It’s happened hundreds of times. An audience of principals, superintendents and instructional coaches is shown a short videotape of a classroom lesson and asked to score it from 1 to 5. It would seem straightforward: The teacher is good, bad or somewhere in-between. But invariably, the scores come in all over the map, with high and low in fairly equal numbers. Having toured the United States with those videotapes, two leaders of the University of Washington’s Center for Educational Leadership conclude that most school leaders can’t identify or explain what constitutes good teaching, ... Read More
‘American Teacher’ Argues for Increasing Salaries
September 23, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Think teaching is a highly respected profession? Think again. A recent ranking of the top 200 jobs in America, based on such criteria as income, physical demands and stress, had public school teaching at a dismal 100 — and nearly 10 spots below teacher's aide. "Our society doesn't value the teaching profession as it should," says Ninive Calegari, one of the producers of American Teacher, a documentary film opening around the country beginning at the end of this month. "We tolerate incredible turnover and bad salaries. People think the job is easy because good teachers make it look ... Read More
Clarity Not Always the Best for Learning
April 18, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
I had a physics teacher in college whose lectures were so amazing that I often felt like I already knew everything he was saying. It was so clear and organized it almost seemed like common sense. It seems pretty obvious that utter clarity is a hallmark of truly excellent teaching. There's just one problem: It may not be true. In my case, I had trouble remembering the lectures after they were over. And that’s part of the problem with clarity: According to growing mountain of research, understanding isn't enough. It's the struggle that makes us learn. By making things too clear, teachers ... Read More
The Cash Benefits of a Catholic Education
April 3, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Catholic high schools in the United States have long boasted a 99 percent graduation rate compared to 73 percent for public schools, and they report sending twice as many students to four-year colleges. Now, an education study from Michigan State University system's Oakland University finds there may be a substantial cash benefit for those who obtain a Catholic high school degree. On average, it shows, students who graduated in 1957 from Catholic high schools earned 18 percent higher wages in their mid-30s and mid-50s than their peers in public high schools. It's true that Catholic ... Read More
Teacher Training Too Academic, Not Practical
November 26, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
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
U.S. Students Hurting in Foreign Languages
May 17, 2010 • By • 29 Comments
All you need to know about the study of foreign languages in the United States is that many more middle and high school students are studying the dead language spoken by Caesar and Nero than such critically important tongues as Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, Farsi, Japanese, Russian and Urdu combined. “Things cannot get worse. We are at the bottom of the barrel now” in terms of foreign language study in America’s schools, says Nancy Rhodes of the Center for Applied Linguistics, which surveys language study in the nation’s schools every 10 years. The center’s most recent report shows a ... Read More
Avoiding Teacher Layoffs With an Education Bailout
May 4, 2010 • By • 3 Comments
The American Association of School Administrators commemorated National Teacher Day today with a depressing announcement, the result of its latest survey of school superintendents. About 275,000 of the teachers and support staff we're all supposed to be thanking this week are likely to face layoffs before the coming school year. What they need, more than apples, cookies or construction-paper cards: About $23 billion. It's "pink slip season" in public education, and in a quirk of recession economics, school districts across the country are on the verge of a crisis dramatically worse today ... Read More
Female Teachers Add to Students’ Math Anxiety
February 5, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
In spite of the multitude of research indicating otherwise, the assumption that boys are biologically better at math than girls is alive and well at schools across the nation. And a new study indicates that when female teachers believe the stereotype, they pass their own mathematical anxiety on to the girls in their classes. While the perpetuation of the idea is troubling, the implications are more so: The girls who believe their gender possesses inferior math skills do significantly worse in the subject than the girls who don't. Researchers at the University of Chicago conducted a ... Read More
Leon Botstein: In It for the Duration
April 23, 2009 • By • 2 Comments
In his 34 years as president of Bard College, Leon Botstein has morphed from wunderkind to elder statesman of higher education. The son of physicians, he studied history with Hannah Arendt at the University of Chicago and earned his doctorate at Harvard before being named president of Franconia College in 1970 when he was just 23. He took the helm at Bard, in upstate New York, five years later. Botstein has bolstered Bard's performing arts program while recruiting prestigious faculty and creating new graduate programs. He has experimented with restructuring secondary education, started a ... Read More
What Are American Schools Doing Right?
February 4, 2009 • By • 1 Comment
We hear it over and over again: The public education system in the United States is broken. Smart teachers burn out and leave early. The achievement gap between poor minority students and their affluent white peers won't budge. America is losing ground to other developed nations on test scores. By now, anyone who has ever read a newspaper — assuming, alarmists may add, that you can read at all — understands that the American public education system is rife with problems. But, surely, some practices work. Isn't there a way to look at examples of success and replicate them? With these ... Read More
