by Greg Toppo / USA Today / 20 May 2012

When did fractions and non-fiction become so controversial?

A high-profile effort by a pair of national education groups to strengthen, simplify and focus the building blocks of elementary and secondary education is finally making its way into schools. But two years ahead of its planned implementation, critics on both the right and left are seizing upon it. A few educators say the new standards, supported by the U.S. Department of Education, are untested, and one Republican governor wants to block the measure, saying it’s a federal intrusion into local decisions.

How did something so simple become so fraught?

The story begins in 2009, when the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers announced an effort to create voluntary national standards in math and reading. All but four states — Alaska, Nebraska, Texas and Virginia — quickly signed on to the standards, known as the Common Core, agreeing to help create then implement them by 2014

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Move to Outsource Teacher Licensing Process Draws Protest

by Michael Winerip / New York Times On Education / 6 May 2012

The idea that a handful of college instructors and student teachers in the school of education at the University of Massachusettscould slow the corporatization of public education in America is both quaint and ridiculous.

The UMass students say that their professors and the classroom teachers who observe them for six months in real school settings can do a better job judging their skills than a corporation that has never seen them.

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by Sam Laird / Mashable Tech /2 May 2012

Is tech saturation good or bad for the modern teenager?

Arguments can be made either way, but there’s no debating that today’s teens are more wired than ever. And digital permeates the lives of young people in general, too.

People aged 18-34 have an average of 319 online connections, according to a recent Pew Research Center study. That’s compared to an average of 198 connections for the 35-46 group, and the numbers continue to decrease from there.

Pew also recently reported that 63% of teenagers text message with friends on a daily basis, compared to 39% who speak on the phone daily and just 35% who interact face-to-face outside of school. Other research has found that text-happy teens send more than 100 messages per day.

But the digital revolution comes with drawbacks.

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by Julia Lawrence / Education News / 26 April 2012

TED, or as Gawker.com calls them, “Nerd Coachella,” is introducing a new platform that will allow teachers to take advantage of TED-created video content to put together unique learning opportunities for their students. TED-Ed, launched with the help of $1.25 million donated by Kohl’s Department Stores, currently hosts a few dozen videos put together from previously delivered conference talks which will give teachers a chance to experiment with the new tools.

Each video featured on the site is mapped, via tagging, to traditional subjects taught in schools and comes accompanied with supplementary materials that aid a teacher or student in using or understanding the video lesson. Supplementary materials include multiple-choice questions, open-answer questions, and links to more information on the topic.

The videos themselves are only part of the experience. What makes this platform special is the unprecedented opportunities to customize the content via a process called “flipping,” which allows teachers to edit or completely alter the supplementary content and pipe the information onto a private webpage whose access permissions could be individually set.

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by Erik W. Robelen / Education Week / 24 April 2012

As states seek waivers under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, one effect may be to chip away at the dominance reading and math have had when it comes to school accountability.

Many state waiver applications include plans to factor test scores in one or more additional subjects into their revised accountability systems. Seven of the 11 states that won waivers in the first round intend to do so, and about a dozen of those that applied in the second round have the same intent.

Science is the most popular choice, followed by writing and social studies.

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In addition to providing the opening of the article, below, I cannot restrain myself from giving my favorite passage, which delighted me with a shock of recognition, as a former teacher of writing and literature who has all too often found mechanical writing and junk forms of writing and thinking passing for sound work, even among promising students and at the college level:

Mechanical writing instruction in mechanical writing forms produces mechanical writers who experience two kinds of dead end: the dead end of not passing the mechanical assessment of their junk-instructed writing, and the dead end of passing the mechanical assessment, but not being able to overcome the junk instruction and actually learn to write.

As bad as this pedagogy’s failure is its successes. Familiar to most college faculty is the first-year writing student who is absolutely certain of their writing performance. She believes good writing is encompassed by surface correctness, a thesis statement, and assiduous quote-farming that represents “support” for an argument ramified into “three main points.”

In reality, these five-paragraph essays are near-useless hothouse productions. They bear the same relationship to future academic or professional writing as picking out “Chopsticks” bears to actually playing music at any level. Which is to say, close to none.

Students of any new skill do need mechanics to help them master the basics, and in essay writing this can mean providing a simple form and a simple process for them to fill and follow (e.g., the five-paragraph essay “junk” genre; focus on sentence- level correctness and clarity; or the same linear writing process steps every time, as if writing by recipe). But teaching these scaffolded forms and processes without pointing out that they are props or helping students to master them and move on to what comes next is a real mistake. Despite the pressures on teachers that Bousquet acknowledges, we can do better. We should. We must.

by Marc Bousquet / Chronicle of Higher Education / 18 April 2012

A just-released report confirms earlier studies showing that machines score many short essays about the same as human graders. Once again, panic ensues: We can’t let robots grade our students’ writing! That would be so, uh, mechanical. Admittedly, this panic isn’t about Scantron grading of multiple-choice tests, but an ideological, market- and foundation-driven effort to automate assessment of that exquisite brew of rhetoric, logic, and creativity called student writing. Without question, this study is performed by folks with huge financial stakes in the results, and they are driven by non-education motives. But isn’t the real question not whether the machines deliver similar scores, but why?

It seems possible that what really troubles us about the success of machine assessment of simple writing forms isn’t the scoring, but the writing itself–forms of writing that don’t exist anywhere in the world except school. It’s reasonable to say that the forms of writing successfully scored by machines are already-mechanized forms–writing designed to be mechanically produced by students,  mechanically reviewed by parents and teachers, and then, once transmuted into grades and sorting of the workforce, quickly recycled. As Evan Watkins has long pointed out, the grades generated in relation to this writing stick around, but the writing itself is made to disappear. Like magic? Or like concealing the evidence of a crime?

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Matt Chingos

Two scholars at the Brown Center on Education Policy, Matthew M. Chingos (Fellow, Governance Studies) and Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst (Director) have published a new report, Choosing Blindly: Instructional Materials, Teacher Effectiveness, and the Common Core (released 10 April 2012), with K-12 instructional materials policy recommendations through the The Brookings Institution.

The report begins with the premise that evidence shows that the selection of instructional materials can have an even greater impact on student test scores than the quality of instruction. And, yet, “little research exists on the effectiveness of most instructional materials, and very little systematic information has been collected on which materials are being used in which schools.”

The report calls for coordinated federal and state efforts to collect data on what instructional materials are in use–such as through districts submitting purchase reports for these–and for the Data Quality Campaign and philanthropic organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Lumina Foundation, to aid with these collection efforts and to provide assistance for assessing how the data collected can be used to improve instructional resourcing.

A summary of the report and a link to the full report can be found here.

2.5 Million Laptops Later, One Laptop Per Child Doesn’t Improve Test Scores [STUDY]

by Sarah Kessler / Mashable Tech / 9 April 2012

At $200 per computer, One Laptop Per Child(OLPC) has sold or facilitated donations of about 2.5 million laptops to classrooms in 42 different countries.

A new study suggests those laptops do not, however, have any effect on achievement in math or language.

The study, which was conducted by development funding source in Latin America called Inter-American Development Bank, looked at 319 public schools in Peru. It found that although OLPC students were more likely to use computers than their non-OLPC counterparts, the two groups scored about the same on math and language assessments 15 months after laptops were deployed.

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by Zoe Fox / Mashable Tech / 10 April 2012

Intel has launched the latest device in its line of classroom computers: a tablet, Intel studybook.

The Intel studybook is built to be both a rigorous education tool and a sturdy playmate. It comes loaded with Intel’s Learning Series software, including an interactive ereader and LabCam applications. The rugged water and dust-proof design is constructed from a single piece of plastic, with shock absorbers surrounding the screen. It’s also drop tested from 70 centimeters, the height of a child’s desk, onto concrete.

“Students today live in a virtual world and this device can give a valid scientific experience for students in emerging economies, ” says Wayne Grant, director of research and planning for Intel’s Education Market Platforms Group, as he throws the tablet across the table to demonstrate its robustness. “Representations of knowledge are changing. Tools are now based in tablet environments.”

The tablet has a 7-inch screen, 1060 x 600 pixel resolution, and can run either Windows 7 or Android Honeycomb software. Some additional features include front and rear-facing cameras, a microphone, multi-touch LCD screen, light sensor support and mobile learning environment. It runs on an Intel Atom Z650 processor.

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• Bridge the gap between formal (in-school) and informal (out-of-school) learning, improving their preparation for real world experience;
• Construct their own learning environments to help them achieve academically and acquire the skills necessary for the 21st century;
  
• Connect instantly with peers, experts, and information resources beyond the school walls;
• Provide real-time feedback, exchange information, and receive assessments during classroom instruction through a text message or Twitter “back channel”;
• Document their work through images taken on and off campus;
• Receive and submit homework assignments digitally;
• Learn how to utilize mobile devices and social networking as tools for lifelong learning.   (p. 4)

CoSN Press Release / 9 April 2012

The Consortium for School Networking (CoSN), today joined with 13 other leading education associations in releasing a new report aimed at helping inform and guide education decision makers as they revise policies related to the use of mobile technologies and social media in schools.

The report–Making Progress: Rethinking State and School District Policies Concerning Mobile Technologies and Social Media –is available here.

To read more…

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