A big thank you to the good folks from EE for all their blogging last week. If you haven’t seen it, it’s all below. I’m around for a while and then later in August Celine Coggins from TeachPlus and Michael Goldstein from MATCH will step in for a few weeks.
Random links and opportunities:
Before he was famous as an author, Frank McCourt was a teacher.
This looks like the kind of PD this field has far too little of.
Austin Considine points out the de facto school segregation problem in relation to last week’s achievement gap report. But, he concludes that unless we address school segregation then education reform is largely hopeless. He’s right that the segregated nature of our schools is a problem, yet we’re not going address the root cause, residential segregation, anytime soon. And in the meantime there are concrete things we can do to make the schools better now that too frequently are obscured by conversations about larger issues that policymakers have much less leverage over. Disentangling the two is a key part of the conversation Considine wants to spark. Also, he beats-up on Wisconsin over the achievement gap. Everyone is! But given Rep. Dave Obey’s (WI) powerful position in the House of Representatives doesn’t the fact that Wisconsin is a bad actor on the achievement gap, and ed reform in general, complicate “Race to the Top” politics just a wee bit?
The DC Public Schools are looking for master teachers across a bunch of subjects and grades. The National Council on Teacher Quality is hiring for several roles and has intern opportunities.
The Walton Family Foundation (not an ES funder) has been pretty reticent about public relations leading to a lot of misconceptions about the range of work the foundation undertakes. Check out their annual report to see their giving across a range of issues.
New school data tool for parents, Schooldigger.com.
“PD”? What does the acronym mean? Is it necessary?
professional development or inservice training
I am curious about the Master Educator program. As I understand it, these master educators will be “independent evaluators” of teachers in the beginning. In part, this position was created to respond to critiques from teachers that if their principal didn’t like them, they received unfair evaluations. I’m wondering, however, how DC will connect these master educators to professional development? It seems to me that the people in these positions will be uniquely positioned with their knowledge of how teachers are doing to be very helpful in informing professional development design. Do you know more? Or do you have an opinion on this?