitute teach. The teacher — I’ll call him Dan — started into a story about his own experience with a substitute, which is easily summarized: Dan left a lesson plan; the sub didn’t follow it. So, he ended by asking, how hard can substitute teaching be?

I smiled, said nothing and bit into my Reuben.

Over the next two years, I would learn — as I subbed once a week for a variety of classes, including kindergarten, sixth grade, middle-school social studies, high-school chemistry, phys ed, art, Spanish, and English as a second language — that Dan’s story is standard teacher fare. Last time I heard it, though, I didn’t bite my sandwich or my tongue.

“Maggie,” a teacher in a Milwaukee public school, was talking about the difficulty of her job, which is something the teachers I know do quite a lot. Then she complained that her sub hadn’t completed the lesson plan she’d been given.

“So, what you’re saying is that a teacher’s job is so hard, anyone should be able to do it for a day,” I said.

This time, it was the teacher who went quiet.

the rest of this editorial can be read here…

Finally I found a great listing of articles, links and resources related to what we could do about our schools (with an eye to our student’s futures…)

A new year has just begun, but while time passes by our educational system keeps standing still. Your kids are still learning the same way you did 20-30 years ago, because they are still in a classroom with books.

Online learning tools and technologies have surfaced in recent years but the impression you get is that e-learning is still confined to a little group of savvy educators who have understood how to leverage the power of the Internet for teaching and learning.

In fact, despite the revolution started by social media, web 2.0, real-time web and agile development, the educational paradigm has not fully embraced those fantastic discoveries to give birth to a new learning paradigm that gets rid of useless exams, tests and paper sheets to focus on those new learning skills required to live a successful and meaningful life.

there is much more on this page that is really worth looking into…

As you could have seen (or read…), these are all articles from major news outlets, there is nothing here that is hard to find… The NYT and Time articles do allow you to see that there is a lot more flux in the current state of education than many would like (you may have heard the ‘old Chinese curse’: “may you live in interesting times”). In the spirit of this ancient curse I will finish this post with a YouTube video of a commercial I saw on TV last night (btw I am agnostic about Kaplan University, I am much more interested in the general sentiment presented!)