Printer-friendly versionSome of the News Fit to Print
US TEACHERS MORE INTERESTED IN REFORM THAN MONEY
U.S. teachers are more interested in school reform and student achievement than their paychecks, according to a massive new survey. The survey of 40,090 K-12 teachers -- including 15,038 by telephone -- was likely the largest national survey of teachers ever completed and includes the opinions of teachers in every grade, in every state and across the demographic spectrum. Called "Primary Sources: America's Teachers on America's School," the survey was conducted by Harris Interactive between March 10 and June 18, 2009, and was to be released Wednesday. It was paid for by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Scholastic Inc. The purpose of the survey was to keep teachers' voices in the debate over education reform, said Vicki L. Phillips, director of Gates Foundation's K-12 education program. This AP article is in the Boston Globe.
RAVITCH U-TURN STIRS DEBATE
Diane Ravitch, the education historian who built her intellectual reputation battling progressive educators and served in the first Bush administration’s Education Department, is in the final stages of an astonishing, slow-motion about-face on almost every stand she once took on American schooling. Once outspoken about the power of standardized testing, charter schools and free markets to improve schools, Dr. Ravitch is now caustically critical. She underwent an intellectual crisis, she says, discovering that these strategies, which she now calls faddish trends, were undermining public education. She resigned last year from the boards of two conservative research groups. “School reform today is like a freight train, and I’m out on the tracks saying, ‘You’re going the wrong way!’ ” Dr. Ravitch said in an interview. Dr. Ravitch is one of the most influential education scholars of recent decades, and her turnaround has become the buzz of school policy circles. The article is in The New York Times.
GRADUATES FAULT ADVICE OF COUNSELORS
Most people who graduated from high school in the last dozen years believe that their guidance counselors provided little meaningful advice about college or careers, a new study has found. And many said the best advice on their futures came from teachers. “Most young adults who go on to college believe that the advice of their high school guidance counselors was inadequate and often impersonal and perfunctory,” according to the study by Public Agenda, a nonprofit research organization. “Most troubling, and potentially significant for policy makers,” the study added, “is that young people who characterized their interactions with guidance counselors as anonymous and unhelpful were less likely to go directly from high school into a postsecondary program.” The researchers surveyed 600 people who graduated from a variety of high schools across the country in the last 4 to 12 years. The study was sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has sought to shed light on low completion rates at both the high school and college levels. The article is in The New York Times.
COLLEGE COMPLETION CACOPHONY
The chorus trumpeting the need for the United States to move more Americans into and out of college with a meaningful credential just got a little louder. Complete College America, whose creation was formally announced Tuesday, focuses "solely," it emphasizes, "on dramatically increasing the nation’s college completion rate through state policy change," and on building "consensus for change among state leaders, higher education, and the national education policy community." That's a logical focus for its president, Stan Jones, who spent 30 years working on higher education issues as a legislator, gubernatorial adviser and commissioner of higher education in Indiana.The group will begin its work with an alliance of 17 states (so far) that have agreed to set clear goals for degree and credential completion through 2020, develop state-specific plans and strategies for achieving those goals, and college and report common measures of progress using consistent data. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.
UNIVERSITIES PONY UP CASH FOR OPENCOURSEWARE
On Monday more than a dozen universities and groups pledged a total of $350,000 over five years to support the OpenCourseWare Consortium, an association that promotes the publication of free content like lecture videos, assignments, and syllabi. The donors include the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tufts University, and the University of Michigan. Their money will support an association focused on helping new members get projects off the ground, sharing best practices, and promoting global awareness of open educational resources. The Massachusetts-based nonprofit has an annual budget of about $750,000, largely supported by a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation that runs out in the 2012 fiscal year, according to Stephen E. Carson, president of the consortium. This information is from the Wired Campus blog in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
A KIND OF SLAVERY WITH TERM LIMITS
Carnegie Scholar-in Residence and Learning Matters CEO John Merrow blogs in Taking Note: The first Merrow to come to America was a Scots highlander named Henry who survived the battle of Dunbar, was taken prisoner by Oliver Cromwell’s forces and shipped to Boston around 1650 where he was sold, at age 25 or 26, into indentured servitude. The term of his service was seven years. The purchase price was 12 pounds. Henry was for all intents and purposes a slave, but with a huge difference: he knew that he would become a free man on a specific contractual date. He might even gain his freedom before that date if he saved enough. But in either case, each day he worked brought him closer to his freedom. Is it too over-the-top to propose that this is akin to America’s high schools today? Students are certainly not slaves, but at times they are a bit like indentured servants, who, if they put in their seat-time for a set number of days and years, will receive diplomas and be done with schooling. They will be free.
TIME TO FIX MIDDLE SCHOOLS
Chad Wick writes in the National Journal: In the past 20 years, education reformers have focused on literacy, math and science at the K-4 and 9-12 levels and have left the middle school curriculum largely undefined. Now is the time to connect our investments. As they were originally conceived, “Middle Schools” were designed to do many things right. The middle school concept focuses on personalization for students and collaboration among teachers. What is left out of the middle schools design is the formal description of what middle school students should know and be able to do.
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