Some of the News Fit to Print

Announcement Carnegie Launches a Knowledge Network: What We Know About Value Added The goal of the Carnegie Knowledge Network is to synthesize emerging knowledge on the rapidly changing landscape of teacher evaluation policy and practice in the United States and to provide an environment for conversation around the toughest challenges. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has assembled a panel of leading technical experts to work toward a consensus on what is and is not known about value-added measures for teacher evaluation. The Foundation selected individuals who have expertise in statistics and economics, without vested interests in particular value-added modeling strategies, and whose previous research, taken together, represents a range of views on this topic. The website's initial content includes a first set of knowledge briefs in the What We Know Series on Value-Added Methods and Applications. The site now includes the following briefs: Stephen W. Raudenbush writes on how educators can interpret value-added estimates. Daniel F. McCaffrey analyzes the research on how well valued-added models can level the playing field – how successfully they can isolate the contributions of individual teachers from student background characteristics, such as poverty or English language proficiency. Susanna Loeb takes on the matter of consistency – or lack of it – in value-added scores. Dan Goldhaber compares the consistency among different models for translating student achievement growth into a measure of teacher performance. Douglas N. Harris addresses the question of how value-added measures compare to other gauges of teacher effectiveness. These authors will monitor commentary and update their briefs periodically to reflect the most current research. In addition, each author will host a moderated webinar to provide an opportunity for interaction around the topics. Carnegie followed a rigorous process for developing the briefs. To identify topics for investigation and to ensure that the work was grounded in critical problems of practice, the Foundation posed pressing questions on teacher evaluation to a wide range of stakeholders. The Foundation engaged a User Panel composed of K-12 field leaders directly involved in developing and implementing teacher evaluation systems. We did this to assure relevance to their needs and accessibility for their use. Visit the Carnegie Knowledge Network at www.carnegieknowledgenetwork.org and join us in our upcoming webinars. The first of these is “How Do Teacher Value-Added Measures Compare to Other Measures of Teacher Effectiveness?” with Douglas Harris on October 31, 2012. _________ This Carnegie Knowledge Network is funded by the Institute of Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the Institute or the U.S. Department of Education. Founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1905 and chartered by an Act of Congress in 1906, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching is an independent policy and research center based in Stanford, CA. For more information, visit our website at www.carnegiefoundation.org

ABOUT K-12

SOME STATES WILL CALL THE ROLL ON SCHOOL REFORM
(Reuters) - Voters in several states will weigh in next month on some of the most contentious issues in public education, including teacher tenure, charter schools and merit pay for teachers, as a national fight over education reform hits the ballot box. The campaigns have been fierce and often nasty. In one corner: proponents of dramatically overhauling public education, including several of America's wealthiest families, led by Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Wal-Mart heir Alice Walton. They seek to inject more free-market forces into the education system by requiring schools to compete for students and teachers to compete for pay raises. In the opposite corner: Teachers unions and their allies, on the left, who say the reformers' proposals would strip resources from the public schools without boosting student achievement.

HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PRINCIPALS RAISE STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT
A new study found that the effect of highly effective principals on student achievement is equivalent to two to seven months of additional learning each school year, while ineffective principals negatively impact achievement by a comparable amount. In addition, the relationship between higher teacher turnover and lower average "value added" in a given grade is stronger as principal quality increases.  The article is in the Huffington Post.

SHOULD STATE EDUCATION CHIEFS BE ELECTED?
Some 13 states currently make their top education official subject to a popular vote. And in virtually every one of those states, there are critics who ask why such an office should be so deeply involved in politics. The article is from Stateline.

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MOOCS FOR CREDIT
Coursera, the largest provider of massive open online courses (MOOCs), has entered into a contract to license several of the courses it has built with its university partners to Antioch University, which would offer versions of the MOOCs for credit as part of a bachelor’s degree program. The deal represents one of the first instances of a third-party institution buying permission to incorporate a MOOC into its curriculum -- and awarding credit for the MOOC -- in an effort to lower the full cost of a degree for students. It is also a first step for Coursera and its partners toward developing a revenue stream from licensing its courses. The article is inInside Higher Ed.

TEXAS A&M LAUNCHES FAR-REACHING PLAN TO RAISE RETENTION AND GRADUATION RATES
Texas A&M University will unveil an ambitious plan here on Monday to fix a leaky educational pipeline by monitoring students from the time they enter kindergarten until they graduate from college. The program, which it calls EmpowerU, is the result of a year-long brainstorming process among leaders of the sprawling system's 11 diverse campuses. It started with a sobering look at the number of students who fail to graduate and the economic toll that takes on the state. "One of the first things we had to do was admit the problem," said Elaine Mendoza, the system regent who helped lead the effort. The article is in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

ABOUT K-12
TOWARD IMPROVING CONTINUOUSLY
A new report from the Forum for Investment in Youth and the Wallace Foundation offers a how-to guide for the development of quality improvement systems (QIS) in afterschool settings. Identifying quality as a priority is an important first step, but addressing it in a systemic way is complicated and requires research, planning, consensus-building, resource development, managing new processes, and redefining old relationships. The guide aims to help those who are working to create better, more coordinated afterschool programming through a QIS, or to further develop existing efforts. It explains what constitutes an effective QIS, describes tasks involved in building one, and offers examples and resources from communities whose work is forging a trail for others. The guide is premised on the model of "continuous improvement": the idea that organizations should regularly take stock of themselves against a standard; develop plans to improve based on what they have learned; carry out those plans; and begin the cycle over again, so that the quality of their work is always improving. Experience shows that afterschool programs – and the children and youth they serve – benefit enormously when programs agree to a common definition of quality and embrace continuous improvement.
TURNING SCHOOLS AROUND: MYTH OR REALITY?
We must advocate for high levels of learning for all children, write Stu Silberman in Education Week’s Public Engagement blog, because when people believe all students can learn at high levels, achievement escalates.
REPORT: HOW RECENT EDUCATION REFORMS UNDERMINE LOCAL SCHOOL GOVERNANCE
A new report from the National Education Policy Center concludes that the concept of local control has all but disappeared from discussions of education policy. The authors define local control as "the power of communities, made up of individuals bound together by common geography, resources, problems, and interests, to collectively determine the policies that govern their lives." In education, this has typically been elected school boards and their constituents. However, NCLB and subsequent federal policy has forced a surrender of local control, with localities accountable to state and federal officials. This information is from the PEN NewsBlast.



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BEGINNING TEACHER INDUCTION: WHAT THE DATA TELL US
Richard Ingersoll writes in Phil Delta Kappan: Since the advent of public schools, education commentators and reformers have perennially called attention to the challenges encountered by newcomers to school teaching. Although elementary and secondary teaching involves intensive interaction with youngsters, the work of teachers is done largely in isolation from colleagues. This isolation can be especially difficult for newcomers, who, upon accepting a position in a school, are frequently left to succeed or fail on their own within the confines of their classrooms—often likened to a “lost at sea” or “sink or swim” experience. Other commentators go further, arguing that beginners tend to end up in the most challenging and difficult classroom and school assignments, akin to a “trial by fire.” Indeed, some have assailed teaching as an occupation that “cannibalizes its young.” These are the very kinds of issues and problems that effective employee entry, orientation, and support programs—widely known as induction—seek to address. Teaching, however, has traditionally not had the kind of induction programs for new entrants common to many skilled blue- and white-collar occupations and characteristic of many traditional professions.
UNION NEGOTIATIONS OVER EVALUATION SYSTEM STALLED
The Los Angeles Unified School District is seeking the assistance of California’s Public Employee Relations Board mediator in order to break the impasse in its negotiations with the United Teachers Los Angeles, the LA Daily News reports. The current round of negotiations is about the development of a new teacher evaluation system which must take into account student achievement metrics such as test scores. The district is operating under a time constraint, as it has until December 4th of this year to devise the new system. Earlier this year the district was found to be using a review process that was in violation of the 40-year-old Stull Act which requires that some measure of how well students are learning the material mandated by the state curriculum play a part in how teachers are evaluated. In 1999, in an amendment co-sponsored by current mayor of Los Angeles Antonio Villaraigosa, specifically named the state-mandated standardized test scores to be used at as that measure. The article is from EducationNews.org.
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FIVE REASONS COLLEGE ENROLLMENTS MAY BE DROPPING
Parents who are desperately trying to get their children into a top school may not believe this: U.S. higher education enrollments this fall might be lower - perhaps significantly so at some institutions - than they were a year ago. Official national data won't be published for some time. Yet state by state, enrollments appear to be down, mostly at community colleges and at some four-year schools as well. The article is in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
TEACHING, STRESS, ADJUNCTS
Full-time faculty members at four-year colleges are spending less time on teaching than they used to, according to a national study being released today by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles. Because the comparative data are for full-time faculty only, it is not clear if this trend is because more courses are being taught by part-timers, because more sections have been canceled due to budget cuts, or for other reasons. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.
COLLEGE PRICE HIKES MORE MODEST
The sticker price of in-state tuition at four-year public universities climbed about $400 this fall, an increase of nearly 5 percent that brought the average to $8,655. That's a modest increase compared to recent years but still painful for families with stagnant incomes after a prolonged economic slump. Room-and-board charges grew by a comparable amount, raising the full cost for students living on campus to $17,860. The latest annual figures from the College Board, out Wednesday, show only about one-third of full-time students pay that published price. The article is in Education Week.

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AN ENROLLMENT EXPERIMENT GROUNDED IN “GRIT”
In the fast-changing realm of higher education, “grit” is becoming a red-hot word. Maybe you call it resilience, determination, or perseverance. Srikant Vasan defines it as “being able to get over obstacles as they appear in your path, to stand up when you’ve been punched down, to set a long-term vision and a goal for yourself, and be able to keep those in mind.” How might colleges effectively measure—and promote—those kinds of noncognitive skills and habits among students? Mr. Vasan hopes to provide an answer. He is the founder and president of Portmont College, a new, low-cost associate-degree program created by Mount St. Mary’s College, in Los Angeles, and the MyCollege Foundation, which is financed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The article is in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

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TEACHING STUDENTS FINANCIAL LITERACY
Students appear to know so little about the repercussions of the loans they take out, in fact, that some universities are starting to require them to undergo financial-literacy training. The first statewide plan to curb student-loan defaults, announced with great fanfare by the State University of New York system, consists not of making more direct grants available or providing tuition discounts, but almost entirely of helping students better understand the debt they’re getting into. It’s not altogether altruistic. Universities and colleges are being judged on their average loan debt and default rates, and stress about finances can derail students and cause them to drop out at a time when funding of public higher education is increasingly tied to its success at producing graduates. The article is from the Hechinger Report.
A NEW ONLINE ASSOCIATE’S DEGREE
The latest model-busting higher education program comes from a novel partnership between a nonprofit college and a nonprofit organization, helped by a push (and some money) from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This new venture is designed to provide online associate degrees to students who have more "grit" than traditional academic credentials. The program is a partnership between MyCollege Foundation, a nonprofit that received $3 million from the Gates Foundation as part of a program of grants for developing "breakthrough" learning models, and Mount St. Mary’s College, a Roman Catholic institution in Los Angeles with a focus on serving low-income and Latino students. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.
COMMUNITY COLLEGES CANNOT BE OVERLOOKED IN AMERICA’S QUEST FOR NEW SCIENTISTS
The United States needs to grow and diversify its science and engineering work force to be competitive in the new global economy — and community colleges play an increasingly important role in this process. More than 50 percent of lower-income and racial-minority students, and 40 percent of all students, start off at community colleges. However, not many students enter community colleges thinking they will become scientists, engineers or mathematicians. Only about 10 percent even consider this pathway. And the majority of those will pursue a different field as their studies progress. The article is in The New York Times.
ABOUT K-12
SURVEYS PROBE GENERATIONAL ATTITUDES OF TEACHING FORCE
A new survey points to differences in how teachers with fewer than 10 years of experience—who now make up more than half the teaching force—view aspects of their profession, compared with their veteran peers. The new-majority teachers were generally more receptive to the accountability movement and its implications for teacher policy, but they also hold some traditional opinions on working conditions.  The post is from Education Week’s Teacher Beat blog.
ACT SHOWS FEW N.C. STUDENTS READY FOR COLLEGE
Seniors across North Carolina have a lot of work to do, especially in science, to be ready for college, results of the first-ever statewide ACT testing show. Just less than one in eight of last year's juniors, or 12.8%, met the benchmark scores considered a predictor of college success in English, math, reading, and science. Last year, the state started requiring all 11th graders to take the exam.  The article is in the Charlotte Observer.




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RETHINK COLLEGE
For a room full of academics talking about the future of higher education, the conversation was surprisingly blunt. Time Magazine gathered more than 100 college presidents and other experts from across the U.S. to talk about the biggest problems facing higher education, which U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan summed up for the room as “high prices, low completion rates, and too little accountability.”
PERFORMING UNDER PRESSURE
State lawmakers increasingly want to tie public funding of higher education to colleges' performance. But measuring sticks that reflect the differences between institutions and who they serve are hard to find. HCM Strategists and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are trying to fill that gap with a series of new research papers and issue briefs. The campaign, dubbed “Context for Success,” attempts to give policymakers and colleges tools to better judge what works in higher education. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.
FINANCES BLEEDING CAL STATE SYSTEM DRY
Cal State is being bled dry. Few super-rich donors write big checks to Cal State, foundation money is scarce, and so are research funds, because the mission of these campuses is teaching. That's why, confronted with Sacramento's slash-and-burn actions, CSU has had to raise tuition fees, cut enrollment and shrink programs. Tuition has quadrupled in the past decade. As a result, a recent report from the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California points out, the percentage of high school graduates enrolling in Cal State is declining, even though more of these students meet university entrance standards. The article is in the San Francisco Chronicle.
PRIVATE COLLEGES BOOM AS CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITIES FALTER
California's public higher education crisis has a flip side: swelling enrollment, expanding faculty, and state-of-the-art construction at the state's private colleges and universities. With five years of funding cuts causing stumbles in the state's public higher education systems, California students are increasingly turning to private institutions, as well as out-of-state schools, to get their degrees. California independent colleges report big upticks in enrollment of both freshmen and transferring students disillusioned with spiraling tuition for fewer classes at California State University, University of California, and community colleges. Universities in neighboring states also say they're seeing more interest from California students than ever before. The article is from the Associated Press.
CAN AN ONLINE DEGREE REALLY HELP YOU GET A JOB?
The University of Phoenix, the largest for-profit school in the country, has been around since 1976. It has 328,000 students currently enrolled and an estimated 700,000 alumni. It offers more than 100 degree programs at the associate, bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral levels. As of 2010 it had more than 8,000 recruiters on staff. But until very recently it had no career-counseling service for its graduating students. That’s finally changed with the school’s new “Let’s Get to Work” initiative announced late last month: a series of online tools designed to help students figure out early on what jobs might be good for them, what employers in those fields are looking for and what skills students need to get the job. The article is in Time Magazine.
ABOUT K-12
THE BENEFITS OF EVIDENCE-BASED OBSERVATIONS
Peter DeWitt writes in Education Week’s Common Ground blog: It sounds like common sense. Shouldn't all observations be evidence based? Is this a passing fad using new vocabulary? Or is this a new focus for principals and teachers? The stakes are high and our focus has to be clear. We need evidence that our students are learning and state tests are not the way to do that. However, teacher observations and the conversations that take place before and after are important to that process because they can have a positive effect on student learning.
COMPETENCY-BASED SCHOOLS EMBRACE DIGITAL LEARNING
The move to competency-based education—also known as proficency-, standards-, and performance-based education—by Lindsay Unified and other districts will likely give them a head start in preparing for the new demands of the Common Core State Standards, experts point out, and in their ability to use technology more effectively to personalize learning. The article is in Education Week.
 

College Is Dead. Long Live College!

By Amanda RipleyOct. 18, 201225 Commentsre

Computer-Generated Image by Richard Kolker for TIME

On Sept. 17, the Pakistani government shut down access to YouTube. The purported reason was to block the anti-Muslim film trailer that was inciting protests around the world.
One little-noticed consequence of this decision was that 215 people in Pakistan suddenly lost their seats in a massive, open online physics course. The free college-level class, created by a Silicon Valley start-up called Udacity, included hundreds of short YouTube videos embedded on its website. Some 23,000 students worldwide had enrolled, including Khadijah Niazi, a pigtailed 11-year-old in Lahore. She was on question six of the final exam when she encountered a curt message saying “this site is unavailable.”
(GOOGLE+ HANGOUT: Can Online Mega Courses Change Education?)
Niazi was devastated. She’d worked hard to master this physics class before her 12th birthday, just one week away. Now what? Niazi posted a lament on the class discussion board: “I am very angry, but I will not quit.”
In every country, education changes so slowly that it can be hard to detect progress. But what happened next was truly different. Within an hour, Maziar Kosarifar, a young man taking the class in Malaysia, began posting detailed descriptions for Niazi of the test questions in each video. Rosa Brigída, a novice physics professor taking the class from Portugal, tried to create a workaround so Niazi could bypass YouTube; it didn’t work. From England, William, 12, promised to help and warned Niazi not to write anything too negative about her government online.
None of these students had met one another in person. The class directory included people from 125 countries. But after weeks in the class, helping one another with Newton’s laws, friction and simple harmonic motion, they’d started to feel as if they shared the same carrel in the library. Together, they’d found a passageway into a rigorous, free, college-level class, and they weren’t about to let anyone lock it up.
By late that night, the Portuguese professor had successfully downloaded all the videos and then uploaded them to an uncensored photo-sharing site. It took her four hours, but it worked. The next day, Niazi passed the final exam with the highest distinction. “Yayyyyyyy,” she wrote in a new post. (Actually, she used 43 y’s, but you get the idea.) She was the youngest girl ever to complete Udacity’s Physics 100 class, a challenging course for the average college freshman.
That same day, Niazi signed up for Computer Science 101 along with her twin brother Muhammad. In England, William began downloading the videos for them.
High-End Learning on the Cheap
The hype about online learning is older than Niazi. In the late 1990s, Cisco CEO John Chambers predicted that “education over the Internet is going to be so big, it is going to make e-mail usage look like a rounding error.” There was just one problem: online classes were not, generally speaking, very good. To this day, most are dry, uninspired affairs, consisting of a patchwork of online readings, written Q&As and low-budget lecture videos. Many students nevertheless pay hundreds of dollars for these classes — 3 in 10 college students report taking at least one online course, up from 1 in 10 in 2003 — but afterward, most are no better off than they would have been at their local community college.
Now, several forces have aligned to revive the hope that the Internet (or rather, humans using the Internet from Lahore to Palo Alto, Calif.) may finally disrupt higher education — not by simply replacing the distribution method but by reinventing the actual product. New technology, from cloud computing to social media, has dramatically lowered the costs and increased the odds of creating a decent online education platform. In the past year alone, start-ups like Udacity, Coursera and edX — each with an elite-university imprimatur — have put 219 college-level courses online, free of charge. Many traditional colleges are offering classes and even entire degree programs online. Demand for new skills has reached an all-time high. People on every continent have realized that to thrive in the modern economy, they need to be able to think, reason, code and calculate at higher levels than before.

At the same time, the country that led the world in higher education is now leading its youngest generation into a deep hole. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Americans owe some $914 billion in student loans; other estimates say the total tops $1 trillion. That’s more than the nation’s entire credit-card debt. On average, a college degree still pays for itself (and then some) over the course of a career. But about 40% of students at four-year colleges do not manage to get that degree within six years. Regardless, student loans have to be repaid; unlike other kinds of debt, they generally cannot be shed in bankruptcy. The government can withhold tax refunds and garnish paychecks until it gets its money back — stifling young people’s options and their spending power.
For all that debt, Americans are increasingly unsure about what they are getting. Three semesters of college education have a “barely noticeable” impact on critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills, according to research published in the 2011 book Academically Adrift. In a new poll sponsored by TIME and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, 80% of the 1,000 U.S. adults surveyed said that at many colleges, the education students receive is not worth what they pay for it. And 41% of the 540 college presidents and senior administrators surveyed agreed with them.
(MORE: TIME/Carnegie’s Higher Education Poll)
Arriving at this perilous intersection of high demand, uneven supply and absurd prices are massive open online courses (endowed with the unfortunate acronym MOOCs), which became respectable this year thanks to investments from big-name brands like Harvard, Stanford and MIT. Venture capitalists have taken a keen interest too, and the business model is hard to resist: the physics class Niazi was taking cost only about $2 per student to produce.
Already, the hyperventilating has outpaced reality; desperate parents are praying that free online universities will finally pop the tuition bubble — and nervous college officials don’t want to miss out on a potential gold rush. The signs of change are everywhere, and so are the signs of panic. This spring, Harvard and MIT put $60 million into a nonprofit MOOC (rhymes with duke) venture called edX. A month later, the president of the University of Virginia abruptly stepped down — and was then quickly reinstated — after an anxious board member read about other universities’ MOOCs in the Wall Street Journal.
One way or another, it seems likely that more people will eventually learn more for less money. Finally. The next question might be, Which people
How the Brain Learns
This fall, to glimpse the future of higher education, I visited classes in brick-and-mortar colleges and enrolled in half a dozen MOOCs. I dropped most of the latter because they were not very good. Or rather, they would have been fine in person, nestled in a 19th century hall at Princeton University, but online, they could not compete with the other distractions on my computer.
I stuck with the one class that held my attention, the physics class offered by Udacity. I don’t particularly like physics, which is why I’d managed to avoid studying it for the previous 38 years. What surprised me was the way the class was taught. It was designed according to how the brain actually learns. In other words, it had almost nothing in common with most classes I’d taken before.
Minute 1: Physics 100 began with a whirling video montage of Italy, slow-motion fountains and boys playing soccer on the beach. It felt a little odd, like Rick Steves’ Physics, but it was a huge improvement over many other online classes I sampled, which started with a poorly lit professor staring creepily into a camera.
When the Udacity professor appeared, he looked as if he were about 12; in fact, he was all of 25. “I’m Andy Brown, the instructor for this course, and here we are, on location in Siracusa, Italy!” He had a crew cut and an undergraduate degree from MIT; he did not have a Ph.D. or tenure, which would turn out to be to his advantage.
“This course is really designed for anyone … In Unit 1, we’re going to begin with a question that fascinated the Greeks: How big is our planet?” To answer this question, Brown had gone to the birthplace of Archimedes, a mathematician who had tried to answer the same question over 2,000 years ago.

Read more: http://nation.time.com/2012/10/18/college-is-dead-long-live-college/#ixzz2Ae3jUcXp

師生是關鍵

http://case.ntu.edu.tw/CASEDU/?page_id=190
 
【活動側寫】2012親子天下國際教育論壇－教出學習力

• 十月
• 08

撰文｜臺大科教中心文字編輯　黃筠茜

《親子天下》於9月26日舉行2012國際教育論壇，講題為「教出學習力」。邀請日本資深教育學家佐藤學先生，以及上海PISA研究中心閱讀項目負責人鄒一斌先生擔任主講者。活動當天演講廳內座無虛席，從這樣爆滿的現場，我們看到了教育工作者和家長對孩子的關心與焦慮。

面對民國103年即將實施的「十二年國教」，家長和老師都處於極度不安的狀態。近來人們除了討論升學制度之外，也開始思考學校的意義是什麼？到底在整齊排排坐的教室裡，孩子學到了什麼？

 

「學習共同體－讓孩子愛上學習」
佐藤學先生是日本資深教育專家，深入研究各國的教育制度，並實際走訪各國共計一萬多間教室考察，提出「學習共同體」的新教學方式。至今日本已有三千多所學 校採用此種方式，東亞各國也紛紛前往日本吸取經驗，而台灣亦有多所中小學開始試辦。佐藤學先生本次將講題命為「學習共同體－讓孩子愛上學習」，在日本，有 許多的學生「從學習中逃走」，逃離教室、害怕上學、討厭老師，據調查，有高達60％的學生出了校園是不再學習的。我們回過頭看，台灣的學生其實也是如此。

佐藤學先生寄予「學習共同體」的願景是創造共學的學校，意即打造學生與學生們相互學習、老師與老師們相互學習的學校。今日的社會已與以往大不相同，從前社 會以勞力工作為主，勞動人口眾多；而今日則轉為服務業社會，所需要的人才需具備知識與創造力。根據英國學者調查，未來孩子們從事的工作有60％尚未被發 明，這代表我們現在的教育對未來孩子們進入社會不一定有幫助，而為了應因社會這樣時空的變化，教育就不該是將知識一股腦兒的填塞入孩子的腦中，而是必須教 給孩子適應未來新社會的「能力」。「學習共同體」的變革將有助於孩子提升創造力和學習力。

佐藤學說：「傳統的教學方式早已進了博物館！」在歐美，乃至日本、中國各地，有很多教育工作者已經意識到孩子珍貴的創造力。但學校要如何教學才能讓這些創 造力發光發熱呢？採用「學習共同體」的國家，他們的教育一是強調「高品質」，即孩子在學校的時間不要求多，但品質要相當高；二是「平等」，倡導不放棄任何 一個孩子，無論這個孩子先天的資質或家境如何。打破過去的教學方式，展開一場「寧靜的革命」，從以往學生坐在下面聽、老師站在講台上說的單向模式轉變成 「協同學習」。教育中，「教」固然是重要的，但孩子能真正的「學」到才是終極的目標。打造學習共同體首先要做的就是「教室的改變」，把桌椅排成ㄇ字型或Ｖ 字型，將孩子兩人或四人分成一組，由老師提問，學生進行小組討論。如此的學習方式可激發孩子學習的潛能，拋出問題引導他們自己找出答案，而非直接告訴他們 答案。尋找答案的過程可增加學習的成就感，並且在小組腦力激盪中也讓孩子親身體會到團隊合作的重要性與趣味性。

老師是關鍵
此種學習方式下，老師的角色相當重要，國家必須培養出專門的教育家，非僅是傳授知識，而是有意識的帶領孩子提升學習力。教學過程中，老師要能夠適時的放手 讓孩子「感受」學習。並且人是群體性的，必然會需要他人的協助，因此老師也要教導孩子去「相信」他人，於困難時虛心請教他人，並引導孩子明白個體與群體的 差異。在傳統的教學方式下，每個孩子都只專注於自身的學習，儘管大人們一再提醒團隊合作是相當重要的，但仍止於口頭空談，真正能體會的孩子並不多。對老師 而言，這樣的教學變革也是在學習。

佐藤學先生不諱言教育改革的確是困難的，老師很頑固、家長很頑固、校長更頑固，且以往制式的教學模式對大部分老師心理層面而言確實是較為安穩的作法。但改 革迫在眉睫，為了打破傳統學習方式，老師們勢必要勇敢地跨出這一步，唯有老師願意嘗試改變，整個教育才有改變的可能，而成功的果實也終究會成熟的。

 

「為了明天的生存而學習」－上海PISA的啟示
鄒一斌先生是上海教委會教研室教研員、上海PISA研究中心閱讀項目的負責人，在本次的演講中分享了上海之所以能在PISA有優異成績的原因及教改歷程。 鄒先生來台期間聽聞了台灣將於民國103年實施十二年國教，他觀察了各方的意見，發現台灣目前對於十二年國教改革的意見多在討論招生制度、明星學校的去 留、菁英教育還是大眾化教育等等，較少深刻討論「課改」問題，但事實上，課程設計的好壞才是真正關乎孩子學習力增長的關鍵。上海的改革即從課程下手。

鄒一斌先生說上海參加PISA的目的有三個：一是從國際標準檢視上海學生的學業品質和學習能力，二是改進教育政策，促進教育公平及深化課程，三是借鑑各國 先進的評價理念和技術，改善基礎教育的評價體系。教育的核心問題從來不在孩子學習以外的事物上，如何招生實際上亦跟孩子學習力無關，鄒先生的一句話深深震 撼著我：「辦好家門口的學校，教好每一個學生，讓家長再也不用把孩子送到明星學校。」確實是如此的。

我們從2009年上海參加PISA的優異成績裡看到上海課改成果，在閱讀、數學、科學三領域中，上海皆是第1名的高水準表現，而台灣排名分別是第23、第 5、第13。在國際評量表中，高於5級的學生被認為是「明日潛在世界級知識份子」達此標準的上海學生有17%，遠高於其他國家；而閱讀素養量表中，低於2 級的學生被認為沒有掌握適應未來社會所需之基本能力，這部分上海僅有4.1%，顯示上海絕大多數的學生在未來都能有基本的閱讀能力。那麼上海到底是如何做 到的？

教育轉型
鄒一斌先生認為，必須從學生全面發展、重新定義學校內涵，以及教育人本價值角度去理性思考和勇敢實踐，才能扭轉以往的教育窘境。今日上海基礎教育的均衡發 展，得力於學校專業地運用教育資源，讓學生親身體會到學習是快樂美好的，如此學生才能樂於學習。學校要做的，是為學生尋找適合的教育，而不是為教育尋找適 合的學生！

鄒一斌先生指出，教育改革的核心是課程改革，課程改革的核心是課堂教學改革，而課堂教學改革的核心是老師專業發展。因此師資培育是教改極重要的一環，他分 享了上海培育教師的經驗，從提高教師的學歷、建立有架構的師資培育系統，到教師長期的職涯進修等三方面來提升教學的品質。

上海的一期課改從1988年到1997年，二期課改從1998年至今。他們改變了課程設計，翻開他們的課表，除了基礎的學科之外，還有許多拓展型課程，如 各式的專題和活動，同步發展學生的基礎學力、發展性學力、創造性學力。由「學術取向」轉變成「學習取向」以孩子的發展為本，關注他們學習的歷程，非只是計 較著孩子進了哪所學校。

佐藤學先生和鄒一斌先生的著墨點有所不同，前者從學習氣氛著手；後者從課程改革進行，但都不約而同的提到兩大教改方向：一是從「教」轉向「學」，強調學生 必需擁有自學的能力；二是高品質學習遠比長時間學習更重要，這正是給盛行補習教育的台灣一記當頭棒喝。此次演講給台灣教育界相當寶貴的意見，教改之路有如 在隧道般晦暗不清，但我們相信只要勇敢邁步，出口的陽光終究會出現。

對話的想像== 勞思光

 對話的想像== 勞思光

***** 亂我心者

昨天我是受贈書之有緣人:

《葉阿月教授佛學論文集》(有書籍版和CD版)台北市: 財團法人台北淨法界善友文教基金會 ，成本價:1600元，2012

賴老闆顯邦是葉教授的學生，跟他學梵文，也是該基金會董事，據他說葉老師幫他弄帳面10萬，讓他每年可用捐一位獎學金的方式當董事之資格。

勞思光《中國哲學史  三上‧三下》台北：三民，1981

蕭公權《中國政治思想史  上‧下》台北：華岡，1964/1977六版，1980買的，有”孔誕2531年”等題記，我跟賴兄說，此種紀年方式，只在梁任公年青時的文章看過。

晚上為Abe退伍喝一杯. 我不喜歡身有一技之長的碩士 一定要去當編輯 賺的只是當修理工的三分之一

跟Abe 談父子之間的剝削和感情

辜先生和我談起永安兄的新作大都會等等

我告訴這位快翻譯完惡之華的朋友 我讀法英對照本的一些看法

 前一陣子取得賴先生的勞思光《中國哲學史 》一冊 還來不及看  僅以舊文紀念勞先生

對話的想像

借用俄人米哈伊爾．巴赫金(Mikhail Bakhtin)的書名，作為本篇的題目，以紀念某些短暫的談話引起的一些沈思。

國立歷史博物館在黃光男先生的領導下，氣象一新，不只讓博物館開始與學生「對話」(原來，許多對面的建中學生從未踏入該館一步，黃先生就開放它，免費讓學生入館看看)，他更邀請些一流的學者，舉辦三天的學術討論會：「台灣光復後中華文化發展之回顧與省思」。我認為從知識的角度而言，西學已成現代人的「體」與「用」了。我對黃仁宇先生、林毓生先生的敬業、認真精神很欣賞。不過由於機緣關係，有機會教勞思光先生一些他對教育的看法，藉本文與讀者們共享。

勞先生檢討過去五十年的中國哲學，認為中國忽視了馬克斯主義最精彩的一面，即強調人道主義的哲學思維，而只利用馬克思主義在政治革命鬥爭下的想法，導致這些年來只有威權主義，強調統治集團的利益、訴諸民族主義.....他的這些提醒，可以幫助我們了解外國人對於中共人權思想上的困惑及失望：如果真正服膺馬克斯主義，對弱勢(囚犯等)及異議份子，理應善待之，不料結果卻是虐待及壓迫。

勞先生說：在這種氣氛下，世界上中國人的學術活力卻並未真正的衰退。會中有人認為這是台灣發展本土特色、自立自強的良機。不過，勞先生固然對中共的官僚體系之結構，以及實質思想空洞化、無根，特權橫行等深表悲觀；而另一方面，對於台灣是否有本事造就一流的思想學人才，持保留態度。我當然不會放過機會就教他。下述的交談很簡短，文責該由我負。

勞先生認為教育的主要奾的，是希望下一代比上一代更好。師道固然包含「傳道、授業、解惑」，不過他認為「解惑」最主要。換句話說，老師要找出學生的特性，指引學生適合自己的路，發揮其才能。這種指引的過程，可以說是「解惑」。可惜台灣目前學術界有一弊病，許多人喜歡「自立門派」，學生進入師門後，大概就罩在一言堂下(這句話是作者本人加的)。
勞先生的談話，就介紹到這兒。會中除了嚴肅的討論外，也有些插曲較有趣，甚至引人深思。例如某官員把一句流行話改為「要教才會贏！」另外，會中有人「小作」廣告，推廣《儒報》，我個人也讀儒家書，可是對於新儒家體系「氣味不相投」；新儒學對我只是「生命情調的抉擇」(劉述先書名)。不過，我看了陳立夫先生的題祝：「儒家即教育家也，故凡合乎教育之文章，均為儒報所歡迎也。」深表同情、了解。

同一天，看了《明報月刊》(12月號)上有人痛陳香港教育體系大弊，說教室中只有老師的自言自語或單向傳授，完全沒有「對話」。文中指出，儒的「仁」，其實重點在「對話」，所以不只是「仁者人也」，更是「二人對話」。可是我認為這種「仁際關係」用西方「對話」是失當的，因為孔門的對話方式與內容，基本與西洋的傳統不同。

請特別注意，近來「對話」己泛用得太「貶值」，勞先生在《中國文化路向問題的新檢討》中，比較西方思辯(對話)與中國「教」的觀念，指出自覺地思考「辯」的共同規則，是西方文化的主軸，有別於我們的「教」，甚至「墨辯」(作者所加)，我們不宜太附會「仁際關係」。
如果我們引用雅斯貝爾斯的《什麼是教育》上的教育基本類型來說，目前中港台的的教育，仍停留在「到學校去就是學習固定的知識，學會一些現成的結論與答案。」也就是屬於「經院式教育」。不過，目前各種教育(含管理學)理想，仍然在《論語》上的「師徒式教育」或各種柏拉圖對話錄上的「蘇格拉底式教育」。換句話說，這是教育的真諦，值得我們進一步討論。
---84.12.29.---1995.12.29 《立報‧教育人行道》  鍾漢清

 近代哲學大師勞思光病逝 享壽90歲
哲學大師、中研院院士勞思光，昨天病逝於台北醫學大學附設醫院，享壽90歲，勞思光是近代重要的華人哲學家，他花了至少十年時間完成的中國哲學史，是兩岸三地最重要的哲學史，他精通術數，有學者說，他是最有資格撰寫中國術數史之人，但很可惜，他並未留下此一著作。

一向以英國紳士穿著，打著領結出現在公開場合的哲學大師勞思光，是中研院目前唯一一位哲學領域的院士，他的祖父是勞崇光是清朝兩廣總督，他的父親勞競九曾 加入同盟會，參與辛亥革命。勞思光北京大學哲學系畢業後，逃難來到台灣，後來旅居香港，他因不滿意胡適和馮友蘭兩人所寫的中國哲學史，花了十年的時間撰寫 了中國哲學史，與西方哲學史對話。

==資料畫面 中研院院士 勞思光==

勞思光所著的中國哲學史，如今是兩岸三地文史哲學系學生最重要的教科書，因為家學淵源及深厚的古文造詣，勞思光也精通術數，但很可惜未能留下著作。

==中研院歷史語言研究所長 黃進興==
做中國術數史
必須要有非常好的國學基礎
他是很少數會算大六壬
一種比較複雜系統的算命
我是覺得他是最有資格
做中國術數史的人
但是很可惜他沒有完成

1989年黃進興到香港演講，得知勞思光有意來台教學，居中聯繫，勞思光回台後到清華大學任教，後來又到政大、最後落腳華梵大學，年輕學生說，勞教授就像是一部活歷史，具大師風範但又平易近人。

==華梵大學哲學碩士 陳思穎==
聽老師上課就好像
在看一本百科全書一樣

勞思光一生都投注在哲學研究及哲學教育，是華人哲學家的 代表。

==華梵大學校長 朱建民==
他是一個非常專注於
單一興趣的一個純思想家
可以說是一以貫之

勞思光一生崇尚自由民主，在解嚴後回來台灣，從不考慮踏足中國，他對於時代轉變憂心忡忡，認為目前面臨的是一個危機時代，但也是轉機的時刻，雖然他已離世，但留下的思想將永存。
記者陳姝君張梓嘉台北報導。

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ABOUT HIGHER ED
COMMUNITY COLLEGES RETHINK PLACEMENT TESTS
College-placement tests can make or break a student's career. Yet there is little evidence to suggest the tests do what they're designed to do. Now, some community colleges are switching to high school grades or revamping assessments, while others are working with high schools to figure out students' college readiness early so they have time to catch up if necessary. The article is in Education Week.
STUDENT LOAN BORROWERS $26,500 IN DEBT ON AVERAGE
The average student-loan debt of borrowers in the college class of 2011 rose to about $26,500, a 5 percent increase from about $25,350 the previous year, according to a report by the Institute for College Access and Success’s Project on Student Debt. The article is in The New York Times.
PRESSED TO BRIDGE SKILLS GAP, COLLEGES AND CORPORATIONS TRY TO GET ALONG
Business officials complain that too many college students aren’t learning what they need to get jobs. Academics retort that their job is to provide knowledge, not vocational training—and that what future workers really need isn’t job-specific preparation, but the ability to think critically that comes from a well-rounded education.  “There’s been something of a rupture,” said Brian Rosenberg, president of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn. “On the higher-education side, we have sometimes not thought enough about how best to prepare our students for the jobs that will be available when they graduate. And employers haven’t always communicated clearly enough to universities what skills employees need.” It’s not for lack of prodding. The article is from the Hechinger Report.
UNCONVENTIONAL TUITION VOTE
Students rarely get the opportunity to vote on whether they want a tuition hike. But that is exactly how California politicos are framing a vote on Proposition 30, a measure pushed by Gov. Jerry Brown that would temporarily raise income taxes on high-income individuals and increase the state sales tax to fund various state services. The proposition is the marquee contest on California’s ballot this November. It will likely affect not just higher education funding, but also state support for K-12 education and public safety. Advocates of the measure have already raised more than $50 million in support of the cause, and opponents have raised roughly $30 million. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.
HOW MUCH IS YOUR COLLEGE DEGREE WORTH?
Psychology tells us that human beings tend to overestimate themselves. We think we're smarter, more popular, and better at our jobs than any objective measure would suggest. So with that in mind, direct your attention to these neat charts tracking college majors and average lifetime earnings from the Census Bureau. They just might tell you something about your future (even if you secretly believe you're way above average).  The article is in the Atlantic.


ABOUT HIGHER ED
POLL FINDS HIGHER EDUCATION IN CRISIS
The American public and senior administrators at U.S. colleges and universities overwhelmingly agree that higher education is in crisis, according to a new poll, but they fundamentally disagree over how to fix it and even what the main purpose of higher education is. According to a survey sponsored by TIME Magazine and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, 89% of U.S. adults and 96% of senior administrators at colleges and universities said that higher education is in crisis and nearly four in 10 in both groups considered the crisis to be “severe.”
HIGHER ED ON THE BALLOT
Higher education is hardly dominating the political airwaves this election season, but a number of ballot initiatives across the country could significantly impact colleges and universities.
Dan Hurley, director of State Relations and Policy Analysis for the American Association of State Colleges and Universities sees the ballot measures as falling into four buckets: revenue impacts, college access, capital improvements, and autonomy. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.
ABOUT K-12
FLORIDA OFFICIALS DEFEND ETHNIC AND RACIAL LEARNING GOALS
MIAMI — When the Florida Board of Education voted this month to set different goals for student achievement in reading and math by race and ethnicity, among other guidelines, the move was widely criticized as discriminatory and harmful to blacks and Hispanics.  But the state, which has been required to categorize achievement by racial, ethnic and other groups to the federal government for more than 10 years, intends to stand by its new strategic plan. Education officials say the targets, set for 2018, have been largely misunderstood. The article is in The New York Times.
TEST SCORES JUMP AFTER LOW-INCOME KIDS GET SMART PHONES
Although smartphones are verboten in many schools, when used properly they may become powerful learning tools. When Qualcomm’s Wireless Reach Initiative, an effort aimed at bringing internet access to families that can not afford it, put smartphones into the hands of low-income students, the students’ standardized test scores improved — sometimes by as much as 30%. Peggy Johnson, Qualcomm’s president of global market development, believes that the improvement comes because students using smartphones have easier access to information at any time of day or night. They are also able to keep in contact with their classmates and even their teachers, which helps them stay on top of everything that goes on in school. The article is in EducationNews.org.

posted Oct 18, 2012 08:19 am

Carnegie Approach to Educational R&D Featured [In the News]

IES TO SEED NEW METHOD FOR STUDYING SCHOOLS
It can be tough to translate evidence into action in education research. A principal or superintendent might sift through academic journals or vendors' pamphlets for an effective reading program, but even a seal of approval from the federal What Works Clearinghouse is no guarantee that what helped students in one district will be successful with another. To better inform that knowledge base, the Institute of Education Sciences is crafting a new research program, called "continuous improvement research in education," to go beyond "what works" and add more context to education findings. "Knowing what works plays a very important role in school improvement, but alone it's not enough," said John Q. Easton, the director of the IES, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education. "There are questions about building the capacity to implement what works, building the capacity to measure, check, and adapt to changes." Carnegie’s approach to educational research and development is featured in this Education Week article.

News Roundup

Daily News Roundup, October 17, 2012

Some of the News Fit to Print


ABOUT K-12
IN DEBATE, OBAMA, ROMNEY LINK EDUCATION TO THE ECONOMY
During their second duel of this campaign, President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney on Tuesday night framed the issue of education as an economic one. The first question at the town-hall style debate at Hofstra University, in Hempstead N.Y., came from a college student who asked what the candidates were going to do to make sure a good-paying job awaited him upon graduation. The post is from Education Week’s Politics K-12 blog.
FLORIDA’S RACE-BASED ACADEMIC GOALS BRING CONTROVERSY
In a vote last week, the Florida Board of Education approved a new set of student achievement goals that differ based on students’ race and other characteristics, CBS Tampa reports. The plan, which sets achievement targets to be met by 2018 based on each students’ race or ethnic background, has already encountered opposition from educators and activists across the state. The article is at EducationNews.org.
ABOUT HIGHER ED
MAJORING IN OUTCOMES
Prospective students who are considering colleges in Virginia can now use a Web tool to see how much money newly minted graduates of individual academic programs earn, with data that is broken out by college and major. For example, a bachelor's degree-holder from George Mason University who majored in computer engineering can expect to earn $59,000 in his or her first year after graduation, according to the College Measures website, which is 56 percent more than the state average in that discipline. On the other side of the earnings scale, the average George Mason graduate who studied biology earns $32,000, still 15 percent more than peers from other Virginia colleges. The web tool and an accompanying report were released this week as part of a joint venture between the state’s higher-education coordinating body and College Measures, a nonprofit group that the American Institutes for Research (AIR) supports. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.
GRADES OUT, BADGES IN
Grades are broken. Students grub for them, pick classes where good ones come easily, and otherwise hustle to win the highest scores for the least learning. As a result, college grades are inflated to the point of meaninglessness—especially to employers who want to know which diploma-holder is best qualified for their jobs. That's a viewpoint driving experiments in education badges. The article is in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
UT SYSTEM TOUTS PLANS FOR FREE ONLINE COURSES
University of Texas System regents approved a $10 million investment in massive open online courses, or MOOCs, becoming the first public university system to join edX, the partnership started by Harvard and MIT. The goal is for institutions to launch four courses through edX by the fall of 2013. The courses will be free. Learners will not earn college credit, though the system eventually intends to offer course credit. The article is in the Houston Chronicle.

Some of the News Fit to Print

Some of the News Fit to Print

應教育部與英國文化協會邀請，倫敦大學學院副校長邁克·沃頓（Michael Worton）昨在台舉辦演講。沃頓也說，過去的年代裡，擁有了知識就是絕對的力量；但全球化世界中流動著海量資訊，每個問題都沒有標準答案。學生要有批判眼前事實的能力，並用創新的方式走一條別人未走過的路。目前就讀建中的高二學生張高登說，在學校裡老師教什麼學生就聽什麼，沃頓提倡的批判思考是他以前都沒想過的事。原來「讓自己變的更有個性，是認識自己、也是世界公民教育的一部分」。

 沃頓說，全球化世界流動著海量資訊，每個問題都沒有標準答案；未來的學生要立志成為世界公民，除要具備批判（critical）、創新(creative ）雙Ｃ思考能力，還要有開放、好奇、創新及彈性的個人特質。沃頓指出，大學教育不止是培育學生與職場接軌，還要讓每位學生找到最適合自己、最獨特的樣貌。

ABOUT K-12
SEEKING AID, SCHOOL DISTRICTS CHANGE TEACHER EVALUATIONS
Fueled in part by efforts to qualify for the Obama administration’s Race to the Top federal grant program or waivers from the toughest conditions of No Child Left Behind, the Bush-era education law, 36 states and the District of Columbia have introduced new teacher evaluation policies in the past three years, according to the National Center on Teacher Quality, a nonprofit research and advocacy group. An increasing number of states are directing districts to use these evaluations in decisions about how teachers are granted tenure, promoted or fired. Proponents say that current performance reviews are superficial and label virtually all teachers “satisfactory.” “When everyone is treated the same, I can’t think of a more demeaning way of treating people,” Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, said in a telephone interview. “Far, far too few teachers receive honest feedback on what they’re doing.” The article is in The New York Times.
SCHOOL REFORM, BUT FROM WHOSE PERSPECTIVE?
Executive Director of the Learning First Alliance Cheryl Scott Williams writes in Education Week: Those of us who have spent our careers in public education have always welcomed interest and enthusiasm from those outside the profession when that involvement focuses on unique perspectives and skill sets they can bring to the learning environment, including financial support, assistance with new technologies, participation in career days, and internship opportunities for students. We also welcome open discussion and the sharing of experience that can contribute to new ways of thinking about the challenges we face in our daily work with students. But the tone, language, and proposals for change currently articulated by the most prominent "reformers" at the national level reveal both a lack of knowledge and experience of the daily realities of even the most successful public schools and a total lack of respect for the professionals now working in public education.
GROUP REVIEWING TEACHER ED APPEALS TO STUDENTS
As its contested project to examine the practices of all 1,400 schools of education continues, the National Council on Teacher Quality is appealing to a new party with a stake in the outcomes: university students. The group today unveiled a new ad campaign that will offer stipends to college students who agree to provide the materials the council is examining for its review, including course syllabi and student-teaching manuals. The post is from Education Week’s Teacher Beat blog.
ABOUT HIGHER ED
WHY COLLEGE MIGHT BE FREE WITHIN TEN YEARS
As few as 10 years from now, quality higher education will be largely free—unless, of course, nothing much has changed. It all depends on whom you believe. But one thing is clear: The debate about financing education grows louder by the day. The article is in Time Magazine.
GETTING SMARTER ON SKILLS TESTING
The big enchilada of potential disruptions to higher education is if employers go outside of the academy to size up job seekers. While that prospect remains fanciful, for now, new approaches to skills assessment show what the future could look like. Take Smarterer, a Boston-based start-up that offers 800 free online tests for people to prove their chops in areas ranging from C++ programming to speaking English for business or understanding Gothic architecture. And not all the assessments are about getting a job -- there are quizzes on punk rock history and how to use Twitter. Smarterer's tests are crowdsourced, Wikipedia-style, and users can get a meaningful score by answering fewer than 20 questions, company officials said. That means they can tout a skill on their Smarterer profile after spending as little as one minute taking a test. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.
 

ABOUT K-12
NO MATTER WHO WINS, CONGRESS FACES ROCKY PATH ON ED ISSUES
No matter who wins the congressional and presidential elections next month, lawmakers will return to Washington in November to sort out a tangle of tricky budgetary issues—and will face a legislative logjam that includes almost every major law that touches on education. The article is in Education Week.
STATES PUNCH RESET BUTTON ON WAIVERS
Given the flexibility to revise their academic goals under the No Child Left Behind Act, a vast majority of the states that received federal waivers are setting different expectations for different subgroups of students, an Education Week analysis shows. That marks a dramatic shift in policy and philosophy from the original law.The waivers issued by the U.S. Department of Education let states abandon the goal of 100 percent proficiency in reading and mathematics for all students and instead hold schools accountable for passing rates that vary by subgroup—as long as those schools make significant gains in closing gaps in achievement.
ABOUT HIGHER ED
COLLEGE REINVENTED
The Chronicle of Higher Education imagines new ways to solve some of academe’s persistent conundrums: how to staff the faculty and improve teaching, how to produce research that will connect with the public, how to bring in more money, and how to help students and families pay for it all — to name a few of the challenges.
HIGHER EDUCATION IS WORKING
Laura Anglin, president of the Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities, writes in the Huffington Post: Beyond the economic benefits, higher education prepares students to be responsible citizens and to engage with the world around them. On the whole, college graduates volunteer more, vote more often, and participate more in their communities. Getting to the win-win that comes from increasing the number of college-educated individuals in the United States will take a renewed commitment to an historical partnership. Thanks to a unique combination of federal, state, philanthropic and college-based student aid programs, millions of students have become the first in their families to complete college, just like my father. These investments have benefited all Americans with the creation of new technologies, products and industries; greater civic engagement; and less reliance on the commonweal.
BLACKBOARD’S NEW BAG
Blackboard has become the latest company to get into the business of helping colleges and universities build online programs. The company, which built its education technology empire on selling software and implementation support, has upped investment in its “online program management services” in an effort to compete with a growing number of entities that are taking aim at the many colleges that are scrambling to reassert, or reinvent, their brands on the increasingly crowded frontier of online higher education. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.
 
ABOUT K-12
MY VIEW: SCHOOL DISTRICTS NEED TO STOP LOSING ‘IRREPLACEABLE’ TEACHERS
Educator and Teach Plus Teaching Policy Fellow Robert Jeffers writes in CNN’s Schools of Thought blog: It takes a lot to make a successful teacher: Hard work, a generous support network and faith from colleagues and administrators all play a role. I’ve been lucky to have those things, and have seen some professional success — success that’s evident in my student growth data, their college acceptances and the outstanding hands-on projects they’ve completed. My students have published a book of original food writing and artwork, completed award-winning films, established an on-campus recycling program recognized as one of the best in Los Angeles County and planted more than 60 trees around our inner-city campus. I’m proud of what we’ve done together. But I would never call myself “irreplaceable.” That’s a word that has been tossed around a lot since TNTP, a teacher quality nonprofit, used it to describe top teachers in a new report, “The Irreplaceables: Understanding the Real Retention Crisis in America’s Urban Schools.” As my former student pointed out, and as TNTP’s report suggests, motivated and highly effective teachers are not easily replaced. In fact, according to TNTP’s research, when top-performing teachers leave their schools, as few as one in 11 possible replacements will be of similar quality.
WHY THE ‘MARKET THEORY’ OF EDUCATION REFORM DOESN’T WORK
Mark Tucker, president of the non-profit National Center on Education and the Economy, writes this commentary in The Washington Post’s The Answer Sheet blog: Years ago, Milton Friedman and others opined that the best possible education reform would be one based on good old market theory. Public education, the analysis went, was a government monopoly, and, teachers and school administrators, freed from the discipline of the market, as in all government monopolies, had no incentive to control costs or deliver high quality. That left them free to feather their own nest. Obviously, the solution was to subject public education to the rigors of the market. Put the money the public collected for the schools into the hands of the parents. Let them choose the best schools for their children. Given a genuine choice among schools, parents would have a strong incentive to choose the ones that were able to produce the highest achievement at the lowest possible cost, driving achievement up and costs down. The theory is neat as pin and as American as apple pie.  But what if it is not true? What if it does not predict what actually happens when it is put into practice?
IT'S NOT JUST WRITING: MATH NEEDS A REVOLUTION, TOO
Barry Garelick writes this commentary in The Atlantic: The world of reform math is where understanding takes precedence over procedure and process trumps content. In this world, memorization is looked down upon as "rote learning" and thus addition and subtraction facts are not drilled in the classroom--it's something for students to learn at home. Inefficient methods for adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing are taught in the belief that such methods expose the conceptual underpinning of what is happening during these operations. The standard (and efficient) methods for these operations are delayed sometimes until 4th and 5th grades, when students are deemed ready to learn procedural fluency. The idea is to teach students to "think like mathematicians." They are called upon to think critically before acquiring the analytic tools with which to do so. More precisely, they are given analytic tools for "understanding" problems and are then forced to learn the actual procedural skills necessary to solve them on a "just in time" basis. Such a process may eliminate what the education establishment views as tedious "drill and kill" exercises, but it results in poor learning and lack of mastery.
     
ABOUT HIGHER ED
MOOCS AND THE REST OF 'ONLINE'
The men and women who attend the Sloan Consortium's annual meeting have been toiling in the fields of online learning for many years, so they could be forgiven for having a wee bit of skepticism (if not resentment) about "MOOC mania," the hubbub of hyper-attention that has been paid in recent months to the massive open online courses developed by Harvard, MIT, Stanford and other elite universities. "MOOCS will change the world and make the rest of higher education obsolete. Hyper-prestigious universities are driving all the change. Umm, I don't think so, folks," Jack Wilson, president emeritus of the University of Massachusetts system and Distinguished Professor of Higher Education, Emerging Technologies, and Innovation at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, said during the conference's opening plenary Wednesday afternoon. "They're certainly not the first movers; they're not even the fast followers," he added, to applause from some in the audience. "It's great to have them on board. But that is not who has led online learning, or who is going to lead online learning." The article is in Inside Higher Ed.



ABOUT K-12
PUBLIC SCHOOLS: GLASS HALF EMPTY OR HALF FULL?
Malbert Smith III, president of MetaMetrics, an education research firm; Jason Turner, director of professional development at MetaMetrics; and Steve Lattanzio, a research engineer at the company, write in Education Week: This year, Gallup's Confidence in Institutions survey revealed a disheartening lack of faith in U.S. public schools. The percentage of participants indicating "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in public K-12 education fell to an all-time low of around 29 percent—a drop of 29 percentage points from 1973, when Gallup first began including public schools in its survey and public confidence in schools measured 58 percent. Unfortunately, faith in the public schools has been steadily eroding since 1973. But are things really this dismal?
ARE NEW ONLINE STANDARDIZED TESTS REVOLUTIONARY?
New high-tech tests for the Common Core standards are being developed, but will these exams really revolutionize how we measure whether children are learning? The two coalitions that are designing the new tests, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC), have posted examples of what's coming on their websites.  The article is in the Hechinger Report.
ABOUT HIGHER ED
THE CANARY IN THE COALMINE?
Community college enrollments dropped in the fall 2011 for the first time since 2007. It’s a decline worth noting since American community colleges are the most important educational safety net for low-income and first-generation college students preparing for or retooling themselves for the knowledge economy. And yet, the media and policymakers paid little attention to the data, released late last year by the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) and the National Clearinghouse). (Figures for this year are not yet public.) The decline is surprising since community college enrollments typically run countercyclical to the economy. Also, the data show that the decline is among full-time students with an increase in enrollment of part-time students. It is hard to imagine that increased employment opportunities are the cause of this decline.  Furthermore, job projections call for increased certificate and degree learning, not less. The post, by Joni Finney, is in The Quick and the Ed.
DISAPPEARING LIBERAL ARTS COLLEGES
A new article in Liberal Education looks at what happened in the 20 years after David W. Breneman asked in a much discussed article "Are We Losing Our Liberal Arts Colleges?"  For the current article, three authors checked up on the 212 institutions and found that today, only 130 of them meet the criteria Breneman used for liberal arts colleges -- a decline of 39 percent. The piece is in Inside Higher Ed.
TRANSFER AND THE COMMUNITY COLLEGE MISSION
College completion gets plenty of attention these days. But the challenges many students face in transferring from community colleges to four-year institutions is less visible, according to a new report from the American Association of Community Colleges. In addition to examining those challenges, the report looks at the role of transfer as a pathway to the bachelor's degree and the mobility of credits between institutions. For example, students are almost twice as likely to earn a bachelor's degree when all of their community college transfer credits are accepted by four-year institutions, according to the report, which was written by Christopher M. Mullin, the association's program director for policy analysis. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.



ABOUT K-12
THE EXHAUSTION OF THE AMERICAN TEACHER
With the 2012-2013 American school year in full swing, it’s worthwhile to note that the people doing the actual educating are down in the dumps. Many feel more beaten down this year than last. Some are walking into their classrooms unsure if this is still the job for them. Their hearts ache with a quiet anguish that’s peculiarly theirs. They’ve accumulated invisible scars from years of trying to educate the increasingly hobbled American child effectively enough that his international test scores will rival those of children flourishing in wealthy, socially-advanced Scandinavian nations and even wealthier Asian city-states where tiger moms value education like American parents value fast food and reality TV. The post is from the The Educator’s Room online magazine.
FIVE THINGS TEACHERS WANT PARENTS TO KNOW
(CNN) - During the average school day, teachers are with children as many waking hours as parents are. But many educators believe there's a short in the communication lines between themselves and parents. When asked what they'd want parents to know about education, many common concerns were voiced from the classroom.
14 N.J. SCHOOL DISTRICTS BAND TOGETHER TO SAVE MONEY ON STATE-MANDATED TRAINING
State-mandated, standardized teacher evaluations start next year in New Jersey. In one county, 14 districts formed a consortium that may have saved the group hundreds of thousands of dollars in start-up costs alone. Districts can choose from one of five research-based evaluation models or develop their own that can be validated through research and data. The article is in the Hunterdon Democrat.
ABOUT HIGHER ED
HIGHER ED SHRINKS
It's official: Higher education is shrinking, for the first time in at least 15 years. Total enrollment at American colleges and universities eligible for federal financial aid fell slightly in the fall of 2011 from the year before, according to preliminary data released Tuesday by the U.S. Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT FISHER V. TEXAS
The U.S. Supreme Court is hearing arguments this week in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, a case that centers on the questions of whether and how race may be used in college-admissions decisions. Wondering what this case means for colleges and state policy? The Chronicle of Higher Education has pulled together the basics and history of the case.