Wednesday, January 25th, 2012 at 9:30 am
Anytime you hear government officials mandating new behaviors to a broad swath of the population, that mandate is likely to run afoul of the First Amendment. And so it is with President Obama’s announcement last night that all states must “require that all students stay in high school until they graduate or turn 18.”
Although Mr. Obama made other pronouncements about education — see Dana Goldstein’s good summary analysis in The Nation — the stay-in-school mandate was the one that caught my ear, since enforcing it would run afoul of both the United States Supreme Court and our historic commitment to religious liberty.
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Sunday, January 22nd, 2012 at 2:07 pm
Last week, CNN reported on recent events in Garfield Heights, Ohio, where austerity measures have led local school officials to shorten the schoolday to five hours, get rid of subjects like art, music, and PE — and send kids home before lunch. What didn’t come out during the piece was that these drastic decisions were fueled in part by the community’s refusal, over a 20 year period, to pass a levy that would help support the schools. Like many places across the country, Garfield Heights’ residents were getting older, its younger people were moving away, and those that remained didn’t see sufficient value in a measure that would be used to support the education of other people’s children.
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Thursday, January 19th, 2012 at 1:21 pm
Like most parents of a young child, I’m trying to decide which environment will be the best for my son when he enters a public school for the first time next fall. At nearly every open house my wife and I attend, cheerful administrators and educators tout the advantage of being a “participatory” school, and of “giving children the opportunity to learn and work in groups.” Send your child here, they tell us, and he’ll acquire a core set of democratic skills – from working collaboratively to acting empathetically – that will help him successfully negotiate our increasingly interconnected global community.
Sounds great, I say – until I open my Sunday New York Times and read a cover story warning against the rise of a new type of groupthink. “Most of us now work in teams,” writes author Susan Cain, “in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in. But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption.”
Whom should we trust? Have we overvalued democratic skills like collaboration and shared decision-making to our own detriment? And, in the end, should our schools be more or less democratic?
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Tuesday, January 17th, 2012 at 10:26 am
What’s the best way to support the overall learning and growth of children — via a healthy doze of generalized praise, or with a strict diet of precise, targeted feedback that helps children see their own work more objectively?
That’s the question posed in a recent article in the Washington Post, and based on the reaction it’s receiving — hundreds of emotionally-charged comments on either side of the debate — it’s clear that the issue of when, and how, to deliver feedback to children is a serious hot-button issue for parents and educators.
The question of feedback is vital, however, in ways that go beyond individual classrooms and students; indeed, some of the Obama administration’s primary proposals for K-12 education reform are based on the assumption that extrinsic motivators are a particularly valuable form of feedback — performance pay for teachers, for example.
Is this a viable strategy to pursue? What exactly is the debate between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation when it comes to individual performance, and how should those arguments be shaping the way we think about everything from drafting federal policies to finding the best school for our children?
To unpack that a bit, here are two previous pieces of writing about the subject — the first describes a live debate between educators on the subject; and the second summarizes the recent research and offers some suggested next steps. See what you think — and please share your thoughts and reactions publicly.
Categories:
Assessment,
Learning,
Organizational Change,
Teacher QualityTags: Center for Inspired Teaching, dan pink, extrinsic rewards, feedback, intrinsic motivation, motivation, praise, washington post
Thursday, January 12th, 2012 at 2:54 pm
Here, in Léogâne, halfway between Port-au-Prince and the epicenter of the 2010 earthquake that unleashed Haiti’s latest round of devastation, death and hardship, Doug Taylor is building houses.
An Indiana native in his 25th year of working for Habitat for Humanity, Taylor is tanned, serious and unshaven, with sandy straight hair that hangs down as though it has been weighted with stones. On a sunny day in December 2011, Taylor greets a visitor before 155 brand-new homes, all arranged in orderly rows, all built to a uniform size and shape, and all painted bright colors of pink, blue or green – a Haitian Levittown.
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Monday, December 19th, 2011 at 3:28 pm
I know most of us have already checked out for the year, but I wanted to share the nominees I’ve received so far in my ongoing search for the world’s most transformational learning environments.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve received recommendations either via Twitter or posted comments on this blog and/or Huffington Post. I’ve done my best to capture every recommendation I’ve received. If I missed yours, or if you have a new one to add, just post your comment and I’ll add it to the master list.
Keep in mind that this list, which features 58 nominees overall, merely aggregates what people have recommended. Of the nominees, 47 are schools or programs here in the United States: 9 public charter schools, 4 public charter school networks, 3 general networks, 13 public schools, 13 private schools, and 5 “others.” For the 11 international nominees, 6 could only be classified as “other” — an interesting contrast, I thought. In any case, see what you think, check them out at your leisure (and keep in mind the QED Transformational Change Model as a way of judging how transformational they are), and let’s all keep adding to the list.
Nominees for World’s Most Transformational Learning Environments
Wednesday, December 7th, 2011 at 2:07 pm
In the halls of Congress and on the presidential campaign trail, a debate is raging over which set of economic proposals to pursue in order to rebuild the national economy. At the same time, K-12 education reformers are engaged in their own frantic search for the right recipe(s) that can unlock the full power of teaching and learning. But rarely do we acknowledge that one individual stands, improbably, at the center of both debates – John Maynard Keynes.
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Categories:
Assessment,
Equity,
Learning,
Organizational ChangeTags: charter schools, DC, DCPS, driving demand, economics, education reform, freedom, Great Schools, John Maynard Keynes, K-12, Learning, parents, school choice
Friday, December 2nd, 2011 at 11:00 am
Thanks to the fabulous Liz Dwyer at GOOD Magazine, there are more people joining in the search for the world’s most transformational schools. You can see Liz’s article and read her readers’ comments by clicking here.
Wednesday, November 30th, 2011 at 8:43 am
OK, people, let’s get specific: out of all the outstanding and forward-thinking schools in the world, which ones are truly the most transformational when it comes to imagining a new way to think about teaching and learning in the 21st century?
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Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011 at 9:10 am
If you’re looking for the latest signs of America’s cultural descent into inanity, look no further than this weekend’s Sunday Styles section in the New York Times, and its review of Maria Abramovic’s performance piece at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s recent fundraising gala.
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