Articles Of Interests
What They See Is What We Get: A Primer on Light
Ten myths about lighting and color in schools.
Most architects and designers (though unfortunately not all) have long known that in schools, access to natural light improves learning and test scores, while poor electric lighting distracts students and can abet inattention and even lead to a kind of creeping depression. If we don’t want our schools to function like prisons, we need to understand the difference between design that punishes and design that nurtures. Because it’s rarely possible to redesign a school from the ground up, a good starting point is to debunk some of the persistent myths about lighting and color in schools.
Read more of t his Edutopia article at http://www.edutopia.org/what-they-see-what-we-get.
Would You Want this Job?
For years, teachers were paid in good will rather than money or status, writes Claus von Zastrow on the Learning First Alliance’s Public School Insights blog, but the new rhetoric of education reform suggests you won’t get even that. It would have you believe you need a missionary zeal and a belief in your own expendability after five or 10 years — not a great advertisement for long-term career viability. Von Zastrow fears that “the growing tendency to describe older teachers as expensive deadwood may prompt young people to see teaching as a brief pit stop on the way to a ‘real’ career.” This is likely compounded by the high profile of Teach for America (TFA) in the media, which perhaps is making teaching cool again, but also disparages other, non-TFA teachers by comparison. Pundits should consider the long-term effects on the teaching profession when painting scenarios in terms of mission: impossible. “I’m at least as concerned by what’s missing from the common rhetoric of school reform,” writes von Zastrow. “Why can’t pundits say more about the support teachers need to succeed, the climate they need to thrive, the career opportunities they need to grow, and the respect they need to maintain their sanity?”
Read more: http://www.learningfirst.org/rhetoric-reform-turning-people-teaching.
Documenting What Works
A new report from the Achievement Gap Initiative (AGI) at Harvard University looks at 15 outstanding public high schools from Massachusetts, Illinois, Ohio, Maryland, Texas, and Washington, D.C. These high schools were featured at the fifth annual conference of the AGI in June 2009, where teams from each school made presentations and then faced questioning from experts about the methods by which they had achieved progress, such as high value-added test score gains on statewide assessment tests and narrowing test-score achievement gaps. The main lesson from the presentations was that student achievement rose when leadership teams focused on improving instruction. Leaders took public responsibility for raising achievement, and stakeholders drafted mission statements to help schools stay on track. Schools carefully organized learning experiences for teachers, and clearly defined criteria for high-quality teaching and student work in ways that engaged entire faculties. As leaders implemented plans, schools monitored student and teacher work to continuously refine approaches. Leadership teams demonstrated commitment through hard work and long hours, studying research-based literature to expand knowledge and competence, and found ways to remain respectful of peers, even when asking them to improve their performance. In these ways, leadership teams earned the respect of their colleagues and gained authority to push people outside their comfort zones.
See the report: http://www.agi.harvard.edu/events/2009Conference/2009AGIReport.php.
Get Florida Crossroads Magazine Delivered to your Inbox or Mailbox!
Florida Crossroads, Florida’s magazine for special needs families, is filled with parenting tips, resources and moral support for special needs families. You can get a printed subscription (1 year/6 issues), mailed to your home or office for $7.50 or read the digital edition FREE online anytime! Go to www.floridacrossroadsonline.com and click subscribe to learn more.
Earning a High School Diploma through Alternative Routes (NCEO Synthesis Report 76, July 2010)
By M. Thurlow, M. Vang, and D. Cormier
Earning a standard diploma has increased in importance during the past several years. Not only is it a document that improves postschool outcomes, but it also has become a part of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act
(ESEA) accountability system at the high school level<with the required graduation rate including only those students who have earned a regular/standard high school diploma or higher. Complicating matters in several states is the addition of an exit exam requirement to the traditional coursework requirements. The addition of a testing requirement to other requirements for earning a standard diploma is a challenge for students who do not perform well on assessments. Many, but not all, of these students have disabilities. The purpose of the study reported here was to examine the alternative routes to passing the high school exit exam that were available during the school year 2008-09 to students to earn a standard high school diploma. It examines alternative routes in the 26 states with active or soon-to-be active exit exams, and documents the alternative routes available for all students and those specifically for students with disabilities. Available on the web at http://www.cehd.umn.edu/nceo/OnlinePubs/Synthesis76/Synthesis76.pdf.
Low Cost, Stunning Results
In a profile of the Boston program City Connects on his Public School Insights blog, Claus von Zastrow writes that a rigorous study by Boston College, which runs the program, “tells a pretty stunning story.” City Connects (CCNX) exists in 11 Boston elementary schools, and works to link each child to a “tailored set of intervention, prevention, and enrichment services located in the community.” The beneficial impact of CCNX on student growth in academic achievement (across grades 1 to 5) was on average approximately three times the harmful impact of poverty. By the end of grade 5, achievement differences between CCNX and comparison students indicated that CCNX intervention moves students at the 50th percentile up to or near the 75th percentile, and students at the 25th percentile up to or near the 50th. For multiple outcomes, the treatment effects were largest for students at greatest risk for academic failure. After grade 5, the lasting positive effects of CCNX intervention can be seen in middle-school state standardized test scores, ranging from approximately 50 percent to 130 percent as large as negative effects of poverty. Von Zastrow conducts an interview with two of the program’s leaders, who explain that at root, the program ensures that already existing services actually reach students previously under-served. Implementing the program by putting a support person and the model into schools costs a little less than $500 per student per year.
Read more: http://www.publicschoolinsights.org/interview-when-city-connects-helps-whole-child-achievement-gaps-shrink.
Opportunity of a Lifetime: Earn Your Doctorate
The National Leadership Consortium in Sensory Disabilities (NLCSD) by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs is accepting applications for full time doctoral study tuition and stipends for four years. The consortium consists of 25 universities with doctoral programs that have an emphasis in one or more of the three sensory impairment areas: blind/visually impaired, deaf/hard of hearing, and deaf blindness. Fellowships for study will begin in the fall of 2011. Approximately 18 Fellowships are available to US citizens/permanent residents who must first be accepted into a doctoral program.
For a complete listing of participating Universities and Programs within universities which are participating in the NLCSD, please go to the website http://www.salus.edu/nlcsd/. Applicants must be accepted by a participating university program by the application due date of December 31, 2010.
The NEW application requirements and forms can be found at http://www.salus.edu/nlcsd/application.html under the first heading “Download and complete applications.” All other information can be found on the website http://www.salus.edu/nlcsd/index.html. Completed applications must be postmarked by December 31, 2010. Applications postmarked after that date will not be considered.
What We Could Learn from Finland
In an article in Rethinking Schools adapted and excerpted from her book The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future, Linda Darling-Hammond writes that she “wonders what we might accomplish as a nation if we could finally set aside what appears to be our de facto commitment to inequality, so profoundly at odds with our rhetoric of equity, and put the millions of dollars spent continually arguing and litigating into building a high-quality education system for all children.” By way of contrast, Darling-Hammond presents Finland, which in the 1970s was not succeeding educationally and therefore “built a strong educational system, nearly from the ground up.” This was at a time when the U.S. was the “unquestioned education leader in the world.” Over the past 40 years, Darling-Hammond writes, Finland has shifted from a highly centralized system that emphasizes external testing to a more localized system in which highly trained teachers design curriculum around “very lean” national standards. The system is implemented through equitable funding and extensive preparation for all teachers, and its logic is that “investments in the capacity of local teachers and schools to meet the needs of all students, coupled with thoughtful guidance about goals, can unleash the benefits of local creativity in the cause of common, equitable outcomes.” This is, she points out, the exact reverse of education policy trends in the United States. Read more: http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/24_04/24_04_finland.shtml.
Teaching is a Human Endeavor of Caring, not Business
In an entry on The Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog, Valerie Strauss publishes a recent letter to President Obama and U.S. lawmakers by the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA, a community of 36 communions with a combined membership of 45 million people. Strauss writes that the letter criticizes the administration’s effort to increase the number of charter schools, to turn federal money used to help poor children into competitive grants, its punitive approach to low-performing schools, and the “ugly” demonization of public school teachers. “As a people called to love our neighbors as ourselves,” the letter reads, “we look for the optimal way to balance the needs of each particular child and family with the need to create a system that secures the rights and addresses the needs of all children.” The authors state their concern over the civil right to education being redefined as the right to school choice. “While competitive, market-based ‘reforms’ may increase educational opportunity for a few children, or even for some groups of children, do they introduce more equity or more inequity into the system itself?” the letter asks.
Read more: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/no-child-left-behind/christian-churches-oppose-race.html#more.
Standards at Last
The final set of common academic standards has been released by the Common Core State Standards Initiative, ending months of closed-door work and revision and incorporating feedback from state education officials, teachers’ unions, and other education interest groups.
The final document outlines what experts decided are the knowledge and skills students should have in mathematics and English/language arts. Convened last year by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, which have worked in various ways to help states raise academic expectations, the writing and feedback panels included university scholars, state curriculum specialists, and teachers; testing organizations such as the College Board and ACT Inc.; the education group Achieve; and curriculum-design companies such as America’s Choice. Read more at http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/06/02/33common.h29.html?tkn=PXBFedguzDuasI77yP+j+EK4tDSM/eevDQU+&cmp=clp-ecseclips.
