Once again, it's your Sunday reading digest, a not-all-inclusive listing of recommendations from the week.
Mercedes Schneider
As the ESEA rewrites and votes and amendments have been flying thick and fast, Schneider has been following and explaining the action swiftly and thoroughly. So this isn't a link to a particular post-- just work your way back through the week to get a clearer sense of what Congress is up to with education legislation.
We Definitely Don't Need a National Education Plan
Rick Hess dismantles the argument for a national education policy. He may be a reformster, but he's no dummy.
The Common Core and Democratic Education
Johann Neem takes a long, thoughtful look at Common Core in general and David Coleman's writing about reading in particular. It's a good clear look at why, exactly, Common Core is a bad, hollow idea.
Six Education Policies a 2016 Presidential Candidate Must Embrace
Lots of folks are writing pieces of this nature, but Cynthia Liu has produced one of the best. Clear, concise and thought-provoking.
K & Preschool Teachers: Last Stand in War on Childhood?
Peter Gray continues his series in Psychology Today looking at those who teach the youngest students and the battle to keep pre-school and kindergarten from turning into developmentally inappropriate menaces to childhood.
Technology Fails Plagiarism, Citation Tests
Paul Thomas takes a look at the use of technology to catch college writers at plagiarism. Except when it doesn't. Or when it catches a false positive.
A Reanalysis of the Effects of Teacher Replacement Using Value-Added Modeling
Want yet another reference to bring up when debunking VAM to someone. Here's a research study that shows, once again, that VAM is neither valid nor reliable.
Good digest, except of course I can't read Rick Hess' article yet because of EdWeek's stupid policy of 3 articles a month unless you pay $60.
ReplyDeleteOther interesting news I read today:
Researchers at Pennsylvania State University have finished a 20 year study, published in the American Journal of Public Health, that "suggests that social skills are at least as important as cognitive ability when it comes to achievement." The students were from low-income schools, 3 urban and one rural.
"The main finding: The kindergartners who scored highest on the social and emotional skill scale [cooperation, sharing, kindness, compassion] were up to four times more likely to turn out to be employed college grads without drug or alcohol problems or a police record." Take that, Chetty et al! A real tracking study, not speculation.
This is a link to the article: https://www.yahoo.com/parenting/the-skills-that-make-kids-more-likely-to-grow-up-124343021577.html
And this is a link to the abstract and a downloadable PDF of the study:
http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2015.302630
The other interesting news is that U.S. students won the International Mathematical Olympiad:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/math-olympiad-usa-win_55ac7f83e4b065dfe89ea295?