Printer-friendly versionSome of the News Fit to Print
INTEREST TURNS TO ESEA PLAN’S CHANCES OF PASSING
Now that the Obama administration has unveiled its blueprint for reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, attention is shifting to whether the proposal will win sufficient support from lawmakers, policymakers, and education advocates to assure passage. Initial reaction from groups including the American Association of School Administrators, the National School Boards Association, and the Council of Chief State School Officers, has been generally positive, even as policy watchers and advocates are still digesting the blueprint. But the proposal rolled out March 13 already has two key detractors: The National Education Association, a 3.2 million-member union, and the American Federation of Teachers, a 1.4 million-member union. The article is in Education Week.
UPDATED LAW WOULD FOCUS ON FAILING SCHOOLS
For most public schools, the perceived heavy hand of the federal government would become a lighter touch under President Obama’s plan to rewrite the No Child Left Behind law. But for some, the consequences of academic failure would stiffen considerably. The proposal to update what is formally known as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act divides nearly 100,000 schools into three categories: those rewarded for high performance; those challenged to overcome major academic struggles; and the huge number in the middle that are pushed to improve but given freedom to innovate. The latter group could amount to 75 percent of schools. "For the vast majority of schools, we're going to get rid of prescriptive interventions," Education Secretary Arne Duncan told reporters Monday. The article is in the Washington Post.
WHY WE MUST FIRE BAD TEACHERS
The relative decline of American education at the elementary- and high-school levels has long been a national embarrassment as well as a threat to the nation's future. Once upon a time, American students tested better than any other students in the world. Now, ranked against European schoolchildren, America does about as well as Lithuania, behind at least 10 other nations. Within the United States, the achievement gap between white students and poor and minority students stubbornly persists—and as the population of disadvantaged students grows, overall scores continue to sag. For much of this time—roughly the last half century—professional educators believed that if they could only find the right pedagogy, the right method of instruction, all would be well. They tried New Math, open classrooms, Whole Language—but nothing seemed to achieve significant or lasting improvements. In no other profession are workers so insulated from accountability. Yet in recent years researchers have discovered something that may seem obvious, but for many reasons was overlooked or denied. What really makes a difference, what matters more than the class size or the textbook, the teaching method or the technology, or even the curriculum, is the quality of the teacher. The article is in Newsweek.
ONLINE JOURNAL 2.0
Art history and architecture professors have long taught out of textbooks and held forth in journal articles with the caveat that to truly appreciate a painting or a building, you must see it with your own eyes. Scaled-down, two-dimensional renderings on a printed page simply do not do them justice. That may still be true. But the Society of Architectural Historians has developed a new platform for its online journal that it hopes will close the gap between reading about important architectural examples and experiencing them. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.
READERS DON’T WANT TO PAY FOR NEWS ONLINE
Getting people to pay for news online at this point would be "like trying to force butterflies back into their cocoons," a new consumer survey suggests. That was one of several bleak headlines in the Project for Excellence in Journalism's annual assessment of the state of the news industry, released Sunday. The project's report contained an extensive look at habits of the estimated six in 10 Americans who say they get at least some news online during a typical day. On average, each person spends three minutes and four seconds per visit to a news site. About 35 percent of online news consumers said they have a favorite site that they check each day. The others are essentially free agents, the project said. Even among those who have their favorites, only 19 percent said they would be willing to pay for news online - including those who already do. The article is in the Washington Post.
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