Much of the furor over how to fix local education systems has focused on teacher evaluation. How do we hold teachers accountable and reward them for student achievement? Should they be paid according to how well their students perform on standardized tests? And is it fair game to publish any metric that evaluates them that way — teacher names and all — in, say, the Los Angeles Times? The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education is floating another idea, one that looks not at how teachers are evaluated in the classroom, but the way they're taught before they get there. ... Read More
The Kindergarten Advantage
November 21, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
An experienced teacher and a small class in kindergarten can set a person up for life, according to a large-scale study by the National Bureau of Economic Research. On average, a kindergarten teacher with more than 10 years on the job is worth an extra $1,100 per year to his or her students by the time they are earning a salary at age 27, the study shows. The lifetime gain for a class of 20 students with an above-average teacher totals $320,000 — and that's from a single year in a high-quality kindergarten class. "We're not saying that teachers should be paid this much," said John ... Read More
A Compensation for Cold Weather: Higher IQs
November 17, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
With the red state/blue state divide rapidly devolving into a cliché, it’s clearly time to find a new way to splice the nation into subsections. Try this adversarial alignment on for size: Smart states/dumb states. Which is to say, cold states/warm states. It turns out those benumbed residents of Maine, Montana and Minnesota have something to brag about. A paper recently published in the journal Psychological Reports concludes that of the 48 contiguous United States, those with cooler average temperatures tend to have populations with higher IQs. A research team led by psychologist ... Read More
The Politics of Bilingual Education
November 2, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
I can't help thinking that Angilee Shah picked the data that would support her bias on bilingual education rather than approaching the issue with an open mind ("A New School of Thought," July-August 2010). During a year in Paris, my brother and I attended 10th and seventh grades, respectively, at the international section of the Lycee de Sevres. For English speakers, the bilingual teaching lasted all of three months. For the many non-English-speaking students from around the world, the teaching was effectively immersion, although we all benefited from simple but very effective audiovisual ... Read More
Delaying School Start Times Causes Alarm
October 25, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
If, as the science says, teens are more alert and healthier when they sleep later, why haven't more high schools adjusted their start times? The answer to that question lies in a mix of logistics and politics. "It was, as it's been in every other town, polarizing," recalls Lisa Bogan, a former school board member in Wilton, Conn., which changed its start times in 2003. She is now the school start time change specialist (yes, there is such a position) for the League of Women Voters of Connecticut. The state league embraces efforts to change school start times because it sees them as a way to ... Read More