Teach Effectively!

I don’t have much idea whether it’s an honor, but I note here that Teach Effectively! was included in one of those “top-100″ lists of blogs. In a post on its blog, Accredited Online Universities (AOU) headed the list with this statement:
Continue reading ‘TE recognized’

Joanne Jacobs hosted the eighty-fourth Carnival of Education this week. Review the posts by following this link.

Over on Ed Week Professor Edward Zigler offered a recommendation about contemporary educational policy in the US. He argued that Title I should be modified so that it reflects the Head Start Transition program of the ’90s and the Chicago Child-Parent Centers. He (rightly, in my view) characterizes the current use of Title I funds as a “hodgepodge.”

Title I has never been a specific program with agreed-upon practices or standards. Rather, it is a stream of money bestowed on nearly all of the nation’s school districts and many private schools. School administrators can mount any type of initiative they feel will be beneficial to the academic progress of poor children.

Thus, schools are using the roughly $14 billion in annual Title I funding to support many undertakings: staffing and teacher training; whole-school programs; pullout programs; after-school sessions; reading, math, and science instruction; and myriad other endeavors. Much of the money is spent on elementary school students, but some of it goes to preschool (about $300 million) and to secondary education. With such a laundry list of activities, one would be hard-pressed to explain to taxpayers exactly what they are purchasing.

It would be good to change this. I’m not sure that the models Professor Zigler recommends are the best choices (there are a few models for whole-school reform that have strong records), but focusing the funding on evidence-based methods—not the usual hodgepodge—would be valuable.

Link to Professor Zigler’s editorial.

Happy anniversary

It was 6 Jan 2005 when I posted the first entry on Teach Effectively. So, Tuesday TE starts its fifth season with, so far, no summer reruns (even if John Lloyd sounds like a broken record).

How long have you been reading TE? What’s your least favorite post? Most favorite?

According to a report by W. Steven Barnett, although preschool programs are highly variable in their quality, there is good reason to support policies that make preschool available to young children, especially preschool programs that employ effective practices. The report, “Preschool Education and Its Lasting Effects: Research and Policy Implications,” was released today by the Education and the Public Interest Center (University of Colorado at Boulder) and the Education Policy Research Unit (Arizona State University).

Amid a contentious debate over the benefit of preschool programs, a new policy brief, Preschool Education and Its Lasting Effects: Research and Policy Implications examines what researchers currently know about the potential of those programs to bring about positive change. It finds that preschool can strongly benefit children’s learning and development. But the brief also finds that the quality of programs varies dramatically and that increased public investment in preschool education should be focused on program designs that have been demonstrated to be highly effective.

Link to a pdf of Preschool Education and Its Lasting Effects: Research and Policy Implications.

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.

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.

Thanks to the top referrers for Teach Effectively!

• Joanne Meier of “Sound it Out” at Reading Rockets;
• D-edreckoning;
• KitchenTableMath;
• Liz Ditz (I Speak of Dreams); and
• Miss Profe (It’s a Hardknock Teacher’s Life).