Education links
Woman denied tenure in Biology Department at Alabama shoots and kills three professors and wounds three other faculty members. 24 years previously, she had shot and killed her brother, but had not been charged.
A school system in Virginia has withdrawn the full version of Ann Frank’s Diary because of one complaint about sexual content. A school district in California removes dictionary after a parent complained about it containing a definition of ‘oral sex’.
A case of over-reaction in a Queens school: student arrested and handcuffed for doodling.
US Education Secretary claims that Katrina was good for New Orleans schools (the local school district superintendent agrees).
Paper on the effect of schooling on health (pdf):
we find little evidence that this additional education improved health outcomes or changed health behaviors. We argue that it is hard to attribute these findings to the content of the additional education or the wider circumstances that the affected cohorts faced (e.g., universal health insurance).
About a study on reasons for falling college graduation rates in the US.
About the issues of homeschooling and national curricula in Oz.
A US academic on why humanities academics tend to be (US) liberal:
I don't mean to suggest that issues of conscience beyond the confines of crass self-interest don't play an important role for many in the liberal arts, but their basic economic condition virtually assures that those in the liberal arts will be natural-born liberals. … In Germany, where I did a good deal of my graduate work and have been a visiting professor on numerous occasions, compensation is determined by civil-service rank rather than academic field. … But my own experience indicates that German professors and instructors are paid roughly equivalently across disciplines and in comparison with other nonacademic professionals, so they tend, for the most part, to be moderate or even conservative. Although here in the United States we hear about radical European professors-Derrida and Habermas come to mind-they are notable precisely because they are so exceptional. …
It is because we liberal-arts professors have a personal stake in our relative economic status; we have carefully studied the actual dynamics of history and culture; and we have trained ourselves to think in complex, nuanced, and productive ways about the human condition that so many of us are liberals. Most of us agree with President Obama that there is a "right side of history," and we feel morally bound to be on it. Although we'd like to see some parity in compensation with our colleagues, we chose our fields with full awareness of the tradeoff. Part of our compensation lies in knowing that our studies can complement our standing on the "right side," rather than having our basic commitments dictated to us by the limitations of other, narrower professions.
Spot the contradiction? They would also be the same liberal academics that, for instance, tend to give various Leninist regimes rather more than mere benefit of the doubt. Not to mention the whole orientalism debacle. A response:
In short, if you haven’t reached a similarly leftwing conclusion, you haven’t achieved sufficient complexity and nuance in your thinking, you peasant. Luckily, we can count on Professor Surber and his peers to guide us to the light, such is their benign magnificence. They may be cruelly underpaid and underappreciated, but by God they’re better than us and they will save us from ourselves.
About what makes a great teacher:
… embodies the most stunning finding to come out of education research in the past decade: more than any other variable in education-more than schools or curriculum-teachers matter. …
Right away, certain patterns emerged. First, great teachers tended to set big goals for their students. They were also perpetually looking for ways to improve their effectiveness. ...
Superstar teachers had four other tendencies in common: they avidly recruited students and their families into the process; they maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning; they planned exhaustively and purposefully-for the next day or the year ahead-by working backward from the desired outcome; and they worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls.
… one way that great teachers ensure that kids are learning is to frequently check for understanding: Are the kids-all of the kids-following what you are saying? Asking “Does anyone have any questions?” does not work, and it’s a classic rookie mistake. Students are not always the best judges of their own learning. They might understand a line read aloud from a Shakespeare play, but have no idea what happened in the last act. …
The activities come in brisk sequence, following a routine the kids know by heart, so no time is lost in transition. In Teaching as Leadership, Farr describes seeing such choreography in other high-performance classrooms. “We see routines so strong that they run virtually without any involvement from the teacher. In fact, for many highly effective teachers, the measure of a well-executed routine is that it continues in the teacher’s absence.” …
But another trait seemed to matter even more. Teachers who scored high in “life satisfaction”-reporting that they were very content with their lives-were 43 percent more likely to perform well in the classroom than their less satisfied colleagues. These teachers “may be more adept at engaging their pupils, and their zest and enthusiasm may spread to their students,” the study suggested. …
Last summer, an internal Teach for America analysis found that an applicant’s college GPA alone is not as good a predictor as the GPA in the final two years of college. If an applicant starts out with mediocre grades and improves, in other words, that curve appears to be more revealing than getting straight A’s all along. …
But if school systems hired, trained, and rewarded teachers according to the principles Teach for America has identified, then teachers would not need to work so hard. They would be operating in a system designed in a radically different way-designed, that is, for success.
Governments spend billions on schooling and none of them bothered to do this research: it took a privately funded service-oriented NGO to care enough to bother.
A school system in Virginia has withdrawn the full version of Ann Frank’s Diary because of one complaint about sexual content. A school district in California removes dictionary after a parent complained about it containing a definition of ‘oral sex’.
A case of over-reaction in a Queens school: student arrested and handcuffed for doodling.
US Education Secretary claims that Katrina was good for New Orleans schools (the local school district superintendent agrees).
Paper on the effect of schooling on health (pdf):
we find little evidence that this additional education improved health outcomes or changed health behaviors. We argue that it is hard to attribute these findings to the content of the additional education or the wider circumstances that the affected cohorts faced (e.g., universal health insurance).
About a study on reasons for falling college graduation rates in the US.
About the issues of homeschooling and national curricula in Oz.
A US academic on why humanities academics tend to be (US) liberal:
I don't mean to suggest that issues of conscience beyond the confines of crass self-interest don't play an important role for many in the liberal arts, but their basic economic condition virtually assures that those in the liberal arts will be natural-born liberals. … In Germany, where I did a good deal of my graduate work and have been a visiting professor on numerous occasions, compensation is determined by civil-service rank rather than academic field. … But my own experience indicates that German professors and instructors are paid roughly equivalently across disciplines and in comparison with other nonacademic professionals, so they tend, for the most part, to be moderate or even conservative. Although here in the United States we hear about radical European professors-Derrida and Habermas come to mind-they are notable precisely because they are so exceptional. …
It is because we liberal-arts professors have a personal stake in our relative economic status; we have carefully studied the actual dynamics of history and culture; and we have trained ourselves to think in complex, nuanced, and productive ways about the human condition that so many of us are liberals. Most of us agree with President Obama that there is a "right side of history," and we feel morally bound to be on it. Although we'd like to see some parity in compensation with our colleagues, we chose our fields with full awareness of the tradeoff. Part of our compensation lies in knowing that our studies can complement our standing on the "right side," rather than having our basic commitments dictated to us by the limitations of other, narrower professions.
Spot the contradiction? They would also be the same liberal academics that, for instance, tend to give various Leninist regimes rather more than mere benefit of the doubt. Not to mention the whole orientalism debacle. A response:
In short, if you haven’t reached a similarly leftwing conclusion, you haven’t achieved sufficient complexity and nuance in your thinking, you peasant. Luckily, we can count on Professor Surber and his peers to guide us to the light, such is their benign magnificence. They may be cruelly underpaid and underappreciated, but by God they’re better than us and they will save us from ourselves.
About what makes a great teacher:
… embodies the most stunning finding to come out of education research in the past decade: more than any other variable in education-more than schools or curriculum-teachers matter. …
Right away, certain patterns emerged. First, great teachers tended to set big goals for their students. They were also perpetually looking for ways to improve their effectiveness. ...
Superstar teachers had four other tendencies in common: they avidly recruited students and their families into the process; they maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning; they planned exhaustively and purposefully-for the next day or the year ahead-by working backward from the desired outcome; and they worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls.
… one way that great teachers ensure that kids are learning is to frequently check for understanding: Are the kids-all of the kids-following what you are saying? Asking “Does anyone have any questions?” does not work, and it’s a classic rookie mistake. Students are not always the best judges of their own learning. They might understand a line read aloud from a Shakespeare play, but have no idea what happened in the last act. …
The activities come in brisk sequence, following a routine the kids know by heart, so no time is lost in transition. In Teaching as Leadership, Farr describes seeing such choreography in other high-performance classrooms. “We see routines so strong that they run virtually without any involvement from the teacher. In fact, for many highly effective teachers, the measure of a well-executed routine is that it continues in the teacher’s absence.” …
But another trait seemed to matter even more. Teachers who scored high in “life satisfaction”-reporting that they were very content with their lives-were 43 percent more likely to perform well in the classroom than their less satisfied colleagues. These teachers “may be more adept at engaging their pupils, and their zest and enthusiasm may spread to their students,” the study suggested. …
Last summer, an internal Teach for America analysis found that an applicant’s college GPA alone is not as good a predictor as the GPA in the final two years of college. If an applicant starts out with mediocre grades and improves, in other words, that curve appears to be more revealing than getting straight A’s all along. …
But if school systems hired, trained, and rewarded teachers according to the principles Teach for America has identified, then teachers would not need to work so hard. They would be operating in a system designed in a radically different way-designed, that is, for success.
Governments spend billions on schooling and none of them bothered to do this research: it took a privately funded service-oriented NGO to care enough to bother.