EdSource Today » Archive
Time to end California’s conflicting accountability systems
Californians can’t be blamed for being confused about whether their schools are doing well or badly. That’s because for the past decade Californians have lived with two conflicting ways of holding schools accountable for the performance of their students—a state and a federal one. … Read entire article »
Filed under: Reporting & Analysis
Dealing with back-to-school anxiety
Is your child anxious about starting school? Are you? Here are some tips to get through the annual child-parent rite of fall from Kate Kelly, a therapist who specializes in treating childhood anxiety and runs courses that help girls learn coping skills for anxiety and stress, Kelly, a longtime resident of San Francisco, now lives in Washington D.C. … Read entire article »
Filed under: Reporting & Analysis
Duncan’s call for $150,000 teacher salaries a distant vision
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan Photo by Ralph Alswang (EdSource) - Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s call for a dramatic boost in teacher salaries comes at a time when many teachers in California are experiencing lower compensation as a result of cuts in school funding. “We should keep our best teachers in the classroom—and they should be earning a lot more money—as much as $150,000 a year,” he declared in a passionate speech to the National Board for … Read entire article »
Filed under: Reporting & Analysis
Look to experience, not policy, to assess 21st century skills
(This commentary first appeared in TOP-Ed.) Learning to collaborate and to solve ill-defined problems are to the 21st Century what industrial discipline was to the last hundred years, according to those who have studied what employers and society need. They need to be considered basic skills, just as are reading, math, and science, and they are one of the key elements of Learning 2.0. By the turn of the millennium, it was clear that jobs requiring routine thinking and skills were giving way to those involving both higher levels of knowledge and also some applied skills, such as expert thinking and complex communicating, that are not well captured by most current educational standards or taught in the conventional curriculum. Teamwork, for example, is taught mostly in extracurricular activities. But how to do this? If … Read entire article »
Filed under: Commentary, Tests & Assessments, Twenty-first Century Learning
A sneak preview of GOP contenders’ brag sheets on education
(This commentary first appeared in TOP-Ed.) The year ahead will see no end of blather about the education records and policies of the major presidential contenders, but few assessments are likely to be as much of a curiosity as “The 2012 Republican Candidates (So Far)” in the next issue of the magazine Education Next. Education Next calls itself a “scholarly journal published by the Hoover Institution that is committed to looking at hard facts about school reform.” With a few exceptions, its editorial board is dominated by voucherites and other conservatives – Paul Peterson, Chester Finn, Bill Evers, John Chubb, Terry Moe, Caroline Hoxby, and Jay Greene – and it has always squinted hard, if politely, to the right. In this article, by Allison Sherry, the Washington bureau chief of the Denver Post, … Read entire article »
Filed under: 2012 election, Commentary
California’s budget woes hit neediest students the hardest
(This commentary first appeared in TOP-Ed.) Californians have been hit with so much bad budget news these past three years it’s easy to assume that we’re all suffering more or less equally. Nothing could be further from the truth when it comes to our schools. Essentially every fiscal maneuver our policymakers have undertaken to respond to the budget crisis has delivered more pain to the neediest schools and students. Even before the traumatic $18 billion in accumulated cuts to school funding since 2009, the underlying school finance system had devolved to one that disproportionately denies low-income students and English learners an equal shot at learning the state’s academic content standards. Two constitutional challenges currently winding through the courts are confronting the fact that our districts are underfunded overall and that high-poverty districts and … Read entire article »
Filed under: Achievement Gap, Adequacy suit, Commentary, Getting Down To Facts studies, Revenue and taxes
Video Highlights from
2013 EdSource Symposium
Transforming Public Education: What's Next For
Students, Teachers and Schools
- In Partnership with the California State PTA -
May 4th symposium in San Jose featured a number of prominent speakers on key challenges in education today, including Linda Darling-Hammond, Martha Kanter, and Pedro Noguera.
You can find video of those speakers and more at our new YouTube channel by clicking below.
New dropout rates may be accurate but tell you little and could get worse
August 22nd, 2011 | 12 Comments
By Peter Schrag / commentary ~ EdSource Extra
(This commentary first appeared in TOP-Ed.) State-level school graduation and dropout statistics have always been squishy, and the most recent numbers, from California’s Department of Education, are not immune to some of the familiar problems. While far more accurate and reliable than anything we’ve had before, they can’t capture all the uncertainties of student mobility or cut through all the fog of educational definitions. Nor do they tell anything about the quality of the education those students have gotten, another area where there’s lots of numbers and even more fog. And of course, they say nothing directly about the shabby support their schools have been getting from the state or the voters; they only reflect it dimly and indirectly. The latest numbers, from CALPADS, the new California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System, are similar … Read entire article »
Filed under: CALPADS, Commentary, Dropout prevention