[ECP] K12 Newsletters Headlines and Resources
- From: "K.E." <admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: K12NewsLetters@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 06 May 2011 14:28:15 -0500
Teacher Appreciation Week
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is a joke!
All he knows how to do is make money. He is a businessman not a teacher. He
doesn't know a thing about teaching or teaching in a classroom. Look at his CV.
One from the KIPPers
A new report from KIPP is the first large-scale look at the college-completion
rate for KIPP students. Andrew Rotherham writes in TIME Magazine that although
the study shows KIPP graduates -- who are 95 percent African-American and
Latino and low-income -- far outpace the national averages for similar
students, they fall short of the network's own goals. Only 33 percent of
students who completed a KIPP middle school at least 10 years ago have a
bachelor's degree today. (Among similar students nationwide, just 8 percent
have graduated college.) And so, Rotherham asks, is 33 percent an achievement?
Or should KIPP be achieving better results, given its intensive support of its
students? KIPP posts a 95 percent high-school graduation rate for students who
have completed its middle schools, regardless of where they attended high
school, and an 89 percent college-matriculation rate. Rotherham therefore
praises KIPP for publishing the college-completion data, and "not moving the
goal posts on its own targets for success, and for owning the outcomes for its
graduates regardless of other factors they can't control." So let's not indict
KIPP or similar schools, writes Rotherham. Instead, as KIPP has pledged to do,
let's redouble our ambitions for low-income youth.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2067941,00.html
See the report: http://www.kipp.org/ccr
In an article in The Huffington Post, James Gee poses the question of why, if
from the late 1960s to the early 1980s the black-white achievement gap was fast
closing, progress ceased in the 1980s? Gee says these questions lack definitive
answers, but we know in big-picture terms. Consider some well-known facts.
Being poor puts a child at-risk for reading failure, but the correlation
between poverty and early reading failure is not large. What is large, however,
is the correlation between pooling poor kids in school and early reading
failure and subsequent lack of school success. It is also known that family,
community, and school factors beyond instructional methods contribute more to
student failure or success than do specific methods. The black-white gap was
closing, Gee writes, because thanks in part to Johnson's War on Poverty,
segregation was decreasing in the United States. This stopped with policies
focused on school and market variables over social and civil variables. "Today,
many policymakers and educators do not see pooling or unpooling poverty as
'reading variables' like phonemic awareness or comprehension strategies," Gee
writes. "But the truth of the matter -- and it is an expensive truth to ignore
-- is that school is not separate from society, and that ceasing to pool
poverty is the key variable to undoing the black-white gap, as well as the gap
between rich and poor children more generally."
Read more:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-gee/why-the-blackwhite-gap-wa_b_855591.html
Facts on the ground
"When we don't get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don't say,
'It's these lazy soldiers and their bloated benefits plans!'" write Dave Eggers
and Nínive Clements Calegari in The New York Times. When results on the ground
are not as hoped, we think of ways to better support soldiers, giving them
better tools, better weapons, better protection, and better training. When
recruiting is down, we offer incentives. Compare this to education. When we
don't like the way students score on international standardized tests, or how
particular schools perform, we blame the teachers and restrict their resources.
"Imagine a novice teacher, thrown into an urban school, told to teach five
classes a day, with up to 40 students each," Eggers and Calegari write. "At the
year's end, if test scores haven't risen enough, he or she is called a bad
teacher." For college graduates with other options, such pressure for low pay
makes little sense. There is currently much debate around accountability,
measurements, tenure, test scores, and pay for performance, but these questions
are secondary to recruiting and training teachers and treating them fairly.
"There is no silver bullet that will fix every last school in America," the
authors write, "but until we solve the problem of teacher turnover, we don't
have a chance."
Read more:
<http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?llr=ojzalicab&et=1105419857394&s=95761&e=001qTfZRxDlElWeWCYM0UAn2ucrR2xcSZeyvV6BSCIZ68Liya0GlipJ6CxLHlxZTk7CSma0dD8bAa8GWLpG_0wQ8kxNvKCbIBs9mNtEwq7ASw9AWTdy9sR8N1_DBTJaT5GJZXOTFzk0FZiMZ7usJmrwg045PT1RUkY8DIkUbP7uIuV31_ZrCI6nKwmbe-Cewc-EHa80QNWWVTk=>http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/opinion/01eggers.html?src=ISMR_HP_LO_MST_FB
BIG WASTE OF MONEY HONEY
but the Business ---- in education get to make money which is the only thing
this is about.
States and districts are only now confronting technical and logistical hurdles
to creating new teacher evaluations, they will never be able to get accurate
data. This whole data collection thing is the K12 bubble of money for
privateers and their private pockets. All the usual suspects involved.
http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/K12-Education-Business.html
more
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/04/27/29value.h30.html?tkn=NOBF7vCom8K2A9jCjvNr6MccoPFZLjfEmLPy&cmp=clp-ecseclips
Forget it!
Center on Education Policy finds that the share of public schools that did not
make adequate yearly progress (AYP) in raising student achievement under NCLB
reached an all-time national high of about 38 percent in 2010. This marks a
rise from 33 percent that fell short in 2009. Despite this, the percentage of
schools missing AYP has changed only slightly over the past five years, and
would have to more than double to reach the Obama administration's projections
of more than 80 percent failing to make AYP next year. Between school years
2005-06 and 2009-10, the national percentage of schools missing AYP rose from
29 percent to 38 percent, but in two of the interim years, the percentage
declined. In 12 states and the District of Columbia, at least half of public
schools did not make AYP in 2010, and in a majority of states, at least
one-fourth of schools fell short. The report includes tables with AYP trend
data for every state, and shows wide differences in the percentages of schools
not making AYP in 2010, ranging from about 5 percent in Texas to about 91
percent in D.C. The report cautions, however, that AYP results are not
comparable between states because of variations in states tests, cut scores for
proficient performance, demographics, and other factors.
read more http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/K12-Education-Policy.html
Less than a quarter of high school seniors passed national civics exams in
2010, raising concern among experts about what appears to be a decline in
understanding about the U.S. government. I wonder how well they understand how
banking and finance works especially when it comes to electing politicians.
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Educational CyberPlayGround, Inc.
www.edu-cyberpg.com
Karen Ellis
[ phone ] 276.633.0388
[toll free] 877.220.0262
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