Two Worlds, One Book

The Common Core Standards are designed to ensure every student is prepared to go on to a post-secondary education or a career. The Standards do more than provide a quality education across states; it promotes providing a quality education among all students from every neighborhood and every school.

Children don’t control where they come from, who their teachers are, or even what information they are taught in the classroom every day. They can control, however, if they will learn or progress in the class. Bringing the best of education to each classroom is the only way the playing field is evened. Where a student comes from should be an asset, not a liability.

In New Jersey, two eighth grade classes are recognizing the value of studying the same book, but with two separate approaches. Just as the Common Core Standards emphasize, strategies used by the teachers in this NY Times article are sharing how race and wealth doesn’t have to play a part in the quality of education students receive.

How have you been able to bridge the divide of race and wealth in your classroom?

Blocks Help Build Student Learning

Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times

Technology has revolutionized the world of education. How students learn and what they learn is constantly changing, but that doesn’t mean that educators should throw out everything they’ve ever done in the classroom. Blocks, yes blocks are making as much of an impact as ever in the learning of young children. So why not combine the two?

Yesterday, Kyle Spencer of The New York Times published an article filled with the positive effects of blocks in today’s classroom. Block building is not about occupying time or finding a way to get kids away from a computer screen. Blocks are about exploration.

Jean Schreiber, a self-described “block consultant,” advised a group of parents to engage their children in building by photographing their work. “Don’t rush to help them with structural challenges,” she said. “You don’t have to ask them a million questions. Just sit with them and notice.”

Jessica Thies, a teacher at Chapin School on the Upper East Side, said her students photographed their block extravaganzas with one of the school’s iPads. Last year, they made a documentary about blocks using a Flip video camera and edited it during computer class. “It is very low-tech/high-tech here,” Ms. Thies said.

Sasha Wilson, co-director of the four-year-old Bronx Community Charter School, said his faith in blocks was solidified by a struggling second grader’s actions after an apple-picking field trip. “She went to the block corner and built an incredibly complex structure, a tractor engine, and she was able to talk about how all the parts moved,” Mr. Wilson recalled. He said he told his staff a few days later: “We need to be looking at this student in a very different way.”

Blocks may just be one more tool we can use to help students learn.

What do you think?

Read The NY Times article here.

How Much Do You Value Education?

No one can deny that education is important, no matter what country they live in. It’s true that every person doesn’t have the same opportunities for education as their peers across the globe, but that doesn’t mean there is a lack of dedication to learning.

Last week, Nicholas D. Kristof from the New York Times presented the story of a malnourished 14-year-old Vietnamese girl making every sacrifice possible in order to go to school and take care of her two younger siblings at the same time.

Dao Ngoc Phung is so obsessed with schoolwork that she sets her alarm for 3 a.m. every day to cook rice for breakfast while reviewing her books. She rides her bike with her two siblings for 90 minutes each way to and from school. Though she is only 14 years old, Phung takes responsibility not only for her learning, but that of her younger sister and brother—she doesn’t complete her homework until after she helps them finish theirs. Sometimes this means late nights with little sleep to start over again the next day.

Phung is not the only one who values education. Kristof explains, “Teachers in America’s troubled schools complain to me that parents rarely show up for meetings. In contrast, Phung’s father takes a day off work and spends a day’s wages for transportation to attend parent-teacher conferences.”

Then what may be most admirable is the following statement from Phung’s father. “If I don’t work, I lose a little bit of money,” he said. “But if my kids miss out on school, they lose their life hopes. I want to know how they’re doing in school.”

“I tell my children that we don’t own land that I can leave them when they grow up,” he added. “So the only thing I can give them is an education.”

Today, we might ask ourselves, “How much do I value education?”

Read the full article here.

How Do We Determine Teacher Effectiveness?

National leaders, teachers’ unions, state officials—all have tried to come up with the most effective method for evaluating teachers. What will ensure quality educators for the students in our schools? Although there is no simple, ready-made solution, Nancy Folbre argues in an article in the New York Times that rating teachers according to their students’ performance on standardized tests and firing those who don’t make the grade will likely backfire.

Too much pressure to improve students’ test scores can reduce attention to other aspects of the curriculum and discourage cultivation of broader problem-solving skills, also known as “teaching to the test.” The economists Bengt Holmstrom and Paul Milgrom describe the general problem of misaligned incentives in more formal terms – workers who are rewarded only for accomplishment of easily measurable tasks reduce the effort devoted to other tasks.

Advocates of intensified teacher assessment assert that current practices leave too many incompetent or ineffective teachers in place. But many schools suffer from the opposite problem: high teacher turnover that reduces gains from experience and increases the costs of personnel management. As Sara Mosle pointed out in a recent review of Mr. Brill’s “Class Warfare,” about 40 percent of teachers in New York City quit after three years.

Is there a solution?

To read the full article, click here.