I note, somewhat belatedly, that I’ve been blogging here since January 2005 (or November 2004, if you want to count a first experimental WordPress post).
My first substantive post, BBC: Small-class pupils ‘do no better’, began:
New British research suggests that there “is no evidence that children in smaller primary classes do better in maths or [...]
(I have a draft post on “teaching to the test” rattling around somewhere, hence the title of this one.)
The gadget shown here was displayed at the recent Consumer Electronics Show. Cnet reported:
The device, called the Airnergy, uses an antenna and circuitry to harvest the energy and an internal battery to store the electrical charge. A [...]
Gordon Rayner in The Telegraph (strike-out mine):
For more than a century, the cornerstones of education have been reading, writing and arithmetic, but surely every British child would benefit if we added a fourth core skill to that list: touch-typing.
All children are given endless hours of coaching in how to use the most common computer applications, [...]
Mark Liberman quotes Yeats (“Letter to Michael’s Schoolmaster“):
Teach him mathematics as thoroughly as his capacity permits. I know that Bertrand Russell must, seeing that he is such a featherhead, be wrong about everything, but as I have no mathematics I cannot prove it. I do not want my son to be helpless.
OK, this can hardly be surprising. But still…
Matthew Yglesias: Public Deeply Ignorant About Cap and Trade
Via Dave Weigel, an unusually useful poll from Rasmussen Reports:
A good article on the production & selection process explains why school textbooks are so lifeless and boring, and why Texas is so influential nationwide. Long, but well worth reading.
http://www.edutopia.org/textbook-publishing-controversy
Most surprising quote: “The books are done and we still don’t have an author!”
This has been floating around for a while, and I’ve been meaning to mention it. So here goes.
Science Literacy — American Adults ‘Flunk’ Basic Science, Says Survey
Only 53% of adults know how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun.
Only 59% of adults know that the earliest humans and dinosaurs did not [...]
Juan Cole suggests journalism at universities as an alternative to traditional print media that seems to be struggling to find a viable business model. His excellent Informed Comment blog provides excellent coverage on Middle East news and commentary not well covered in the mainstream media.
I like the idea a lot: news is very much a [...]
This is Harry Brighouse at Crooked Timber. My guess is that our local administrators would insist , mostly, that “that’s what we’re already doing”. Teachers maybe not quite so much. And yet…
Go read the whole thing, and don’t neglect the comments.
Some obvious comments about school improvement and the achievement gap.
… How are you going to [...]
Ryan Avent.
The Worst Option, Except for All the Others
…
The issue is this — banks have assets that are worth much less than they’re currently being valued on the books. If banks fix this problem, they are suddenly and obviously insolvent. If they don’t, then they linger on in zombie mode, dragging down the broader [...]
Which I haven’t seen. Follow the review link for a readable lesson in political economics.
Response to IOUSA
In case you’ve missed the hype, IOUSA is a documentary making the case that the U.S. budget is hopelessly out of control and that our current spending patterns will bankrupt our children. The film features such noteworthy characters as [...]
My local school district serves a Silicon Valley bedroom community on the Pacific coast. The district has been shrinking for the last decade, but beneath the steady shrinkage are some interesting demographic changes.
I posted an article on the subject at Coastsider.com.
He’s not alone, I’m sure. In an opinion piece in the NY Times, Brooks informs us that US education is going to hell in a handbasket. We’re falling behind.
America’s edge boosted productivity and growth. But the happy era ended around 1970 when America’s educational progress slowed to a crawl. Between 1975 and 1990, educational attainments [...]
I wrote a piece over at Coastsider.com on what is, in the event, a rather minor agenda item from the last meeting of our local school board.
The district’s middle school has reached the final stages of NCLB’s “Program Improvement” (that’s what California calls it; I think the Feds say “School Improvement”). Having failed to made [...]
Bob Herbert in the NY Times:
Our Schools Must Do Better
The latest federal test results showed some improvement in public school math and reading scores, but there is no reason to celebrate these minuscule gains. We need so much more. A four-year college degree is now all but mandatory for building and sustaining a middle-class standard [...]
Via Eduwonk, the NCLB discussion draft. All in all, an incremental improvement. See for example the sections on ELLs, growth model, and school improvement.
Derek Neal and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach (University of Chicago) discuss their recent paper, “Left Behind by Design: Proficiency Counts and Test-based Accountability”.
Roughly two decades ago, education policy makers in the United States began to rely more heavily on standardized test scores as performance metrics for teachers and schools. During the late 1980s and [...]
From today’s SF Chronicle:
California schools are in line for a $6 billion windfall over the next five years, and interest groups are already lining up to get their share, promoting ideas like improving high schools, paying teachers more, and helping urban districts with severely declining enrollment.
The money is anticipated because K-12 enrollment [...]
Last June, a parcel tax proposal by my local school district failed, for the fifth time in recent memory. This Tuesday, Californians will vote on Proposition 88, an initiative that seeks a perpetual statewide $50/year parcel tax.
Sidebar: California School Funding
California school districts are primarily funded by the state, through a complicated formula that needn’t concern [...]