In its current newsletter (No 63, Winter 2007: “The Great Reading Disaster; Beware BSF”), the UK Campaign for Real Education alerts readers to a dozen contemporary concerns about the quality of education. There are sections recounting the “great reading disaster,” concerns about the government program called “Building Schools for the Future,” notes about how English students scored on the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, recognition that the Department for Children, Schools and Families has now (finally?) published guidance on teaching synthetic phonics, and much more. Link to the newsletter here.
Sphere: Related ContentMonthly Archive for January, 2008
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Folks, your not-so-trustworthy administrator failed to update one of the side programs for this blog when he updated the basic software. So, the polls haven’t worked right recently. Thanks to those who let me know (through public and private channels). I’ve updated the polling software and I think it’s right now.
Please revisit What is Critical Thinking and cast a vote. If you voted earlier and now cannot vote again, please let me know.
Sphere: Related ContentThe current Education Gadfly has a guest editorial by Shep Barbash entitled “Reading First’s Christmas massacre” in which Mr. Barbash decries the funding cuts to the Reading First program.
Reading First, funded at $1 billion per year, is among the most promising federal efforts to help the poor. Title I, funded at $12 billion per year, is not nearly so effective. That President Bush has just signed into law a 2008 budget that gives the latter an 8.6 percent increase in funding and the former a 64 percent decrease confirms the wisdom of Lincoln, who observed, “In republican democracies, public sentiment is everything. With it nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.” Notwithstanding Reading First’s success increasing early literacy rates among the poor, public sentiment for the program remains weaker than that of its enemies, who have proved more influential in Congress and more determined than Reading First’s stewards in the administration.
Here’s a link to the full editorial.
Full disclosure: I am a member of the Reading First Federal Advisory Committee. That I have pointed to Mr. Barbash’s editorial here does not imply that the committee endorses or condemns his views. Just passing it along, folks.
Sphere: Related ContentIn “How the World’s Best Performing School Systems Come out on Top,” Michael Barber and Nona Mourshed of McKinsey & Company report the results of a study of schools systems around the world that consistently have high scores on international assessments of student outcomes or that appear to be improving rapidly. Their conclusions will fit well with the biases of some readers of Teach Effectively.
The quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers, 2) the only way to improve outcomes is to improve instruction and, 3) achieving universally high outcomes is only possible by putting in place mechanisms to ensure that schools deliver high-quality instruction to every child. (p. 43)
The report recommends that school systems focus on (a) getting the right people to become teachers, (b) developing effective instructors, and (c) ensuring every student performs well. No duh!
Sphere: Related ContentThere’s a bit of talk about “critical thinking.” A post over on Instructivist prompted me to consider alternative meanings for the adjective, “critical.” There are several connotations for it, so I thought, hmmm… it being the season of lots of news about polls and this being a democracy, let’s vote on what sort of critical thinking we think is appropriate. Read the alternatives, click on the “vote” button, then click your choice. (You only get one vote in this poll.)
What do you think is the appropriate type of critical thinking students should learn?
- Evaluative thinking. (100%, 4 Votes)
- Censorious thinking. (0%, 0 Votes)
- Grave thinking. (0%, 0 Votes)
- Crucial thinking. (0%, 0 Votes)
Total Voters: 4
Loading ...Read the post, under the delightful title “Old new-fangled skills,” from Instructivist and the Illinois Loop pages about critical thinking.
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Spamdammit
As P. Z. Myers noted in a recent post, one of the plagues of blogging is handling the comment spam; not that Teach Effectively is anywhere nearly as popular as Professor Myers’ Pharyngula, but Teach Effectively does get hit with a lot of spam. People send robots to add comments to post for nefarious reasons such as less-than-honest advertising. Fortunately, there are ways to automate rejection of spam comments. In the year plus that I’ve been using it, a wonderful piece of software that I employ, Akismet, has protected the Teach Effectively from 61,654 spam comments (for the current number, check the total in the left sidebar).
When I compare the number of legitimate and spam comments, I get a signal to noise ratio of 0.0023193953. That makes Akismet a pretty valuable product.
Another valuable one is Bad Behavior. Whereas Akismet blocks comment spam, Bad Behavior stops robots from registering as users and, sometimes, from even reading the blog.
These are things worth employing.
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