“Don’t leave out kids who have disabilities”
Declan Ryan is a senior at Vanguard High School in New York City.
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]
“Stop standardized testing. It is affecting the dropout rates.”
Kattye Gonzalez is a sophomore at Validus Preparatory Academy.
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]
“You want us to come to school? Have something for us when we get here”
Eric Caldwell is an 11th grader from New York City.
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]
Narrative Pedagogy
1.I have been researching narrative pedagogy as a means for integrating earth science and literacy education. I am in a doctoral program in environmental studies and am concerned as a parent, teacher of teachers, prior classroom teacher, environmental educator, and gifted and talented coordinator, that many of our children, particularly from grades 4 - 12, are not excited about earth science as a potential career choice. With global environmental and climate change, we have some very intricate problems to solve and new realizations to discover, and we’ll need a future generation of earth scientists and educated citizenry to participate in the solutions.
There is a great deal of research [Read more...]
Curricula
Beginning with my first article on the subject in the KAPPAN in 1966, in books published by respected publishers, in myriad articles in professional education journals, and in dozens of my Knight-Ridder/Tribune columns, I have argued that the curriculum adopted in 1892 and now in near-universal use in our schools and colleges was poor when it was put in place and grows more dysfunctional with each passing year. By any objective measure, it is simply unacceptable. Sending the young into an unknown future armed with such a crude intellectual tool is unconscionable.
My statements of problems have been very specific, as have been my suggestions for their solution within present bureaucratic [Read more...]
Laws for Publishing Companies
Dear President Obama,
I see a large portion of district money going towards textbooks as part of curriculum adoption. In September 2006, an advisory committee to the U.S. Education Department issued a lengthy analysis of the economic forces that lead to high textbook prices. They included inelastic demand (school districts have to buy the books); an oligopolistic supply market in which only a handful of publishers (including Thomson, McGraw-Hill, Prentice Hall, and Houghton-Mifflin) dominate; high production costs that create barriers to entry by possible competitors with the Big Four.
I am wondering if you could pass a law that would stop the publishing companies from raising their textbook prices (if school districts [Read more...]
More Foundational Courses
Dear President-Elect:
Congratulations on your historic opportunity. Your campaign indicated a desire to get students back to the fundamentals of education and student development.
I see this need as an educator to reestablish basic life skills such as business etiquette, work ethics, soft skills, international educational awareness, all of which I include in all my course instruction.
These life skills start early; my wife and I own a Montessori Pre-school and we include these life skills in our programing as well. I invite you to visit our school in MN at some point.
Thanks again for allowing input.
Dan Creed
Business Instructor
Normandale Community College
This post was submitted by Dan Creed.
Worst piece of public policy I’ve ever seen . . .
As a professor of education, I’ve done a considerable amount of research on NCLB and have concluded that the following negative consequences are among its most serious:
-Narrowing of the curriculum to emphasize only those subjects that are tested
-Impoverishment of classroom teaching practices to “teach to the test,” neglecting higher-order thinking skills
-Labeling of experienced, successful teachers as not “highly qualified”
-A “diversity penalty” that puts schools with highly-diverse populations at a greater risk of being labeled as failures
-Failure to distinguish between effective and ineffective schools, and to provide real support to schools that are truly struggling
-Greatly increased federal control at the expense of local control
Among the causes of these problems are the [Read more...]
