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Category Archives: School Reform
At Risk Students and School Reform: Will High Expectations Be Enough?
Summary: An impressive turnaround in enrollment, academic atmosphere, and graduation rate at Seattle’s Rainier Beach High School apparently stems from a decision a few years ago to establish an International Baccalaureate program at the school. While high expectations of student … Continue reading
Schools and Politics: The Feds, the Locals, and School Reform
Summary: As with institutional racism, as with health care, in educational quality the federal government often is the court of necessary remedy where local leadership fails to guarantee equal protection to the disenfranchised. In the recent Conservative Political Action Conference … Continue reading
School Reform: College Counseling is “Elementary”
Summary: College counseling for low income students plays to a largely absent audience if interventions have not been going on since elementary school. I looked across the room of fifty or sixty seniors with a pride that had little to … Continue reading
Posted in At Risk Students, School Reform, Schools and Culture
Tagged at risk students, College Board, College Bound Scholars, college counseling, dropouts, KIPP charter schools, low-income students, relationships in schools, school reform, student motivation, teaching self control, Walter Mischel
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School Reform and the Suspension Trap; Charters Learn the Lesson
Summary: High profile charters in New Orleans learn the lesson good public high schools have known for a while. Suspension often has to take a back seat to more nuanced and humanly intensive interventions in the lives of the kids … Continue reading
Posted in School Reform, Schools and Culture
Tagged at risk students, charter schools, discipline for behavior in high school, dropouts, I-1351 Washington State, Kent School District, KIPP charters schools, low-income students, New Orleans charter schools, public high school counselor, relationships in schools, school reform, student discipline, Suspension
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School Bureaucracy: Behind the Walkout at Garfield High
Summary: The common practice in school districts that adjusts student-teacher ratios a month into school retards the learning process, distracts teachers and counselors from more important work, and in the end simply harms students, some more than others. The practice … Continue reading
School Reform: Where Less May be More in the Refinement of Teaching
Summary: Teachers in countries that surpass the US in student test scores spend half or less the time in direct instruction than do American teachers. Regular collegial consultation and feedback, for novice and veteran alike, is part of how that … Continue reading
Posted in School Reform, Uncategorized
Tagged Building a Better Teacher, Deborah Ball, direct instruction, Elizabeth Green, jugyokenkyu, lesson study for teachers, Sara Mosle, school reform, student teacher ratio, student test scores, teacher collaboration, teacher morale, teacher professionalism, teacher training
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Progress In School Reform: What Is The Picture We See?
Summary: While by some measures the school reform movement has come up with little but goose eggs in the national aggregate, a more nuanced approach to school change makes clear that improvements do occur in substantial ways, in a cultural … Continue reading
Posted in School Reform, Schools and Culture, Schools and Politics
Tagged Catherine Rampell, dropout prevention, dropouts, educational progress, Head Start, mentor, nation's report card, National Assessment of Educational Progress NAEP, progress in schools, race and education, school reform
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School Reform: Why One Success Does Not Beget Another
Summary: Looks as though the difficulty of replicating the success of one school in another may come down to clever access or lack thereof to extra resources. The first school has been innovative in program, but often by leveraging additional … Continue reading
School Reform: The Dance of Competencies and Traditional Grading
Summary: Though the focus on narrow reading, writing, and mathematics competencies serves employers and highlights the need to improve skills, it may also reflect the mirage that traditional grading has become. Sometimes one has to step outside of a familiar … Continue reading
School Reform: Build In Support and They Will Come
Summary: Presidential directives and court cases are useful, but good teachers know schools of poverty will burn out their energies without well designed support for their efforts. The drumbeat of reform has a new cause. Since quality teachers are the … Continue reading
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