Mostly Education News Round Up

Some of these are only tangentially about education ... but, you get the drift.

Here is one that horrified me ... and I will admit the first thing I wanted to do was wag my finger in front of all those people who keep trying to tell me that fb [and by extension all those other social networking sites] are not all bad. They are even kind of useful, they tell me.   In the middle of this piece, I literally wanted to scream, "what's redeeming about this?!"  If you can forgive the young woman the flat affect, you may find this as interesting as I did.  Of course, it is not fb's fault that people do this ridiculousness, but likes guns, when there is an easy way to shame someone, who doesn't indulge in it??

I appreciated this piece on how some college campuses are dealing with students who are diagnosed (and those who are not) with mental illness.  It is not enough ... and as I contemplate how to best use the last four sessions at my campus's counseling center, I marvel at those who need this kind of help to get by with the rationing that we must inevitably put in place.

I am including this not because it is a great piece, just that it is timely -- and it's important to know that folks are working on this.  When I worked at UC, I went to a voluntary "Active shooter training" -- thankfully, it was not a simulation.  It was informative in the extreme, but also very overwhelming emotionally.  In order to punctuate their main points, the officers played portions of the 911 calls from Columbine.  It was painful, but they illustrated the need to rethink our assumptions about what to do in these scenarios.  I am guessing that it should be mandatory -- on some level -- but that in its own way is horrifying.  It is a better mandatory, in my opinion, than the every teacher should be armed.  This piece does make good sense about why willynilly placement of police officers or armed guards would not be helpful in and of itself.

Yes, I read the paper[s] this week, too, but the radio links are just so easy.

I wish that the reporter had spent a little time investigating the rationale behind the move to lengthen the school year ... and the school day. Perhaps it is just parents lobbying for more babysitting time ... and that deserves some more digging as well.  But no where in this piece is there a discussion of how schools are funded -- and the ties to the lengthening or shortening of school years. This could have been a really interesting story.  

Turns out that the little trick California tried to play with the Feds on NCLB didn't work on the first round or the second round.   This is the way they are going to "fix" it.  You be the judge.  This is the statement, attributed to Torlakson, that gives me the greatest pause: "As a teacher, what's most exciting is that these new tests will serve as models for the kind of high-quality teaching and learning we want in every classroom every day."  I am hopeful that the Common Core will bring back instruction based on learning not mastery of exams -- but the emphasis on the tests makes me skeptical.  If, indeed, as is suggested by another's comments quoted here the test results will be turned more quickly (now students are tested in May and then the results are returned the following fall -- the earliest I know them to have been reported is August ... long after those students have exited the class where the teacher taught the content), then tests could be helpful.  But as long as these tests have no tangible results for the students, I am not sure what the data of the tests offers to the public or the administration in terms of truly assessing the learning of the students (or the teaching of the teachers). 

If you need more information -- and want to hear their rationale for why they are fixing the testing system (read: they are not copping to what I wrote in the first sentence of this paragraph), here's another piece. If you just read the list of all the tests students in California could potentially be taking, you would think, wow, there are no days when students aren't taking standardized tests.  Though the issue of the number of tests out there is worthy of discussion, this piece could be clearer about how many students are taking the number of "alternative" tests -- and whether or not they also take the others. It is only really noted that certain students who are ELLs will take both kinds of content knowledge tests.  And, for instance, it doesn't say that the EAP is only an additional 10 questions to the tests those students are already taking.  All I am saying is that the article is somewhat misleading or at least not ultra informative.  And if you read the recommendations carefully, it is not clear that the number of tests will be eliminated ... they may just be changed.

At some point, I may just have to devote an entire post to assessment and what isn't working about how we do it, and why our current data won't help to assess teachers' work.