Last month, I blogged on The Shanker Institute’s manifesto, A Call for Common Content. This manifesto, available at http://www.ashankerinst.org/curriculum.html, urges the creation of curricular materials that support the Common Core Standards and bridge the gap between the standards and the new assessments being developed. These curricular materials would be voluntarily Read more
The prospect of designing and implementing teacher and leader evaluations and the data systems necessary to link teachers with the achievement of their students is a daunting task. States and districts are only now confronting technical and logistical hurdles to creating new evaluations, writes Stephen Sawchuck in Education Week. In Read more
At this writing, 44 states and thousands of districts are crafting summer and fall plans to support system-wide transition to the Common Core Standards. A high priority in every plan is to ensure principals are prepared to successfully lead their schools through this transition, and to ensure principals are equipped Read more
Nearly four in 10 teachers report that they are interested in combining their classroom work with other roles or responsibilities in their school or district, including 46 percent of teachers with five or fewer years of experience. Across the country, interest is increasing in alternative approaches to school staffing that Read more
A new study based on the Annenberg Institute on School Reform’s (AISR) work with the Transatlantic School Innovation Alliance (TISA) adds to the emerging literature supporting the idea that peer networks among educational practitioners, both within and across schools, can improve teaching and learning.In England, there has been a focus Read more
Scientific American is about to make connecting scientists and schools a whole lot easier, thanks to their new 1,000 Scientists in 1,000 Days program. They’re recruiting “scientists who are willing to volunteer to advise on curricula, answer a classroom’s questions, or visit a school—for instance, to do a lab or Read more
In honor of Teacher Appreciation Week last week, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has published an open letter to American teachers. In Education Week, he writes that as someone working most of his life in education, he has “a deep and genuine appreciation for the work [teachers] do.” He wants Read more
Concerns over current and future emerging changes in the U.S. education enterprise have led one of the nation’s premier educational psychologists, Professor Edmund W. Gordon (photographed here) of Teachers College at Columbia University, to lead a two-year study group – the Gordon Commission on the Future of Assessment in K-12 Read more
A new report, Double Jeopardy: How Third-Grade Reading Skills and Poverty Influence High School Graduation, from the Annie E. Casey Foundation finds that students who don’t read proficiently by third grade are four times more likely to leave school without a diploma. For readers who can’t master even basic skills Read more
The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) has released the final draft of the InTASC Model Core Teaching Standards: A Resource for State Dialogue.These new model core teaching standards outline what all teachers across all content and grade levels should know and be able to do to be effective Read more
Successful school turnarounds have long been elusive and have depended on finding talented teachers and leaders to engage in the transformation of school cultures and teaching norms. A newly piloted model out of Boston shows some promise for staffing school turnaround and providing career ladder options for experienced teachers. The Read more
After a fantastic conference in Washington, DC with the National Center for Education Information and a nice holiday, I’m back. To ease back into things, I thought I’d have a little fun with educational jargon. Yesterday, John Merrow blogged about “The Joys of Jargon.” He listed the most annoying buzzwords Read more
A new book from Yvette Jackson will restore teachers’ belief in their ability to help all students perform at high intellectual levels. Jackson outlines a simple but radical approach to teaching that builds on students’ strengths in order to develop instruction that is both relevant and motivational. The Pedagogy of Read more
Class-size reduction, or CSR, is enormously popular with parents, teachers, and the public in general. The latest poll results indicate that 77 percent of Americans think that additional educational dollars should be spent on smaller classes rather than higher teacher salaries. Many parents believe that their children will benefit from Read more
A new issue brief released by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices offers lessons drawn from its State Strategies to Improve Chronically Low-Performing Schools project, which sought to address underlying causes of failing schools: weak leadership; inadequate skill levels among teachers; and insufficient high-quality teaching materials. In 2009, Read more
For the past four years, New York City has experimented with merit pay. Recently their experiment came to a halt, after $57 million and no increase in test scores in schools that received bonus money. Why did NYC’s merit-pay program fail? According to the Wall Street Journal, one reason is Read more