Tag Archive for 'public policy'

Free gift from Education Consumers Foundation!

Published on 6 December 2011 in Administration, Arithmetic and mathematics, Assessment, Behavior Management, Bookshelf, Content learning, Elementary, News, Policy, Primary, Reading, Research, Secondary, Spelling, Standards, Teacher education, The press and Written Expression. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

partial image of cover of Clear Teaching

Isn’t it unusual to get something for free that is actually worth a lot? The good folks over at Education Consumers Foundation (ECF) are giving away a small book that is quite valuable, and I encourage readers to download it, read it, and tell their friends to get it, too.

What are they giving away? It’s a book called Clear Teaching: With Direct Instruction, Siegfried Engelmann Discovered a Better Way of Teaching by Shep Barbash. As one can tell from the subtitle, it’s about Zig Engelmann’s work on education. I talked with Mr. Barbash as he worked on the manuscript for the book, read an earlier version of it, and am very impressed with this finished product. It’s even more impressive that the book is now out in the wild for free. Kudos to Mr. Barbash, John Stone, and all the others at ECF who made this happen.

Clear Teaching – The Book
Written by veteran journalist Shepard Barbash over a period of 10 years, Clear Teaching is a well-researched, highly readable introduction to Direct Instruction (DI), a systematic teaching approach which for more than 40 years has dramatically improved learning outcomes for students of all abilities and from all walks of life. The book looks at the development of DI through the early experiences of its creator, Zig Engelmann; explains the principles that underpin this approach; and looks at DI’s reception in the world of teaching, where it has been effectively shunned despite a formidable research base and example after example of transformative success.

The image at the top of the post is hot, but readers can also click here to go to the ECF page where they can download the PDF.

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It’s the teaching that matters

Published on 5 December 2011 in Administration, Musings, News, Policy and The press. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

Does all the verbiage about the ills of education make you wonder about the reasoning skills of educational reformers? Well, it does make me have questions. I practice resisting the urge to walk away when people start attributing educational underachievement to problems we educators can’t change (poverty, for example) or to features of schooling that are like nibbling on one’s napkin rather than eating food (e.g., walls height in classrooms).

I also get a bit incensed when folks go after teachers as the bad people in the equation. I find it foolish to suggest that education simply needs to raise pay to attract more qualified people into classrooms; it is an admittedly biased sample, but there are lots of smart people going through U.Va.’s (and similar) teacher education programs. (Sadly, too many teacher education programs fill their students’ thinking with Pop-Ed bologna.) And even though I talk about dysteachia and dyspedagogia, those are references to practices, not to the people—and some of the worst cases of dyspedagogia probably can be observed in the professoriate at schools of education!

Anyway, I am glad to report that a couple of my colleagues argued a coherent case about the importance of curriculum in the effects of teaching in an editorial for the New York Daily News. In “The teacher quality conundrum: If they are the problem, why are kids gaining in math? Curriculum design is key to reform,” Dan Willingham and David Grissmer use evidence and reason to explain that it’s not the teachers per se, but the teaching that matters. I encourage people interested in sensible reform of education to read it.

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Rigorous Evidence newsletter

Published on 27 January 2011 in Administration, News, Policy, Research and The press. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

The Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy, which covers many different social programs in addition to education, announced the publication of an electronic newsletter that should be of interest to some readers. The current issue of RIGOROUS EVIDENCE Newsletter: Distinguishing Effective Evidence-Based Programs from Everything Else doesn’t have much that is precisely on point for education (though, check the entry about a teen pregnancy program), but one can bookmark the on-line site for the newsletter and check it regularly as a potential source for trustworthy content about effective educational methods.

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Where reformers ought to be aiming

Published on 22 December 2010 in Administration, Musings, News, Policy and The press. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Over on Ed Excellence, Robert Pondiscio published an editorial entitled “The Fierce Urgency of Eventually” in which he argues that those reform efforts that ignore curricular and instructional issues present less-than-timely and -helpful alternatives at the very time when US education needs immediate, substantive change. Mr. Pondiscio presses his case for doing the hard work of specifying what students need to know. He wants reformers to talk about—get ready!—curriculum, teaching, and learning!
Continue reading ‘Where reformers ought to be aiming’

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PISA results as Rorschach

Published on 8 December 2010 in Musings, News, Policy and The press. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

The education press is abuzz about the release of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2009 results, so it’s a good time for some semi-snarky speculation about excuses for the less-than-stellar relative scores for US students and about proposals we’ll be hearing or reading regarding what the US education system should do to correct underlying problems leading to those scores. Here’s a start. Feel free to add your own in the comments. (For bonus points, drop in references to news stories, letters to the editor, and etc. where people actually express one of the prototypical positions!)
Continue reading ‘PISA results as Rorschach’

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Willingham’s guidelines for teacher accountability

Published on 24 August 2010 in Administration, News, Policy and The press. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

In his recurring posts for the Washington Post, Dan Willingham has three suggestions about how to approach the problem of creating a system for evaluating teachers’ contributions to students’ outcomes. The guidelines are sensible and worth reviewing. Read them here.

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i3 projects

Published on 17 August 2010 in News, Policy and The press. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Ed Week reporter Christina Samuels reminded me that the US Department of Education has announced awards under the “Investing in Innovation Fund” (“i3″ program). There are substantial funds for cooperative agreements or grants aimed at promoting practices with demonstrated benefits.

Program Description: The Investing in Innovation Fund, established under section 14007 of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), provides funding to support (1) local educational agencies (LEAs), and (2) nonprofit organizations in partnership with (a) one or more LEAs or (b) a consortium of schools. The purpose of this program is to provide competitive grants to applicants with a record of improving student achievement and attainment in order to expand the implementation of, and investment in, innovative practices that are demonstrated to have an impact on improving student achievement or student growth, closing achievement gaps, decreasing dropout rates, increasing high school graduation rates, or increasing college enrollment and completion rates.

These grants will (1) allow eligible entities to expand and develop innovative practices that can serve as models of best practices, (2) allow eligible entities to work in partnership with the private sector and the philanthropic community, and (3) identify and document best practices that can be shared and taken to scale based on demonstrated success.

I’m regularly a little wary about “innovation,” as an interest in what’s “new” or “innovative” too often trumps the employment of well-established (“old school”) practices that have a documented track record for success. Let’s hope that the track records for these innovations are actually well established. Also, let’s hope the US Department of Ed applies a level of scrutiny to them that at least approximates the evaluation that it focused on the Reading First initiatives.

Although Ms. Samuels focused her analysis on projects that fit with special education (a sensible take, given that special ed is her beat), there are many others. Readers can see a complete list of the funded projects on a site provided by the department by following this link and learn about the program by following this one.

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“Our teachers think they’re all effective.”

Published on 15 August 2010 in Administration, Arithmetic and mathematics, Elementary, Musings, News, Parents, Policy, Reading and The press. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

According to Stannis Steinbeck, principal of Broadus Elementary School in Pacoima (CA, US), this is the view of the members of her faculty. According to data about the teachers’ effects on student achievement, not all teachers are effective. It should come as no surprise that some are more effective than others and some are woefully ineffective.

Jason Felch, Jason Song, and Doug Smith of the Los Angeles Times aggregated achievement test data over seven years and across many students assigned to 6000 teachers to assess which teachers consistently improved and which consistently diminished their students’ outcomes.
Continue reading ‘“Our teachers think they’re all effective.”’

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