Murphy Educational Consulting (MEC)

I have been experimenting with ways to get current information about the fields of education and evaluation.  Here are some of my favorites:

Listservs

I belong to several evaluations listservs: Eval Talk, Chicagoland Evaluation Association and Eval Business (the latter two are hosted on yahoo groups).  These groups are active, and real people answer questions in real time.  I have them to be very supportive communities.

Twitter

Although seemingly simple, and almost silly, Twitter is proving to be a powerful way to connect.  All updates are 140 characters or less, and you can follow any one else’s tweets.  Some of the people that I am following are change.gov, EdWeek, Politico, some friends, and others who seem to be active in the fields of education and evaluation.  You can find me on twitter at murphno.

Ning

Ning is like a lot of facebook sites for specific topics.  They are usually started and maintained by individuals with an interest in a certain topic and are generally open to anyone.  I have joined:

• Evaluation Practice

• Ning in Education

• K-12 Open Source Community

What are others using to stay informed and connected?  Please share your experiences!

Nora

In case you were wondering how long it would take for a school to be named after President-elect Barack Obama, here’s your answer. Interesting fact from the story…David Paterson, current NY governor, graduated from the school when it was known as Ludlum Elementary School.

Last night, the University of Illinois at Chicago hosted a panel discussion on education policy. In front of a packed audience of more than 250, eight professors from area institutions presented their “top ten list of education policy priorities for President-elect Barack Obama.” Instead of listing all the proposals set forth last night, here’s a list of my top ten of everyone’s top tens, in no particular order of importance (responsible professor in parentheses):

-Institute multiple language curriculum in K-12 schools so that all students of American public education can be bi- or trilingual (Carl Grant, UW-Madison; Sumi Cho, Depaul)

-Public officials (i.e. president, members of congress) should send their students to public schools (Sumi Cho, Depaul; Carl Grant, UW-Madison “Public schools will only get better when people stand up and walk the walk…(slight applause)…Yeah, you can go ahead and clap!…(room erupts in applause)”

-Ensure high quality, FREE PK-16 public education for all Americans, including immigrants (Pauline Lipman, UIC; Erica Meiners, NIU)

-Create and provide high quality training for a diverse, national teaching corps that recruits community members to educate students from their own neighborhoods (Pauline Lipman, UIC; Erica Meiners, NIU)

-Extend the school year to 10 months in 2010-2011 and 11 months after that so that arts and humanities are included (Carl Grant, UW-Madison “we are no longer an agrarian society”)

-Replicate model of the Harlem Children’s Zone in cities across the country (Carol Lee, Northwestern)

-Create a “Book a week” program (Obama reads the book too) to inspire all Americans to read more (Haki Madhubuti, CSU)

-Downsize schools and classroom to ensure individual attention (Carl Grant, UW-Madison)

-Involve community members and students in public education through peer juries, the development of culturally relevant curriculum, integration with healthcare, non-military leadership opportunities, etc (in one form or another, every panelist made this suggestion)

-And perhaps the most energizing moment of the evening came from Haki Madhubuti, when he lead a call-and-response with the audience. He spouted off at least ten positive phrases encouraging the use of art in public education, for example, “Keep young people in school and out of prison with…ART!” (Haki Madhubuti, CSU)

William Ayers (UIC) presented last and didn’t really offer a top ten list. Instead, he summarized everyone’s thoughts and spoke about the “full development of all” instead of the individualistic, competitive nature of American public education. As a final point, he suggested that every proposal made tonight is not only directed at Barack Obama and government institutions, but rather American society as a whole. He argued that citizens have tremendous power to change the cultural landscape of public education.

If you were not able to attend, but would like to view clips from this event, visit the UIC College of Education website in the coming days. They will post a video recording of the event on their website.

For those of you in the Chicago area with free time tonight, you should check out a panel at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Professors from UIC’s College of Education will lead a discussion about the education policy priorities for President-elect Barack Obama. Here are the details…

Who: Kevin Kumashiro (moderator), William Ayers, Sumi Cho, Carl Grant, Carol Lee, Pauline Lipman, Haki Madhubuti, Erica Meiners (panelists)

What: Education Policy Priorities for the New President: A Panel of Experts & Their “Top Ten” Lists

When: Thurs., Dec. 4th at 6 PM

Where: The Event Center of the UIC Forum, 725 W. Roosevelt Rd., Chicago, IL, 60607

Parking: Lot #5, 1135 S. Morgan

RSVP is appreciated, but I’m sure they’ll make room for eager attendees.

If you’re not able to attend, don’t worry. I will post a brief summary of the event on Friday. Until then, if you need an Obama education fix, check out District299.com for information about CPS CEO Arne Duncan and USDOE Secretary Maragaret Spellings. Some people think he will be Obama’s Secretary of Education. Thoughts?

I was fortunate enough to teach in a school that Dennis Litkey had been the principal of, and to have Elliot Washor as my 6th grade math teacher.  I admired them both and was not at all surprised to learn that they were the creative and intellectual force behind the ‘Big Picture Schools’.  I am still learning more about them, and would like to visit one in person.  For those not familiar with these schools, click here for a good article, and click here for the Big Picture Company website.

A new study finds that states with genuinely alternative teacher certificationprograms have greater representation of minority teachers inschools and higher achievement gains among students.  The report is authored by Paul E. Peterson, the director of the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG) and Daniel Nadler, a PEPG research associate.  Peterson and Nadler found that students attending schools in states with genuine alternative certification programs gained 4.8 points in 4th grade math, and 7.6 points in 8th-grade math, than did students in the other states.   Test-score gains were also larger among African Americans in the states with genuine alternative certification. 

Click here to read more.

The layout is a little rough around the edges right now, but Alexander Russo is on to something with his new blog of blogs, called the ‘Big Bad Edu-Blog’.  It’s a collection of blog entires and news reports from around the world.  In one glance I saw interesting topics that I never would have seen otherwise, even with the 20+ blogs that I read regularly!  Check it out: http://scholasticadministrator.typepad.com/bigbadedublog/

If you haven’t seen this video yet, it is worth taking the 8 minutes to do so. It’s a video of a young boy in the Dallas ISD who talks to members of the school district’s staff about believing in children and about how much each adult means to the students’ success. Often adults don’t believe. They say it’s “too late” or there are “too many problems at home” and the list goes on and on. This child makes you want to think differently and to go into schools and really cherish and educate all of our children in this country.

John’s Hopkins Best Evidence Encyclopedia just published an updated review of middle school and high school mathematics program.  It’s a meta-analysis of all of the existing research, which is very hand for people who want to make evidence supported decisions, but don’t have the research degree necessary to sort through all of the published data out there to find the reliable and valid studies.  The end result of their work is a hand chart that identifies programs as and lists programs down into the categories of ‘Strong Evidence of Effectiveness’, ‘Moderate Evidence of Effectiveness’, ‘Limited Evidence of Effectiveness’, ‘Insufficient Evidence’ and ‘No Qualifying Studies’.

Interestingly, there were only two programs and the ‘strong’ category and none in the ‘moderate’.  Considering all of the claims out there of raising your students test scores by leaps and bounds, this is important to note.  Most of these programs fell under ‘no qualifying study’ meaning that the results that they tout were not gathered through a methodologically sound study.  The two top rated programs were:

• Student Teams-Achievement Divisions (STAD) (IP-Cooperative Learning) – nmadden@jhu.edu
• IMPROVE (IP-Cooperative Learning) – mevarz@mail.biu.ac.il

To see the rest of the list, click here.

I just read on the Public Education Network that Henry Lous Gates is working on an ancestry based education curriculum.  Now, if you don’t follow curriculum development closely, it might be easy to dismiss this as ‘already done’ or ‘more if the same’.  But I have hope for this being better than that and truly, enlightening, engaging and relevant.    I have watched “African American Lives” several times, and have even given it as gifts because I feel that it’s so important for people to watch. He describes dragging kids through ‘historical archives’, which is exactly what he did for his own family when making this series.  I imagine this is why he realizes the true potential of this type of curriculum.  I am excited to see the types of schools, and teachers, that will adopt such a curriculum.

Henry Lewis Gates working on ‘ancestry-based’ curriculum
In the wake of his highly acclaimed PBS series “African American Lives,” which traced the ancestry of 19 famous African Americans using genealogical research and DNA science, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is working with other educators to create what he calls an “ancestry-based” curriculum to teach history and science to African-American students in grades K-12. In a conversation with Learning First Alliance’s Public School Insights blog, Gates notes that half the African-American students in the United States are failing to graduate from high school. To help them become more engaged, he has been working on a six-week history unit in which kids will interview parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents — collecting family stories along with census information, tax records, and estate records. Gates says that if you “went into an inner-city school and said, ‘We’re going to drag you into historical archives about the Civil War,’ or the Great Depression, or the Great Migration, kids would say, ‘Get out of town.’ But if we said, ‘We’re going to trace your family through those periods and to those periods,’ my goodness, who wouldn’t be interested in that?” When students reach the Civil War period, adds Gates, they can be taught DNA analysis in a science class so they can continue to trace genealogy after the paper trail ends.
Read more at http://www.publicschoolinsights.org/?storyId=22061