Archive for October, 2008
Support for Gifted Math & Science Students
In the late 1950\\\’s, the US Government began to invest a small amount of funds toward educating gifted youth through programs such as NSF Young Scholars.
Funding for programs like Young Scholars was cut off in the mid 1990\\\’s, as US educational policies and society\\\’s attitudes shifted — support for gifted young students in science and math was diverted to educating students at the bottom of the class.
Please restore the funds at NSF and NASA for programs aimed at the gifted such as Young Scholars. I was lucky enough to attend a Young Scholars program in the early 1990\\\’s. It changed my life. I am now [Read more...]
Less Testing!
Study child development! Require active engagement in classrooms. Decrease the number of tests! Do some standardized testing in grades 5 (or 6) , 8 ( or9) and in 12. Help make the national chant “What do we do if they do not learn?” SUPPORT teachers; do not penalize the teachers who CHOOSE to teach in impoverished environments. Support, rather than tear down is the key!
This post was submitted by Patty Jordan.
Address the Crisis of Character in our Schools
The next President of the United States needs to address not only the problem of poor academic performance in our schools but also the student problems of drug abuse, sexual promiscuity, violence, lying, cheating, stealing, racism and bullying.
No matter how many red flags are raised in the media about the crisis of character in our society and despite the fact that we all agree that the role of education should be to produce citizens who are both smart and good, we continue by and large to focus on test scores rather than authentic measures of intellectual and moral excellence.
As a principal, the survivor of a concentration camp, once [Read more...]
A New Generation of Teachers
An upended economy means an upended job market. And the turmoil runs deeper, into the realms of values, meaning, and social purpose. Ours is a time when to be young is also to inherit a world that needs to be righted and to acknowledge that the resources of the human spirit and imagination are about the only resources that have not been systematically depleted. Now is the time, Mr. President, to make education, and especially teaching, one of the top five careers chosen by college graduates. That would involve better career preparation in colleges and universities, reformed induction practices (not dissimilar to interning), working conditions similar [Read more...]
Make America a Nation of Learners
For almost a decade, our education conversations have talked around learning, not about learning. Our vocabularly is peppered with NCLB, accountability, human capital, charters, vouchers, AYP, etc.
Mr. President, get America talking about learning. Focus on it relentlessly.
Get started by using policy and the bully pulpit to:
(1) Topple the tyranny of testing and replace it with the love of learning as the focus of the business of our schools.
Demand that schools develop foundational skills as the child’s toolkit for lifelong learning. Then, put most energy into helping each student clearly understand how they learn, and how this know how is used to acquire mastery and expertise [Read more...]
Protect student journalism.
Student journalists are high achievers. Study after study has confirmed the correlation between participation in student journalism and reduced dropout rates, improved standardized-test scores, and greater college readiness. Working on a student newspaper or a student news broadcast develops the foundational communication and critical-thinking skills that employers highly value, and it is a pathway to engagement in the civic life of the community and the world, both for the journalist and for the audience.
You would assume that school administrators would embrace and nurture this powerful learning tool. But you would be wrong. A dozen times a day, thousands of times a year, the telephone [Read more...]
Beyond Proficiency
During the past decade, our Nation has taken important steps – most notably through enactment of No Child Left Behind – to improve educational outcomes lower-income and minority children. While NCLB needs to be improved, the simple process of establishing standards to measure student success has, for the first time, provided clear evidence that enormous numbers of low-income and minority children are failing to achieve proficiency in math and English.
The next administration will need to improve national strategies for helping low-income and minority students, including more rigorous and uniform achievement standards and increased funding for programs designed to meet NCLB’s goals. But educational equity in the US [Read more...]
More Focus on Tomorrow; Use Educational Futuristics
K-12 schooling focuses primarily on the Past and the Present. Young learners want as well to explore the Future. They want to understand choices they can make to help shape the space where they will spend the rest of their lives. They are endlessly fascinated by possibilities - both positive and perilous - and their investment in their schooling would greatly improve if schools included the future in every aspect of the curriculum.
This includes, and goes beyond the Greening of education, the use of IT “ghee whiz” technology, internet outreach to schools overseas, and other strengths of Educational Futuristics. It especially involves infusion in a school of a pro-learning [Read more...]
Pass It On
Every student will have the opportunity to have a mentor, and every student will have the opportunity to be a mentor.
This post was submitted by Arlan Berglas.
End High-Stakes Testing
Nothing has hurt the education of our students more than the emphasis and high-stakes NCLB has put on testing. This HAS transformed education, and not for the better. We are preparing students to be test-takers, not thinkers. These two outcomes do not go hand-in-hand, they are fist against fist. The fear of not making AYP drives everything. We don’t evaluate the true learning of the students. Can they solve problems? Can they apply learning? Can they communicate well? Do they have goals and aspirations and is what we are doing in the schools helping them to achieve this? We don’t evaluate the factors that really make a difference in how [Read more...]
