As I documented last year, I love music videos that teachers and/or their students make. Here’s one reminding kids that “Every Day I’m Studying”.

10:33 pm - 10 May 2012 - 1 note
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Filed under: #music #education

Anyone interested in education — especially in the Charlotte area — must read this. TL;DR version: A Mooresville school has figured out how to use laptops to provide differentiated instruction, in ways that go beyond grade levels and touch social differences.

Via @ScottGrafRadio

7:38 am - 13 Feb 2012
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Filed under: #education #Mooresville

For instance, Miami Dade is Florida’s largest school district, and state funding only covers about 60 percent the cost of educating a severely-disabled student. State and federal laws say no school - traditional or charter - is allowed to turn away kids because it’s too expensive to educate them. But there’s a loophole. The law also says students with severe disabilities can only go to schools that provide the services they need.

And our investigation found that most Florida charter schools do not offer those services.

Audio here.

It’s slowly dawning on people that turning over the public school system to for-profit charter schools, as in New Orleans, has some unintended consequences. Namely, for-profits have strong incentives to weasel out of serving all comers. If the goal is to give all children equal opportunity for free, quality, public education, that requires recognition that some students cost more to educate and that the wider society benefits from giving them a quality education. If you don’t buy that notion, own it and argue that Tres Whitlock’s parents ought to pay the cost of his education in excess of the average student’s, and why it’s not in our society’s interest to give him the resources he needs to have equal opportunity.

4:45 pm - 14 Dec 2011
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Filed under: #education

If you live in the Commonwealth of Virginia and you’re wondering who sets the academic calendar, you need only look up, up to the soaring roller coasters and slides of Kings Dominion, Busch Gardens and Water Country USA. It seems that since 1986, a Virginia law has barred schools from opening before Labor Day because it’s bad for the amusement park industry.

A similarly insane law governs the North Carolina academic calendar: school may not start before August 25 or end after June 10 (PDF), and it appears the tourism industry was a part of the effort to pass that law.

The thing is, it prevents policy makers from putting together the most rational calendar possible. What is our education system’s ultimate goal? Simple: we want to guide young people to lives of learning and accomplishment, however they define it. To do that, we don’t want to crush them with responsibility — they are children, after all, and free time and family time have their place — but an ideal academic calendar almost certainly has more than 185 academic days, and might not have a three-month break during the summer months.

Unfortunately, current law aimed at protecting tourism acts in direct opposition to schools’ interests. I happen to think public schools are more important, in sum, than tourism, but our state government’s actions indicate a lot of legislators think otherwise.

10:30 am - 6 Dec 2011 - 24 notes
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Filed under: #education #North Carolina #Virginia

More evidence that the system for finding teachers is actually pretty efficient, and that student background — family life, etc. — is extremely important when talking about education outcomes.

10:19 am - 17 Aug 2011
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Filed under: #education

The Fiancee is an elementary school teacher, and in a previous life I was a high school English teacher, so we’re both pretty plugged in to education issues and developments. One particular niche of the education universe, though, we agree is our favorite: the music videos people make to help students do their best on standardized tests.

People are remarkably variable in how they best learn information, and music is just another way to teach a concept. However, because music is so infrequently used in most classrooms, the novelty of songs probably helps crucial test-taking information stick that much more.

Below are my favorite examples of these songs. They’re all built around pop songs the children already know, aiding their stickiness. But even though there are differences in approach, the sheer joy expressed by teachers and students is a wonder to behold.

Here in North Carolina, we have End of Grade testing for fourth-graders, so these teachers figured they’d use a Justin Bieber song to remind their kids that after they’ve completed the test to Check It Over.

Continue reading this post...

11:33 am - 21 Jul 2011 - 6 notes
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Filed under: #education #music

A friend from high school, Larkin Callaghan, recently wrote about this mini-trend of people saying college isn’t worth the cost anymore, which inspired me to comment and send her a link to a similar piece, but Matt Yglesias has linked to an article at The New Republic that puts it all in perspective by finding the subjects of “college isn’t worth it” articles from past economic downturns and showing where they are now. It’s all about looking at a long enough timeline. For example:

In 1993, a Post article titled “Grads Without Jobs” described two young women graduating from good state universities who planned to spend a year wandering North America in a station wagon because “there are no jobs anyway.” Today, one of them lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, and runs her own H.R. consulting firm. The other got a PhD and works 20 feet away from this author in a Washington, DC think tank.

2:10 pm - 9 Jun 2011
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Filed under: #education

Do you, or a child you know, need help remembering essential test-taking strategies? Listen to this song. Genius in its own way.

10:00 pm - 20 May 2011 - 1 note
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Filed under: #music #education #standardized tests #Justin Bieber

Andrew Sullivan is on a Gifted and Talented education kick today. Of course, some of his correspondents are missing the point about why plenty of left wing-ish folks are against pulling exceptional students from the mainstream and putting them in environments where they are free to associate with like-minded and equivalently-skilled students.

Continue reading this post...

10:35 am - 17 May 2011
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Filed under: #education

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools are contemplating a switch to a merit pay system for teachers, but there doesn’t seem to be any money to do it. Such is life in a society that wants the best education possible available to all for free, yet also harbors many who are openly hostile to public education and paying for any kind of social services via taxes.

I happen to think merit pay is a wonderful idea, but the way CMS wants to implement it is lacking. Here’s why.

Continue reading this post...

12:45 pm - 6 Apr 2011 - 1 note
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Filed under: #Charlotte #Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools #education #schools