Does doing math give you goosebumps?
His teaching career began at age 19, when he was working on his master’s degree in mathematics at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). Forty years later, Freeman A. Hrabowski, III is President of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), a position he has held for nearly two decades. I had the pleasure of hearing […]
Colorado seeking to define “highly effective” teachers?
Colorado, which finished 14th among the 16 finalists in round one of the Race to the Top competition, is considering major changes to state teacher-tenure laws. Senate Bill 191 was introduced on Monday by a high-school-principal-turned-legislator named Michael Johnston (D-Denver). Though the bill has bipartisan and bicameral support, it will face an uphill battle from the 40,000-member Colorado Education […]
Paying kids for performance?
The current issue of Time magazine features a cover story entitled “Should Schools Bribe Kids?” Amanda Ripley reports on a contentious study by a Harvard professor about how incentives influence student performance — but with a twist. Instead of paying teachers more for improved student performance, the idea in this study was to pay students […]
Teachers, teachers everywhere — but not a job to take!
Newspapers around the country are reporting that would-be teachers aren’t having an easy time finding positions for the 2010-11 school year. The woeful economy and accompanying budget cuts have led many districts to freeze or significantly scale back on new hires. And yet there doesn’t appear to be any similar reduction in the number of teacher […]
Rubber rooms: Coming soon to a theater near you!
A few years ago, when I was teaching at the United World College in Hong Kong, an Irish friend told me that there are thousands of teachers across the U.S. who have been accused of various “crimes” and thus removed from classrooms. Instead of teaching, they report to “work” each day in what he called “rubber rooms,” […]
The final nail in NCLB’s coffin?
Pundits aplenty are busy parsing the latest NAEP results. On Wednesday, the federal government released reading scores on the “nation’s report card” — also known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) — for fourth- and eighth-graders around the country. The results disappointed almost everyone. Over at The Washington Post, Jay Mathews said the […]
