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

John’s Hopkins University publishes a reviews of educational research in something called the ‘Best Evidence Encyclopedia’. I like it because it gathers, compares and contrasts current research. They make sure that they are using credible, valid research, and have access to research reports that the average person might not have. Once you research their review, you are free to dive deeper into a topic of interest. But all in all, this is a fantastic starting point.

Their latest review looks at upper elementary reading programs.

Educator’s Summary

Full Report

It summarizes the evidence on four types of programs including:

• Reading Curricula, including core reading textbooks such as Reading Street and Open Court, as well as supplementary texts like Read Naturally and Fluency Formula
• Computer-Assisted Instruction, such as Jostens/Compass Learning and Accelerated Reader
• Instructional Process Programs, such as cooperative learning and classroom management and motivation programs
• Combined Curriculum and Instructional Process Programs, such as Direct Instruction, Wilson Reading, and Project Read

The Best Evidence Encyclopedia is located at http://www.bestevidence.org.

There are a lot of free sites out there with evaluation information…  for current research on evaluation check out the excerpt below:

Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation is a peer-reviewed scholarly
journal freely accessible on the Internet at http://PAREonline.net PARE
has just published:

Unexpected Testing Practices Affecting English Language Learners and
Students with Disabilities under No Child Left Behind
Mark Fetler

The testing and accountability requirements of the No Child Left Behind
Act impose sanctions on schools for not making adequate yearly progress
in student achievement. The sanctions may encourage inappropriate
practices intended to raise scores of low performing student subgroups.
This article considers evidence and consequences of misclassification of
English language learners as students with disabilities.

Questions?  Contact:
Lawrence M. Rudner & William D. Schafer
Co-editors

coeditor@pareonline.net
Practical Assessment Research and Evaluation

My brother-in-law showed me a website that he knew I would appreciate, not so much for it’s content, but for the impressive data display.  I was skeptical, but once I started clicking through the presentation, I was hooked!  The display of data was so interactive and compelling, that I kept clicking until the display was finished.  It’s called Gapminder.  Click here to see it for yourself!

I immediately started thinking about all the ways I would love to use such a data display for educational research.  Here are two topics that I read recently that I would love to see presented using Gapminder:

In the Public Education Weekly NewsBlast (June 13, 2008):

SCHOOL SIZE NOT KEY TO SMALL HIGH SCHOOL SUCCESS, STUDY FINDS
A new study by Education Resource Strategies, “Strategic Designs: Lessons for Leading Edge Small Urban High Schools,” examines nine high-performing small urban high schools throughout the country to better understand how they achieved their success. The report by Karen Hawley Miles and Regis Shields finds that the success of small urban high schools rests less on their smaller size and more on how they use their resources strategically. The high-performing schools in the study — all schools with flexibility over their resources — proactively manage people, time, and money, and demonstrate that it’s not just how much money is spent that impacts student learning, but how well resources are used.
http://www.educationresourcestrategies.org/small_schools.htm

In Eduwonkette (June 15, 2008)

In a new paper, “The Persistence of Teacher-Induced Learning Gains“, Brian Jacob, Lars Lefgren, and David Sims estimate how much of the teacher effect fades out over time. It turns out that kids lose more of these short-term test score gains that we (or at least I) thought:
“Our estimates suggest that only about one-fifth of the test score gain from a high value-added teacher remains after a single year. Given our standard errors, we can rule out one-year persistence rates above one-third. After two years, about one-eighth of the original gain persists.”

If you have the courage and interest to try using this on your own, the software has been bought by google (i love google!)  and is free for you to use.  Their first output is now up and running as a free Google Gadget called Motion Chart. It allows evryone to make a gapminder-like bubble graph that you can publish on your web-page or blog.   » Read more about Motion Chart…