Students Weigh-in on One-to-One Laptops in K-12 Classrooms

/ Ogo Okoye-johnson / 4 Comments

Authors Binbin Zheng, Kathleen Arada, Melissa Niiya and Mark Warschauer conducted a study that gauged the perspectives of students because students are usually not included in planning instructional technology that impact them. Using 362 blog postings that covered a two-year period, the authors analyzed K-12 students’ perspectives about the implementation of one-to-one laptops. They recommended based on their analysis that schools introducing new technology should see students as learners as well as “real writers with valuable opinions.” Schools should provide opportunities for students “to write for an authentic purpose and audience using diverse forms of digital media.”  The authors found that students’ perspectives on use of technology in schools could be grouped into seven themes: “more efficient and productive learning, tools for better writing, access to information, engagement with new media, remaining relevant in a technological world, share and learn from peers, and individualized and differentiated instruction.

This study resonates the importance of putting into active practice the inclusion of all stakeholders when planning or designing new instructional programmes.

You Have Till January 7, 2015 To Share Your Views about VAM with NASSP

/ Ogo Okoye-johnson / 4 Comments

The board of directors of the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) will deliberate during its February 2015 meeting the final adoption of its official position statement on the use of Value-Added Measures (VAM) in teacher evaluations. The decision whether a teacher should be rated proficient or not, or should be retained or not based on student test scores using VAM has been a controversial and polarizing topic in the field of education and in the national political arena. NASSP has asked its members and all interested parties to share their opinions on this topic from November 7, 2014 to January 7, 2015 – a period of 60 days.

After a intentional, deliberate and thorough analysis of various research reports on VAM, NASSP made the following recommendation about the use of VAM to evaluate the effectiveness of teachers: “VAMs should not to be used to make key personnel decisions about individual teachers.”

NASSP made further recommendations about how VAM should be used:

“VAMs should be used by principals to measure school improvement and to determine the effectiveness of programs and instructional methods. VAMs should be used by principals to target professional development initiatives. States and Districts should provide ongoing training for Principals in the appropriate use student data and VAMs. States and Districts should make student data and VAMs available to principals at a time when decisions about school programs are being made. States and Districts should provide resources and time principals need in order to make the best use of data.

If you would like NASSP to consider your comment before its position statement is finalized, do so by January 7, 2015 via e-mail to karhusea@nassp.org.

Lessons in Factual Reporting, Rolling Stone Apology, Media Ethics

/ Ogo Okoye-johnson / 5 Comments

There have been many newspaper articles, news reports and blogs on the subject of the Rolling Stone magazine’s apology for publishing information about an alleged sexual assault at the University of Virginia (UVA) without a thorough fact-finding exercise, and without contacting the alleged perpetrators. Some people blame the accuser, others blame the magazine and the media, while some are somewhere in between. There are those who believe that there has been a lapse in good journalism by some reporters and their sponsor news organizations who print information and innuendos gathered from one source without doing the due diligence of reaching out to the other parties involved in order to conduct adequate fact-finding. Once something is printed, the nuances remain even after a retraction or correction has been made by the reporter. Sexual assault advocates are angry that this apology will deter future reporting of assaults.

It is very critical to note that victims of assault should always report the assault.

I would like to highlight the article that resonated with me which looked at the events through the eyes of UVA student journalists who not only have to report the story, but live on the same campus daily. What lessons are student reporters learning about the profession they plan to work in? The editor-in-chief of  The Cavalier Daily, a student run news outlet at UVA, Rebecca Lim stated that the coverage is part of the students’ daily lives. She said, “We’re reporting on the community that we’re very much a part of. If you take the reporter hat off, at the end of the day you’re a student at the university.”

Here is “What UVA journalists take away from Rolling Stone apology”

 

Resegregation in Delaware Charter Schools Charges ACLU

/ Ogo Okoye-johnson / 3 Comments

The legacy and efficacy of Brown versus Board of Education is definitely at risk with the resurgence of segregated public schools. The threat is heightened with charter schools now following suit in creating resegregation. Resegregation enhances the borders of race and class. The borders systemically become boundaries both physically and in society’s psyche.

In this post, Matthew Albright, of The (Wilmington, Del.) News Journal reported that American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU, and Community Legal Aid Society filed a complaint with the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights against the Delaware State Department of Education and the Red Clay School District, which approve all of the charter schools for discriminating against students with disabilities and minorities; and consequently creating resegregation. The resegregation is apparent because the charter schools, especially those in Wilmington, are either low performing and mostly populated by minority students, or mostly populated by white affluent students. The admission requirements into the charter schools such as “high exam scores, parent essays, mandatory parental involvement and required fees and uniforms” exclude minority students from low-income families from applying to the affluent charter schools.

The groups are advocating that new charter schools should not be approved until a desegregation plan has been put in practice. They also advocate the use of lotteries for admission into charter schools, ensuring that all charter schools are free, ensuring that public school class sizes are not larger than those in charter schools, and ensuring the provision of more funds for schools with low-income and minority students.

The executive director of Delaware’s ACLU, Kathleen MacRae, stated, “The power of choice should be with the student and the family, not with the charter school. We can no longer allow the competition for a desk in a high-performing charter school to come between neighbors and friends or exclude students of color and students with special needs.”

 

 

New iPad Use by New York City Teachers Halted

/ Ogo Okoye-johnson / 3 Comments
The New York City Schools Active Sync, its wireless network, was no longer to support new teacher users of Android and Apple tablets effective November 10, 2014 after spending 1.3 million to purchase 2000 iPads for classroom use in January. How prepared are schools and districts to handle the demands of technology use?
 

Grand Jury to Review iPad Records Confiscated by FBI from Los Angeles Unified School District

/ Ogo Okoye-johnson / 4 Comments
What is the grand jury hoping to find in the 20 boxes of documents confiscated on December 2nd by the FBI from the Los Angeles Unified District’s iPad fiasco? It is left to be seen. Stay tuned!


 

 

Under Scrutiny About His Credentials, the 22-year-old Newly Approved to Open a N.Y. Charter Quits

/ Ogo Okoye-johnson / 3 Comments

The decision to grant a 22-year-old with no school administration experience an approval to open a charter school in Rochester by the New York Board of Regents raised some eyebrows, however when inconsistencies in the credentials used to approve the charter were revealed, apparent concerns about how thorough the charter approval process is emerged.

The following is a thorough analysis by Justin Murphy, Staff writer at Democrat and Chronicle of the inconsistencies depicted in the 22-year-old’s credentials used to apply for the charter school.

“Ted Morris Jr. of Rochester wrote on a 2013 charter school application that he received a bachelor’s degree from Western Governors University and had served as assistant CEO of a local nonprofit; both assertions, among others, turned out to be false.”

• “He said Sunday that he graduated from School Without Walls in Rochester, but clarified Monday that he withdrew from that school in 2008 and graduated later that year from Penn Foster High School, a private online high school based in Pennsylvania.”

“Former School Without Walls principal Dan Drmacich and the Rochester School District both verified that Morris left the district in 2008.”

• “Morris said in interviews and in paperwork submitted to the state in 2013 that he got a bachelor’s degree from Western Governors University, an online college based in Salt Lake City. But a school spokesman said he attended classes there but did not graduate and is not currently enrolled.”

• “He then allegedly got master’s and doctoral degrees from Concordia University Chicago through a program that required him to be on campus for one weekend a month, he said in interviews Sunday and Monday. But that school said it has no record of him ever enrolling there.”

“The resume he submitted to the state in 2014 listed bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Concordia (omitting the Western Governors University reference) and a pending doctoral degree from the online Grand Canyon University. He said in an interview Tuesday, however, that he only took a few classes at Grand Canyon and then unenrolled.”

“Representatives from Penn Foster and Grand Canyon could not be reached to verify his claims regarding their schools.”

“Morris wrote he was the assistant chief executive officer for the Hickok Center for Brain Injury, with duties including “developed and implemented all program policies and procedures” and “served as acting CEO in the absence of the CEO.”

“Elaine Comarella, the center’s CEO, said his title was actually administrative assistant, and that the responsibilities he listed in the resume were “a little overshot.”

“He worked on all those things, but he didn’t actually do all that stuff himself,” she said.

“Morris said that he meant to describe his job as assistant to the CEO, but that he did serve as acting CEO at one point, a claim Comarella disputed.”

• “Another of the jobs listed on his resume was director of Church Women United’s Task Force on Courts. That was accurate, but in the resume he submitted to get that position, obtained by the Democrat and Chronicle, he claimed he had bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Almeda University, an unaccredited online school in Idaho.

“That apparently isn’t true. He said Tuesday he’d never heard of that school and didn’t know why it was on his resume.”

“A third job listing was senior administrator for Victory Living Christian Faith Centers from 2003 — when he was a few months shy of his 11th birthday — to 2010. The resume said he “hired, trained and supervised a staff of seven administrators … (for) a national Christian organization).”

“Morris reiterated Tuesday that he did in fact start serving as an administrator at age 10, “as little as I was,” and “did all the official paperwork” in those seven years. His hiring and supervisory responsibilities started when he was around 15 or 16 years old and were done together with other leaders, he said.”

A Second Bid by US Education Department to Regulate Teacher Preparation Programs Receives Mixed Reactions

/ Ogo Okoye-johnson / 3 Comments

The federal government, following a failed attempt in 2012 because of a lack of agreement to use test scores to evaluate teacher effectiveness, would like states to use a rating system approved its Department of Education to determine how well teacher preparation programs run by the universities, Teach for America and other nonprofits and through school districts are preparing K-12 teachers for the classroom. Obama Administration does not believe that K-12 teachers are ready for the classroom. Some of the criteria the rating system would use to rank the programs as “low-performing,” “at-risk,” “effective” or “exceptional” are whether the graduates from these programs are hired to teach the subject of their specialty, how their students do in standardized and other tests, and how long they remain at their jobs.

A “low-performing” or “at-risk” program for two consecutive years, will lose the $4000 a year federal Teacher Education Assistance for College and Higher Education, or TEACH, grants for teacher preparation candidates who agree to work full time in high-need fields and struggling schools for at least four academic years which amounted to $96.7 million for 34, 000 grants.

According to Arne Duncan Education Secretary of Education, “Nothing in school matters as much as the quality of teaching our students receive. We owe it to our children to give them the best-prepared teachers possible.” The regulations will be issued by September 2015 with the first report cards issued by states in April 2019. Take advantage of the 60 day public comment period to share your ideas and opinions.

Here are the mixed reactions reported by Lyndsey Layton, who has been covering national education since 2011:

“Arthur Levine, former president of Teachers College at Columbia University and a critic of teacher preparation programs, said the country needs urgent action. “Our colleges and universities have waited far too long to transform these programs to meet the needs of both today and tomorrow,” he said.

“Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president at the American Council on Education, which represents colleges and universities, said the move is “a significant expansion in the federal role overseeing state government. But it may well change considerably before it becomes final.”

“States would be required to judge the quality of an education program in large part by tracking the performance of a newly minted teacher’s students on standardized tests. That idea triggered immediate protests from teachers unions, which argue that student test scores are not an accurate measurement of teacher effectiveness.”

“There’s no evidence these regulations will lead to improvement and plenty of reason to believe they will cause harm,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, adding that teacher prep programs might avoid placing graduates in struggling schools where test scores tend to be lower and teacher turnover higher.“Due to the focus on K-12 test scores, the very programs preparing diverse teachers for our increasingly diverse classrooms will be penalized.”

“Becky Pringle, vice president of the National Education Association, said her union recognizes the need for better teacher training, but she also slammed the “inappropriate” use of test scores to judge teacher preparation. “Too many teachers are saying they are unprepared for the realities of the classroom and that teacher preparation, licensure, and induction standards must improve,” she said.

“Charles Barone, policy director for Democrats for Education Reform, said that improving the education schools’ quality will prevent future problems.“They could save a lot in the long run if they just got the training right from the get go,” he said.

“Too many people are graduating who aren’t prepared to teach. Then you get bad instruction for the kids. And we try to remediate that,” Barone said. “You’d do less of that and disrupt fewer lives if you just got it right from the beginning.”

STEM Education gets $28 Million from Obama Administration

/ Ogo Okoye-johnson / 5 Comments

In an effort to increase the number of  teachers of technology, science and math across the US classrooms, President Obama announced on Thursday November 20, 2014 during a White House ceremony to present the highest national science, technology and innovation awards for 2014 that a $28 million investment will be made by the federal government in partnership with some organizations. The increased funding will provide one million new students with science courses over the next two years and also continue the Educate to Innovate initiative started in 2009 to increase the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) skills of high school students in the United States.