What Makes for Effective Professional Development?

In this Teachers United report on teacher preparation, support, and retention, Sarah Margeson, Chris Eide, and Alison Fox list the criteria for effective professional development:

• It is designed to improve teacher effectiveness as measured by improved student outcomes.
• It is tied to schoolwide reform efforts, a clearly communicated vision for student…

Foreign language websites – This regular feature in The Language Educator recommends several free websites:

• LessonPlanet – This site www.lessonplanet.com has thousands of lesson plans and worksheets for Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Latin, Russian, and Spanish.
• Visual Dictionaries in English…

Sustaining Outdated Practices Will Not Transform Schools…

Toward national funding reform

Almost every education policy debate is in part a proxy for something else, writes Conor Williams on the New America Ed Central website. Regardless of surface appearance, school funding arguments are often implicitly about deeper theories of justice and core elements of our social contract (both articulated and unarticulated). If we believe that all students should be treated equally in a public education system, presumably we…

What price fundraising drives?

From bake sales to gala auctions, private groups are raising increasing amounts of money for public schools in wealthier communities, spurring inequities, writes Motoko Rich in The New York Times. A new study in Education Finance and Policy finds that nonprofits of parents and community leaders tripled in number and quadrupled dollars generated between 1995 and 2010 -- $880 million in 2010, up from $197 million in 1995. Their…