January 28, 2012

Ritalin Gone Wrong

By L. ALAN SROUFE

NY Times

THREE million children in this country take drugs for problems in focusing. Toward the end of last year, many of their parents were deeply alarmed because there was a shortage of drugs like Ritalin and Adderall that they…

Anyone that has been in the education field for even the most limited time has felt the sweep of the pendulum.

It seems as though forces from one side or the other tend to push education reforms back and forth depending on who happens to have public opinion on their side. And there we lie, just as Poe described, tethered by the inquisitors of education reform,  as the sharp blade gets closer and closer until we begin to feel it. We somehow manage to set ourselves free but face another…

There are certain education conferences that people look forward to attending each and every year. Certainly the big national conferences with thousands of attendees and hundreds of vendors are the conferences most familiar to educators. The state organizations usually draw big crowds of educators as well. At one time this is how educators networked and saw the newest of the new, and the best of the best. All of that is represented at big education conferences.

With the introduction…

• Notes on Washington and the world by the staff of The New Yorker.

The Latest Wrinkle About Merit Pay for Teachers

By Walt Gardner on January 2, 2012 8:18 AM

They say if you live long enough you get to see it all. That's why I was not surprised to read about Impact Plus, billed as the nation's most advanced merit pay system for public school teachers ("…

From Whence Come Ideas for Reforming Teaching Practices?

Larry Cuban

Over many years I have written about reforms aimed at classroom teachers and how they have fallen flat. Think about major past efforts–and yes, in the present moment also–to alter how teachers taught reading, math, science, and social studies. Or reform-driven decision-makers making enormous investments to get teachers to use new technologies in classroom lessons, past and present. Teachers have selectively…

Student Achievement, Poverty and “Toxic Stress”

by Robert Pondiscio

January 4th, 2012

Tags: accountability, American Academy of Pediatrics,…

Using Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers Is Based on the Wrong Values

The True Cost of High School Dropouts

By HENRY M. LEVIN and CECILIA E. ROUSE

NY Times

Throughout history, there are numerous examples of smart people who have made poor decisions. At the time, they may have thought that the decision seemed logical, appropriate and promised that positive changes would result. We have all read stories of well-respected people who have made incredibly ill-conceived statements, policies, and proclamations that in hindsight were misguided, short-sighted and downright wrong.  Here's a grievous example of one of those…

WARNING:  “Control-Oriented Efforts Can Sabotage Student Motivation”

Joan R. Fretz

In Race to the Top, the Dirty Work Is Left to Those on the Bottom

By MICHAEL WINERIP

NY Times

Teacher Preparation With Strings Attached

Ariel Sacks

I'm certainly one of the lucky ones. I can proudly say that my teacher preparation included a strong background in developmental theory, curriculum design, and student-centered pedagogy at Bank…

All of the controversy about teacher evaluation is driven by the federally mandated Race To The Top. Unfortunately nowhere is the “top” precisely defined and the educrats who conceived and established the Race To The Top forgot that any race to the top begins at the bottom and they neglected to identify the “bottom” from which we are supposed to race to the “top.”…

Attack VAM before it is too late

Classroom teachers and building principals must join together and attack Value-Added Modeling (VAM) as a method for classroom teacher evaluation much less a measure of student performance and teacher effectiveness.

In New…