Seattle Times, This One's For You
Guess what? According to a new Brookings study , teachers matter. Principals matter. Superintendents? Not so much. Findings:
Posts
Data Walls in Classrooms (Coming to a School Near You?)
Read this article by Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post. It should cause you to consider what is coming. Following on the heels of that article is her next one where one privacy expert says this could violate FERPA. Really, the photo, from Caledwell County Schools in North Carolina, says it all. In some places, parents and teachers are getting tired of embarrassing kids. New England Public Radio reported earlier this month that teachers and parents have banded together in Holyoke, Mass. to petition schools officials to stop publicly displaying student achievements on classroom data walls. District superintendent Sergio Paez, who has been pushing schools to use more data, said that students are not supposed to be identified, but teachers said they feel pressure to do so. The In These Times reported that Agustin Morales, an English teacher at Maurice A. Donahue Elementary School in Holyoke, said she thinks data walls are mean, but she has felt pressure to cr...
Race, Poverty and Public Schools
Bob Herbert of the NY Times wrote an excellent column about race and poverty in learning called Separate and Unequal. From his column: Educators know that it is very difficult to get consistently good results in schools characterized by high concentrations of poverty. The best teachers tend to avoid such schools. Expectations regarding student achievement are frequently much lower, and there are lower levels of parental involvement. These, of course, are the very schools in which so many black and Hispanic children are enrolled.
Revisionist History at Work
Students Need Stable District Leadership is an article at the website, District Administration, about Dr. Goodloe-Johnson. It was written by Tom Payzant, a professor "of practice" at Harvard's Graduate School of Education and the former head of Boston Public Schools and he is apparently someone who likes to talk about things he isn't well-versed in or he just likes to leave things out.