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A Matter of Balance
Anne Wujcik — Friday, May 18, 2012
Several news stories this week offer some ideas to ponder. The Tampa Bay Times reports on problems associated with Florida's writing assessment. The Florida Writing Assessment is used in grades 4, 8, and 10 to measure students' proficiency in writing responses to assigned topics within a designated testing period. It's seen minor variations from year to year in terms of student prompts and grading protocols. This year, the state returned to using two raters to score each piece of student writing and instructed scorers to grade more strictly, with an eye to punctuation, grammar and the quality of word choice and relevance. The result: only 27% of fourth-graders statewide earned a score of 4 or better, compared to last year's 81%. Similar drops in score were seen among 8th and 10th graders. Read More »
Working on Content
Anne Wujcik — Friday, May 11, 2012
Lot's happening with content. The Council of the Great City Schools and Student Achievement Partners, whose founders led the writing of the Common Core English/language arts standards, sponsored the first in a series of workshops for teachers and literacy specialists from across the country. Recognizing that in many classrooms the existing store of textbooks will continue to be the major instructional resource, the goal of the workshop was to develop a set of materials that teachers can use in conjunction with their basal textbooks to better address the Common Core's emphasis on text-dependent analysis and interpretation. Students will be expected to understand and analyze a variety of texts and teachers will need to help them read text more closely. Read More »
Waiver Responses and Do Standards Matter
Anne Wujcik — Friday, May 04, 2012
The Department of Education has completed its initial review of the 27 waiver applications it received in the second round of the ESEA flexibility program. Letters have gone out to states detailing the Department's concerns and asking for clarification and improvements. Each requesting state faced at least some criticism, though Maryland came out well ahead of the rest of the pack. The Department liked Maryland's plans for transitioning to college- and career-ready standards, intervening in struggling schools, and its work on teacher evaluation. It wanted more details on how Maryland will validate the measures it's using in the teacher evaluation system. This will be a challenge for many states, as the teacher evaluations systems are new and there aren't that many ready-made measurement tools. Read More »
Speak Up Results and More CC Assessment News
Anne Wujcik — Friday, April 27, 2012
I just want to point you to some news of interest this week. Project Tomorrow held its first Congressional Briefing on results from the Speak Up 2011 survey. This session focused on findings related to students and parents. The related report, "Mapping a Personalized Learning Journey - K-12 Students and Parents Connect the Dots with Digital Learning" is now available on the Project Tomorrow website. This first report focuses on how today's students are personalizing their own learning, and how their parents are supporting this effort. That personalization centers around three student desires: including how students seek out resources that are digitally-rich, untethered and socially-based. The report share the unfiltered views of K-12 students and parents on these key trends and documents their aspirations for fully leveraging the technologies supporting these trends to transform their learning lives. There's also a summary infographic. Read More »
Assessment Items and CTE Reauthorization
Anne Wujcik — Friday, April 20, 2012
In a story that is the equivalent of beneath the fold in today's electronic version of the newsletter, the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium selected CTB/McGraw-Hill to develop items for the new Common Core Assessments. The job involved developing nearly 10,000 test items that will be used in the pilot test of the Smarter Balanced assessment system in early 2013. A separate contract solicitation will be issued for item and performance task development for the field test of the assessment system in spring 2014. The test items will include a variety of innovative formats, performance elements and rich technological enhancements. All items will be subjected to rigorous review and research. The contract announcement marks a new stage in the consortium's progress. Test items are concrete and move the SBAC assessment one step closer to being "real." Read More »
Tablets and Metatags
Anne Wujcik — Friday, April 13, 2012
Many interesting announcements this week. More Android-based tablets are reaching the market, including one built for education from Intel. I've not carefully tracked announcements of Android-based tablets, but it's clear that more tablets are appearing from a wide variety of manufacturers, especially at the low end. Google is widely rumored (by no less than the Wall Street Journal, among others) to be readying a tablet launch. Expected sometime in May, at a price between $200 and $250 (or possibly as low as $199), the 7-inch, Android 4.0 tablet is likely to be manufactured by Asus. Today's issue includes an announcement from Ematic about its latest Android-powered tablet: the 7-inch eGlide Prism. The Prism is 9mm thick and weighs only 0.6 pounds. It comes with built-in Wi-Fi compatibility, 8GB of flash memory plus 5GB of cloud storage, features a front facing camera, built-in speaker, a MicroSD Memory Card port and runs on the Android 4.0 OS. Retail price is $216. Other recent announcements include Samsung's Galaxy Tab 2, a 7-in Toshiba Excite, Acer's Iconia Tab and several new Indian tablets. These are consumer devices, many aimed at the Kindle Fire, but the price points are becoming very attractive. For one perspective on this read Frank Catalano's recent post (http://www.geekwire.com/2012/googles-rumored-tablet-hurt-kindle-fire/) on GeekWire. Read More »
Changes
Anne Wujcik — Friday, April 06, 2012
There was good news for more than just the three winners of the March 30 Mega Millions drawing this week. The frenzy of lottery ticket purchases that the $656 million jackpot fueled resulted in big tax gains for a number of states. And in those states where lottery proceeds support education, schools were the big winner. In Illinois, the past nine weeks of Illinois Lottery sales generated $31.5 million for the state's Common Schools Fund. The story was similar in Georgia, where lottery officials said that ticket sales generated $25.2 million in profits for education. Georgia Lottery profits go toward the state's HOPE Scholarship and Pre-K programs. And three states - Illinois, Kansas and Maryland - will also benefit from the income tax that the big winners will have to pay, though that money does not benefit education directly. Read More »
FY 2013 Budget Cycle Begins
Anne Wujcik — Friday, March 30, 2012
Yesterday (March 29) the House of Representatives passed its FY2013 Budget Bill. 228 Republicans voted for the bill. 181 Democrats and 10 Republicans voted against. The budget, crafted by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's (R-WI), caps non-defense discretionary spending at $1.028 trillion, $19 billion below the levels set by the Budget Control Act of last August. The bill cancels the automatic across the board spending cuts put in place under the Budget Control Act, known as sequestration, that are scheduled to kick in on Jan 2, 2013. The House Budget Bill now goes to the Senate where it is likely to fail, since the Democratic leadership there announced that they would they officially establish their own spending level of $1.047 trillion, reflecting the caps agreed upon in the Budget Control Act. Does any of this sound familiar? I've already seen several references to a government shutdown. Read More »
League of Innovative Schools
Anne Wujcik — Friday, March 23, 2012
This really is a TGIF week! Maybe it felt so hectic because all of us here in Chicago have been pulled to get outside and enjoy this absolutely incredible stretch of weather that has left us with many of our trees in full leaf and the daffodils are nodding away. It's been hard some days to stay at a desk. Last week I made the decision to stop including in the e-mail News Alert version all the announcements of contests and grant programs that have been flooding in. Last week alone there were seven. I will be posting them on the News Alert website and they will be searchable in the database. Of course there will be exceptions and one crossed my desk this week from EPS, School Specialty's Literacy and Intervention division. Read on.... Read More »
The MetLife Survey of the American Teacher
Anne Wujcik — Friday, March 16, 2012
The MetLife Survey of the American Teacher: Teachers, Parents and the Economy, the 28th in the annual series, examines the views of teachers, parents and students about the teaching profession, parent and community engagement, and effects of the economy on teaching and learning in schools. The survey explores how teachers, parents and schools are working together to promote student learning and healthy development in the context of reduced budgets, reallocation of resources, and continued attention to improving teaching and learning. These surveys are always interesting and their long history allows for comparisons over the years. The good news this year is that parent and community engagement with schools has increased. There are concerns, however, around teacher satisfaction. It seems that the stress of the economic downturn is taking its toll. Today, over one-third of teachers (34%) say that they do not feel their job is secure, compared to just 8% of teachers who felt that way in 2006. Read More »
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