This is a big step in the right direction. These are the kinds of numbers that schools need to be aware of - graduation rates are meaningless if paired with 70% college remediation rates.
“To the extent you have less working memory, you have less space for storing and integrating ideas and therefore less to do the reasoning you need to do,” says Mr. Kramer, floating nearby.
The article brings up some great points, some that make me want to find a way to break my students’ texting addictions during class.
I’m in huge support of these kinds of school reforms.
This is the single biggest educational hurdle for many students in my school, and fighting it is really, really hard.
This is a brilliant piece. Read it carefully. If you’re a teacher, it’s the right time to start rethinking your curriculum, so figure out how to apply more creative tasks to your classroom.
Please take 10 minutes and watch this, and if you’re an educator, ask yourself how you could work to reinforce the notion of an “empathic civilization” in your classroom.
“The Achievement Gap” - it’s the most haunting and complex problem in education today. When it comes to other markers of progress and best practices, we can have open, honest, educated debates about classroom sizes, teacher competency, merit pay, etc., but when it comes to this problem, most people have no idea what to say. Many want to blame the urban communities, or gangster rap, or racist teachers, but all of these “answers” amount to little more than name-calling and finger-pointing.
This article, and the book it comments on, won’t solve the problem. But they are both interesting premises (or at least they seem to be - I haven’t read the book) for a deeper investigation into the complex struggle between public education and the underachieving black subculture.
I honestly don’t know a lot about the I.B. curriculum, but I’m intrigued by the idea. I think it could be a good fit for a lot of students, but with the success and completion rates suggested in this article, it’s clear that the transition from general public ed to an I.B. program is too dramatic for many students. We need to rethink middle school and early high school to get more students able to think creatively and outside the box.
This article summary of a Fox News roundup discussion points out the wrongheaded attitudes that many people have about education funding. In no other industry do we slash budgets and jobs while raising expectations. I’m not suggesting that there are not ways to educate students in a more cost effective manner, but why don’t we follow the usual route of first investing in some serious R&D andthen lowering the budget when we know that the new system works?
The final quip in this interchange focuses attention on the difference between war funding and education funding - a reality that continually blows my mind.
(via noteachersleftbehind)
Cooperative Catalyst is an interesting blog to follow, and this notion of eliminating grading is one that has always interested me. While this entry doesn’t necessarily offer a clear example of how to teach without grades, it does a decent job explaining the merits of eliminating them.
