Teach Effectively!

As the new year approaches, with the hope engendered by a change in US government, here’s a salute to organizations—Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities, Justice for All, and the World Institute on Disability, among others— that advocate for individuals with disabilities. These organizations and their siblings have done a great deal to secure health care, civil justice, employment, protection from violence, and many otherwise taken-for-granted features of daily life that are too often denied to individuals with disabilities. Now’s a good time to accomplish more.

On the educational front, one of the factors to which many disability rights organizations regularly point is the poor outcomes for students with disabilities after graduation from high school. The litany of unfavorable comparisons between students with disabilities and their not-disabled peers is familiar to many: higher unemployment, less frequent enrollment in post-secondary schools, more frequent contact with and incarceration by law-enforcement officials, etc. These are clearly outcomes that we would not only like to see improved, but also they are improvements that would auger well for our society (e.g., emphasizing the abilities of individuals) and economy (e.g., lower unemployment).

Among many advocates for individuals with disabilities, a (if not the) critical concern for public policy is ensuring access to situations to which those without disabilities routinely have access. Access may range from curb cuts that permit safer road crossings to computers that “read” printed text. Without elaborating further here, suffice it to say that the range of applications is far greater than this simple dimension, and information about possible means of ensuring or providing access abounds on the Internet.
Continue reading ‘Beyond access: Improving success’

Over on Ed Week, while taking off from the advertising battles that are likely to come in the next few weeks as interest groups promote their educational policies, eduwonkette yesterday posted a few notes about studies comparing charter schools with publics serving the general population. It’s worth a read. Link to The Full Page Ad That Won’t Be in the Washington Post Tomorrow.

Since 1997, the first Children and Technology Committee of the US American Library Association has maintained a list of Web sites for children that should be on the list of to-be-visited-locations-on-the-Web for readers of Teach Effectively. Here’s a snippet about the content:

The Web is a lot like a flea market: there’s a vast selection of sites to choose from but not a lot of order to it. Some sites are offered by reputable “dealers” and some from individuals who want to show off their personal favorite items. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s a hidden treasure, what’s worth taking a look at, and what’s a waste of time.

It’s not hard to find sites if you use a search engine like Google, or a subject directory like Yahoo (or Yahooligans for kids). But how can you tell if a site you find is worthwhile?
Continue reading ‘ALA sites for kids’

In “Gates Foundation to study ‘cash for grades’: Organization will analyze whether incentive payments to low-income college students are effective,” Gale Holland of the Los Angeles (CA, US) Times reported that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will fund a large-scale study of whether cash payments to low-income college students improves outcomes.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is throwing its weight behind the trend to offer “cash for grades” to keep low-income students in college, despite protests from some quarters that such incentive payments amount to little more than bribery.
Continue reading ‘‘Cash for grades’ in college’