January 24th, 2012 · Comments Off
Excerpt from Bill Gates’ annual letter regarding the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation:
Our work in U.S. education focuses on two related goals: making sure that all students graduate from high school ready to succeed in college and that young adults who want to get a postsecondary degree have a way to do so.
On the K-12 side, our top priority is helping schools implement a personnel system that improves the effectiveness of teaching, because research shows that effective teaching is the most important in-school factor in student achievement. There are a lot of great teachers in public schools, and a lot of teachers who want to be great but don’t have the tools they need. If we could make the average teacher as good as the best teachers, the benefit to students would be phenomenal.
A personnel system includes hiring; giving specific feedback; helping employees improve; and creating pay schedules, benefit plans, and termination procedures. There is consensus that the current personnel system in public schools doesn’t work. Every element of today’s system is criticized. However, there isn’t a strong consensus on what to change. Many states are moving away from guaranteed tenure with pay based solely on seniority and what degrees you have. But most of the alternative measures do not include much investment in teacher evaluation, which makes them very dependent on how good the principal is and how well student test scores measure teaching effectiveness.
I still find it hard to believe that 95 percent of teachers are not given specific feedback about how to improve. Even more important than a pay schedule that rewards excellence is identifying and understanding excellence so that teachers know how they can improve. In all the meetings I have had with teachers around the country, and in the surveys we have done, it is clear that most teachers want more feedback and will use it to improve, even if the financial rewards for performance are comparatively modest.
The most compelling example I have seen that this concept can work in a way that is great for both teachers and students is the school district of Tampa, Florida that Melinda and I visited this past fall. A key element of the agreement between the teachers’ union and the superintendent was to assign 2 percent of the teachers to become peer evaluators. These teachers were trained to observe classroom teaching and provide feedback on 22 different components. The principals have also been trained in this approach. Every teacher gets in-depth feedback from both the principal and the peer evaluator.
Tampa has been doing this for three years now, and it is already making a big difference. Teachers told us they value having feedback from two different sources—the principal who knows the school the best and the peer who knows the challenges of their specific job. The first round of evaluation revealed that many teachers need help engaging the students to prompt critical thinking and problem solving. The district started to organize its professional development around these findings, and the teachers have seized that opportunity to become more effective in the classroom.
When Melinda and I met with students, they told us that they had seen a big change during their time at the school. The success here required great work by Superintendent Mary Ellen Elia, Classroom Teachers Association President Jean Clements, and all of the teachers. I was particularly impressed with the peer evaluators. They all said they understood great teaching far better, having done the peer evaluation job. Some of the peer evaluators will go back to teaching and others will go into schools of education to help make sure new teachers have better preparation.
After seeing how valuable peer evaluation is, I think it should be part of every public school personnel system. Dedicating 2 percent of teachers to do this work is a large investment. It can mean raising the average class size by 2 percent or spending 2 percent more money. With budgets as tight as they are, most states will not add extra money for evaluation so we will have to make the case that it is worth the small increase in class size (of fewer than one student per class on average). Without this investment I don’t think an evaluation system will get enough credibility with the teachers or provide enough specific feedback to help teachers improve. Looking at test scores is also valuable for most subjects, but test score data mostly just identifies who is succeeding—it doesn’t show a teacher what needs to change. I see the willingness to make this investment as a test of whether people are serious about an evaluation system that really works.
Accelerating the development, discovery, and use of innovative educational technologies is another high priority for us. We have seen a tremendous amount of progress in this area recently, but it is really just the beginning. More needs to be done to equip teachers with the tools and information they need to make learning more personalized and engaging.
Social networking is one of the most promising areas, because it helps teachers and students connect in ways that naturally augment what’s going on in the classroom. Services that use social networking, like Edmodo, are really starting to take off because teachers can manage all aspects of the classroom using a platform with which most people are comfortable.
I’m also excited to see more and more schools “flip” the classroom so that passive activities like lectures are done outside of class and in-class time is used for more collaborative and personal interactions between students and teachers. Khan Academy is a great example of a free resource that any teacher can use to take full advantage of class time and make sure all students advance at their own pace.
Great work is also being done by companies that are thinking beyond simply digitizing textbooks. CK-12 Foundation, Udemy, and Ednovo have great teacher- and community–generated content. A simple example of how powerful the community can be in this area is TeachersPayTeachers, a marketplace that facilitates the sharing and exchanging of lesson plans and other materials developed by teachers themselves.
We’re also just starting to see how impactful gaming can be in an educational context. MangaHigh and Grockit are successfully delivering fun, competitive, game-based lessons that drive greater engagement and understanding. Zoran Popovic, at University of Washington’s Center for Game Science, is taking this even further through some amazing work creating games that automatically adapt to each student’s unique needs based on their interactions with the computer.
Many of these new tools and services have the added benefit of providing amazing visibility into how each individual student is progressing, and generating lots of useful data that teachers can use to improve their own effectiveness.
But how do most teachers figure out what’s available and right for them? There’s not yet a good answer to this question. Good technologies remain unused, and teachers spend too much of their own time and money. That’s why I’m launching a project this year to build an online service that helps educators easily discover and learn how to use these new tools and resources. I think there’s no limit to what a teacher with the right tools and information can do.
Bill Gates, 2012
GLO
Tags: School Whisperer
November 22nd, 2011 · Comments Off
From New York Times op-ed section (Tom Friedman):
To better understand why some students thrive taking the PISA tests and others do not, Andreas Schleicher, who oversees the exams for the O.E.C.D., was encouraged by the O.E.C.D. countries to look beyond the classrooms. So starting with four countries in 2006, and then adding 14 more in 2009, the PISA team went to the parents of 5,000 students and interviewed them “about how they raised their kids and then compared that with the test results” for each of those years, Schleicher explained to me. Two weeks ago, the PISA team published the three main findings of its study:
“Fifteen-year-old students whose parents often read books with them during their first year of primary school show markedly higher scores in PISA 2009 than students whose parents read with them infrequently or not at all. The performance advantage among students whose parents read to them in their early school years is evident regardless of the family’s socioeconomic background. Parents’ engagement with their 15-year-olds is strongly associated with better performance in PISA.”
Schleicher explained to me that “just asking your child how was their school day and showing genuine interest in the learning that they are doing can have the same impact as hours of private tutoring. It is something every parent can do, no matter what their education level or social background.”
For instance, the PISA study revealed that “students whose parents reported that they had read a book with their child ‘every day or almost every day’ or ‘once or twice a week’ during the first year of primary school have markedly higher scores in PISA 2009 than students whose parents reported that they had read a book with their child ‘never or almost never’ or only ‘once or twice a month.’ On average, the score difference is 25 points, the equivalent of well over half a school year.”
Yes, students from more well-to-do households are more likely to have more involved parents. “However,” the PISA team found, “even when comparing students of similar socioeconomic backgrounds, those students whose parents regularly read books to them when they were in the first year of primary school score 14 points higher, on average, than students whose parents did not.”
The kind of parental involvement matters, as well. “For example,” the PISA study noted, “on average, the score point difference in reading that is associated with parental involvement is largest when parents read a book with their child, when they talk about things they have done during the day, and when they tell stories to their children.” The score point difference is smallest when parental involvement takes the form of simply playing with their children.
These PISA findings were echoed in a recent study by the National School Boards Association’s Center for Public Education, and written up by the center’s director, Patte Barth, in the latest issue of The American School Board Journal.
The study, called “Back to School: How parent involvement affects student achievement,” found something “somewhat surprising,” wrote Barth: “Parent involvement can take many forms, but only a few of them relate to higher student performance. Of those that work, parental actions that support children’s learning at home are most likely to have an impact on academic achievement at school.
“Monitoring homework; making sure children get to school; rewarding their efforts and talking up the idea of going to college. These parent actions are linked to better attendance, grades, test scores, and preparation for college,” Barth wrote. “The study found that getting parents involved with their children’s learning at home is a more powerful driver of achievement than parents attending P.T.A. and school board meetings, volunteering in classrooms, participating in fund-raising, and showing up at back-to-school nights.”
To be sure, there is no substitute for a good teacher. There is nothing more valuable than great classroom instruction. But let’s stop putting the whole burden on teachers. We also need better parents. Better parents can make every teacher more effective.
GLO
gordotto@parentsnschools.com
Tags: PD for Parents
November 21st, 2011 · Comments Off
Advertising Standards Canada has an information campaign out on bus shelters and websites informing of their work maintaining truth in advertising standards. The campaign slogan is “Dressing it up doesn’t make it true.” Their main message is “because among all the pretty words and pictures, truth matters”.
Coincidentally, the Alberta government has launched a re-look at its draft Education Act, under the handle:
“Our Children, Our Future: Getting It Right”
Hmmm…
… a series of so-called “community meetings”… held predominantly on weekdays (workdays)… during business hours (perhaps they should be called “usual suspects meetings” or “meetings of people with the same schedule, budget and mandate as ourselves”)
… meetings scheduled on less than two weeks notice (perhaps it should be called “Getting It Rushed”)
I have written before that if truth in advertising laws applied to government schooling, where graduation rates hover near the 70% mark, meaning only two of three children who are together in Grade 9 are still together at graduation… that it could not advertise itself as a “K-12 System” but only as a “K-8 System”.
GLO
gordotto@parentsnschools.com
Tags: PD for Parents · Educator Has No Clothes
November 18th, 2011 · Comments Off
Public education as a “partnership” between home and school… between parents and educators… is
… convenient to say
… a poor deal for parents (the “least partner”), and
… meaningless in law.
It is a pretend thing, a fictional construct, backed by nothing really at all.
And the fiction gets in the way of reality, and any real progress attainable in the actual relationship among millions of homes and thousands of schools.
Too bad.
GLO
gordotto@parentsnschools.com
Tags: Parents as Consumers Not Partners · PD for Parents
November 11th, 2011 · Comments Off
John Wood and his remarkable “Leaving Microsoft to Change the World” book and his even more remarkable “Room to Read” charity was recently featured in the New York Times, as they passed their 10 millionth book milestone.
The NY Times story captured his purpose and vision elegantly:
“I get frustrated that there are 793 million illiterate people, when the solution is so inexpensive,” Wood told me outside one of his libraries in the Mekong. “If we provide this, it’s no guarantee that every child will take advantage of it. But if we don’t provide it, we pretty much guarantee that we perpetuate poverty.”
“In 20 years,” Wood told me, “I’d like to have 100,000 libraries, reaching 50 million kids. Our 50-year goal is to reverse the notion that any child can be told ‘you were born in the wrong place at the wrong time and so you will not get educated.’ That idea belongs on the scrapheap of human history.”
Throughout human history, of the 70 billion or so humans that have ever lived on this planet, nearly 10 out of 10 of them were literally born in the wrong place at the wrong time to get educated. We stumbled along. The remarkable change in the past few generations is that education every place is becoming more attainable, accessible and actual. Humans will learn, if you let them. Humans will read, if you teach them how and a book is at hand. You CAN stop them (see North Korea)… but it is much better not to.
GLO
gordotto@parentsnschools.com
Tags: Schooling 2.0
October 10th, 2011 · Comments Off
In the 1890’s, the goal of organized labour was described as “More!”
Alberta’s new Premier Redford demonstrated this month during her campaign for leadership her understanding that this goal is alive and powerful within the ranks of government school collectives, when she deliberately took $100 million out of the Provincial Treasury and promised it as “More!” to serve her ambition to become Premier.
As candidate she went out of her way, with only days left before the final vote, to meet with government school labour collective officials to be sure (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) they heard her promise. It wasn’t a message for students and it wasn’t a message for parents… even though there are millions of them, they are not conveniently connected by either email or organized self-interest. And it wasn’t a message for trustees. There are only a few hundred of them… hardly enough to bother, compared with a government school labour collective with tens of thousands of members. And then that labour collective made sure (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) that her promise got heard and read by its membership. The promise of over $100 million. And the promise of within 10 days.
Nudge, nudge… wink, wink… say no more… say no more.
Appeal to a 30,000+ member collective, all of voting age and opportunity, during a campaign involving 80,000 total votes and where 1500 made the difference.
All with other people’s money. All toward mutual self-interest.
So much for stewarding the people’s trust. So much for stewarding the legislature’s trust.
GLO
gordotto@parentsnschools.com
P.S. This play would not have worked with nurses. The leadership vote was on a Saturday, and nurses work weekends.
P.P.S. Meet with the labour collective AFTER becoming premier, fine… no personal self-interest. Meet with them for the purpose of BECOMING premier… offering other people’s money in specified amounts within a specified time frame… and that makes all taxpayers unwitting donors to the campaign. Nice play, but way out of bounds.
P.P.P.S. Still, I suppose, on the bright side, the $100 million was far less than the $2 billion the last premier-elect gave government schoolers during his leadership campaign, when a promised royalty review resulted in that much extra being extracted from royalties and, within weeks, being injected into government schoolers’ pensions to cover a pesky “shortfall”. That pension fund was only “short” what government schoolers had optimistically assumed it would earn from the assumed ever-increasing number of hired government schoolers contributing assumed ever-increasing salaries. When demographics resulted in zero growth in students, engendering zero growth in schoolers, the pension assumptions and economics stopped working. The logical and principled solution of schoolers contributing more to their own pensions, or expecting less from them, made no sense… to them. Better to have government and taxpayers pay more AS IF their assumptions had all happily come true. And these are the same people grading our children’s math scores…
Tags: Parents as Consumers Not Partners · No More Money
July 18th, 2011 · Comments Off
Well worth capturing here from Whitney Tilson’s blog, quoting a public statement from a California organization called “Parent Revolution” that was involved in establishing meaningful and effective and just regulations to empower parents to change school systems that are not performing for children and families.
To me, it is a victory, too, for the lifting of the facade that maintains parents as “partners” in public education (and thus maintaining parents as accomplices in a system designed for generations more as a “full employment for schoolers” system than a “full education for children” system). Partnership is a bad deal for parents in their children’s schooling — especially as silent partners with no genuine ownership interest or influence. Consumers have greater strength than pretend partners. This is an exercise of consumer power in California.
“Today, the parents and children of California won an historic and hard-fought victory at the State Board of Education over Parent Trigger implementing regulations. These regulations operationalize Parent Trigger as a true right for every parent in California, and they make it virtually impossible for recalcitrant district bureaucracies like Compton Unified to abuse the ambiguity in the law in order to defend an indefensible status quo.
“Eighteen months ago, when parents across California first organized to pass the Parent Trigger; or even eight months ago, when parents in Compton submitted their historic Parent Trigger petition, none of us could have predicted this day. And just six short months ago when our Executive Director, Ben Austin, and other reformers were removed from the State Board of Education largely in an attempt to stymie Parent Trigger, no sane political prognosticator could have predicted that this day would come to pass. But it did. Today. Because of the power and the passion of desperate and committed parents.
“A few highlights of these historic regulations:
• They ban harassment and intimidation of parents organizing around Parent Trigger, and they ban the use of school resources to campaign for or against Parent Trigger;
• They create a model petition, so that no future Parent Trigger petition will ever be thrown out due to a technicality;
• They provide every parent at all 1300 Parent Trigger eligible schools in California with notice about the law and their rights under the law;
• They create common sense signature verification procedures and timelines, and mandate that no legitimate signature shall ever be thrown out based on a technicality;
• They empower parents to choose their charter or in-district reform partner through a transparent and public parent-led RFP process after the parents have won the organizing campaign, and;
• They reject CTA’s outrageous proposal that teachers be given veto power over Parent Trigger.
“Over the past six months, hundreds of parents rode on a midnight parent bus, from Compton to Sacramento. Over and over and over again. These parents convinced the governor, along with key statewide education and legislative leaders, to stand with them instead of the most powerful and wealthy interest groups in the state. When they didn’t get the answer they wanted, they got right back on the bus to Sacramento. They refused to take ‘no’ for an answer and they ultimately forced the Sacramento establishment to listen. People throw around the term “parent involvement” a lot. But these brave parents define the term ‘parent empowerment.’
“Today we close one long, circuitous chapter, and we open a new one. These regulations make the Parent Trigger a true right for every single parent in California, even if they don’t always have a stable of idealistic pro-bono attorneys at their side. As this movement spreads across Compton, Los Angeles and California to far off places like Texas, Mississippi, New York and dozens of other states, we will never forget what this movement is about: giving parents power to finally make education serve the interests of children, not adults.
“Thank you for everything you have done to make this day and this journey possible. We have many more chapters in this story to write together. But it’s worth taking a moment to savor the historic conclusion to this chapter, and the transformative implications it has for the parents and children of California.”
GLO
gordotto@parentsnschools.com
– Share with a Friend –
Tags: Parents as Consumers Not Partners
June 6th, 2011 · Comments Off
It pleases me to read the blurb below from Fast Company’s “100 Most Creative People in Business”, about Khan Academy in 7th place.
Because they’re succeeding in providing online math solutions from OUTSIDE government schooling, as some colleagues of mine attempted some years ago now with www.youtheducationservices.ca.
Good for them. Good for children. Good for their success in math.
Every subject… every lesson… every bit of learning a child receives should come at their own individual pace… it should come in their own individual favourite flavour… and it should come with a handy “repeat” button.
GLO
=========
The kids in Ms. Cadwell’s seventh-grade remedial math class at Egan Jr. High in Los Altos, California, are doing things differently this year. They solve problems at their own pace, using a computer program that gives them instant feedback, charts their progress, and rewards them when they get 10 correct answers in a row. Instead of listening to the teacher lecture about dividing fractions, they learn from short videos that they can pause and rewind. They progress very quickly — more than doubling their scores on an exit exam in just the first 12 weeks of this pilot project. Students earn badges for solving problems rapidly and accurately, and for working hard to master a concept. It’s “like a game,” says John Martinez, 13. “It’s kind of an addiction — you want a ton of badges.”
The man behind this remarkable venture is an unabashedly geeky former hedge-fund analyst and star high-school mathlete named Sal Khan. The mission of his not-for-profit Khan Academy is “to deliver a world-class education to anyone anywhere.” And if you ask supporters like Ann and John Doerr, Bill Gates, and Google.org, he has a good shot.
Khan, who lives in Silicon Valley, used to tutor his younger cousins in New Orleans over the phone. He built the first version of his so-called adaptive-learning system for them in 2005. “I viewed it as something that would generate more exercises and track how they did them and whether they got them right.
Once they got 10 in a row right, they could move on.” As he later found out, this is called “mastery-based learning,” a technique that’s supported by 80 years of research but is unwieldy to implement without special software like Khan Academy’s.
Later, Khan replaced the live phone sessions with videos he uploaded to YouTube. “When I started, I really viewed it as ‘I’m going to talk to my cousin Nadia about math.’ I wasn’t paralyzed by a fear of being judged by the world.” The 5- to 10-minute videos show colorful equations and doodles on a black background while Khan’s friendly voice explains, say, the Doppler effect or organic chemistry. He has made more than 2,000 videos to date, all free on khanacademy.org and YouTube. They attract about 2 million unique visitors a month.
Khan, who now has hired a president and a team of software engineers, makes videos every day. “Five a day if I can. I think Khan Academy will get watered down and lose its focus if I’m not more focused on building content than debating policy.”
But with the success of the math pilot at Egan and two other schools in Los Altos, Khan is on a path to become a central figure in national education-policy debates. “I talk a lot about flipping the classroom,” he says. “As powerful as we think the software and the videos are, what’s really powerful is what it does to the rest of the class time. Teachers are spending more time on investigations and project-based learning,” and working with students one-on-one. “They’re having their cake and eating it too!”
Tags: Uncategorized
May 16th, 2011 · Comments Off
Local newspaper writes that some 5,000 student fee accounts within our local school board (totalling over a million dollars) lie unpaid due to resistance of families to pay fees for resources that they feel should be provided by the government schooling system.
And that those parents are content with the fees mounting up in hopes of the school board launching a lawsuit they can argue.
Are they paying their children’s hockey dues? Dance fees? Skiing lessons? Orthodontist bills?
What is it about a government-provided schooling program that makes people feel entitled to demand every little bit of it for free?
Only about half of Albertans are involved in government schooling (as students, educators or parents).
They have a right to not contribute to that benefit?
And these families think people “win” when they don’t pay their share of levied fees? Where else will the money come from? So everyone else does without in proportionate amounts, while they make their point, at no expense to themselves. And, like public utilities do with their unpaid accounts that it makes no sense to collect upon in small amounts, the school boards budget for the deficiencies and charge everyone else more.
Government schooling would benefit from a couple dozen well-placed lawsuits, I know.
But not petty ones.
GLO
gordotto@parentsnschools.com
Tags: PD for Parents
May 12th, 2011 · Comments Off
From “The Daily Caller” website, via The Cartel Movie’s distribution list.
Those who cannot appreciate satire, please read no further. (Farther?…)
GLO
Classroom grading is an attack on students
It can hardly be denied that there are factors outside a student’s control that might affect his grades. How smart he is, how much his parents support education, how nutritious the food in his home is, and how much his older brother distracts him with PlayStation II.
Some parents might put on SportsCenter at 11pm Eastern time. Others don’t. It’s hardly a level playing field.
Since a student has no control over these kinds of things, and since some students face a lot more of these obstacles than others, grading them simply isn’t fair. Why should I get a better grade than you just because my home life makes it easier for me to perform? And as we’ve learned from teachers’ unions, it’s better to have no evaluation system than one that could be unfair.
There’s another reason too. It’s an ugly one: favoritism. We all know the teacher’s pet is likely to get a good grade, while the charmless face a much tougher slog. That’s not fair either.
It brings the inevitable conclusion: Until someone devises a grading system that can equalize all these disparate factors, and compensate for which students have advantages and which don’t, the only fair course is to avoid grading completely.
This mirrors every other industry in American life. Fairness, after all, is acknowledged by educational leaders to be more important than accountability.
Moreover, there’s no real need for grades anyway. That seventh-grade student didn’t just walk into class from out of nowhere. He’s been certified with six consecutive years of training before he ever steps foot in that seventh-grade class. His certifications prove he’s qualified to be a seventh grader, which make the act of grading him superfluous. Grading schemes would be an insult to this seventh grader’s extensive, multi-year qualification process.
Grading, at least with respect to grades less than an “A,” is also punitive. Struggling students, and those who don’t want to complete assignments, need help and guidance, consultation and mentoring. How does punishing them with a grade lower than “A” give them a hand up? What does a bad grade teach a kid about algebra, biology or history? Nothing. Indeed, it punishes the very students that need the most help.
This is why grading without adequate fairness safeguards is, quite simply, an attack on students. A fair system (we might call it “tenure”) would, by contrast, prevent unfair grading schemes from affecting children by granting them due process should some particular teacher seek to give them something less than “A.”
With all that said, should there be consequences for poor performance? Of course. Everyone understands and supports that. If a teacher can show, by presenting months of collected evidence, that a student has earned less than an “A,” then a non-“A” grade should certainly happen. Like a “B+.” Or in some cases, a “B.” A student tenure hearing would at least provide due process, where students would be presented exhaustive cases against them, and they’d be given a chance to respond with adequate representation to argue their cases. Anything else is unfair.
(That said, it would also be only fair for students to be able to file grievances against teachers for giving them less than an “A.” Might some students gang up to file multiple, petty grievances against a teacher they don’t like, as retribution? Perhaps, but that is simply the price of due process.)
All this notwithstanding, the big picture is that the issue of student grading schemes and student tenure really shouldn’t be up to us — it should be up to them. Who knows more about student education than students (as represented by their elected leaders)? After all, it’s their learning we’re talking about. And in surveys, student union leaders show strong support for student tenure. When outsiders try to impose unfair, nepotistic student grading schemes, without accommodating for complaints and accounting for unfairnesses, it’s coercive and arrogant. It’s student bashing. These people should be ashamed of themselves, and it should trigger outrage from the rest of us.
In short, students themselves, not their superiors, should decide whether they would like to be given grades. And evaluating people who don’t want to be evaluated can only be called one thing: An attack.
(Thanks to America’s teachers’ unions for their assistance in the development of this piece.)
Bob Bowdon is the director of The Cartel, an award-winning documentary film about corruption in public education. He also appears regularly on the Onion News Network.
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2011/05/12/classroom-grading-is-an-attack-on-students/#ixzz1MBaqfCSu
Tags: Educator Has No Clothes
