Worth a read and a thought.
How Charter Schools and Testing Regimes Have Helped Re-Segregate Our Schools – The Daily Beast
Sure, it’s mostly the courts, but as we approach the 60th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, charter schools and testing regimes are reinforcing segregation.
Tom
Thanks to Franklin Schargel for pointing out this new Carnegie Foundation study.
BY SUSAN HEADDEN – Carnegie Foundation for the advancement of teaching 2014
This is my attempt to summarize the main points of 28 pages of this important and timely study. Interestingly, much of this tracks very closely with M. Night Shyamalan Foundation’s studies and book: I Got Schooled, which I summarized earlier in my blog.
Talent Drain – turnover and departures are lowering the average classroom experience level
Why They Leave – mainly because of poor/lacking administrative and professional support
New Generation, New Attitudes – impatience with dysfunctional structures, older teachers didn’t have to put up with all the testing and curriculum changes
Myths About Money – again, solid administrative support seems more important than money, pension back-loading is hard to swallow
The Toll of Teacher Turnover – turnover is very expensive, student relationships suffer, support from veteran teachers is rapidly vanishing
How Much Turnover is Too Much – it turns out that number/quality/costs of turnover is very poorly tracked, principles aren’t getting good teachers to stay and aren’t good at getting bad ones to leave, there are no good ideas what effective turnover targets should be
Supporting a Teacher’s First Years – careful hiring is important, new teachers are not prepared for realities of classroom, there is too little summer training, there is too much late hiring, there is lack of comprehensive induction (useful discussion of benefits of comprehensive induction and various approaches)
Houston Boot Camp – a mentoring program in the face of daunting statistics and politics
Roving Mentors in Iowa – mentors working outside of their normal grade levels and subject areas have much to offer to the new teacher, a lot of work gathering data on what was working
Teacher Residencies: Working Into The Job – pre-service apprenticing for up to a full year is producing desirable results in effectiveness and retention
A Matter of Match – problems arise from weak interviewing, little interaction with school personnel, hiring late in the process and after school year starts. turnover destroys continuity and trust for teachers and students
Returns On Investment – high quality induction produces lower turnover and higher retention, poor hiring practices leaks good teachers
Anamosa, Iowa –a detailed example of mentoring support
To read the whole study, click here.
So, if you are looking about for an interesting and timely topic for a social studies, civics, or government class, or just a dinner party, you owe it to yourself to spend 35 minutes watching this TED talk.
Whether you believe Snowden is a traitor, scoundrel, or hero, he speaks about what is perhaps the greatest change agent Spaceship Earth has witnessed in the past 20 years.
He relates the internet’s relationships and impacts – past, present, and future – with the fundamental themes and concepts of: human rights, economic – military – national security, journalism, the Bill of Rights, governance, politics, as well as the necessities for and challenges of the black-budget intel world.
I urge you to take 35 the minutes to watch it and then just imagine the discussions and experiences you may have in your classroom of kids that have only grown up knowing, and will continue growing up with and using, this amazing creation: The Internet – 2014 and beyond.
This from recent Bloomberg News
Who needs an army of lawyers when you have a computer?
When Minneapolis attorney William Greene faced the task of combing through 1.3 million electronic documents in a recent case, he turned to a so-called smart computer program. Three associates selected relevant documents from a smaller sample, “teaching” their reasoning to the computer. The software’s algorithms then sorted the remaining material by importance.
“We were able to get the information we needed after reviewing only 2.3 percent of the documents,” said Greene, a Minneapolis-based partner at law firm Stinson Leonard Street LLP.
Full Coverage: Technology and the Economy
Artificial intelligence has arrived in the American workplace, spawning tools that replicate human judgments that were too complicated and subtle to distill into instructions for a computer. Algorithms that “learn” from past examples relieve engineers of the need to write out every command.
The advances, coupled with mobile robots wired with this intelligence, make it likely that occupations employing almost half of today’s U.S. workers, ranging from loan officers to cab drivers and real estate agents, become possible to automate in the next decade or two, according to a study done at the University of Oxford in the U.K.
“These transitions have happened before,” said Carl Benedikt Frey, co-author of the study and a research fellow at the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology. “What’s different this time is that technological change is happening even faster, and it may affect a greater variety of jobs.”
To read the full article and see the neat graphic, click here.
This little 3:10 video asks a question in an ‘in-your-face’ way.
Then goes on to answer it.
Then goes on to say why really matters.
Enjoy ~
Shyamalan’s 3rd identified practice for closing the education-opportunity-achievement gap is Feedback. Regular, consistent, timely feedback in formats usable by teachers, principles, and parents. This TEDx talk describes the behavioral economics, psychology and power of feedback in some very interesting ways.
“Despite our best efforts, bad or inexplicable decisions are as inevitable as death and taxes and the grocery store running out of your favorite flavor of ice cream. They’re also just as predictable. Why, for instance, are we convinced that “sizing up” at our favorite burger joint is a good idea, even when we’re not that hungry? Why are our phone lists cluttered with numbers we never call? Dan Ariely, behavioral economist, has based his career on figuring out the answers to these questions, and in his bestselling book Predictably Irrational (re-released in expanded form in May 2009), he describes many unorthodox and often downright odd experiments used in the quest to answer this question.”
Here is a quick summary of Catherine Bracy’s September 2013 TED Talk entitled Why Good Hackers Make Good Citizens.
I believe you will want to watch it a couple of times and share it with lots of others.
One example towards the end is just sobering.
The Mexico House of Representatives let a 2-year $9.3 million (USD) contract to build a bill-tracking system. Out of frustration and irritation, Mexico City tech-geeks created a contest to create a system in 10 days for a “prize” of $9,300 (USD) (!). They received 173 apps; 5 were presented to the legislature and are still being used; the $9.3 million contract was vacated.