Leading Schools

When schools struggle, bringing in new evidence might mean upturning years of practice or ousting well-loved programs or administrators. Successfully using that sort of evidence calls for leaders who want to learn and improve along with their staff members. 

That's the upshot of a new study of district research partnerships published in the American Educational Research Journal. Researchers from the University of Washington and RTI International tracked 23 administrators in six districts of an unnamed state—ranging in size from 2,000 to 50,000 students—that were attempting to implement new school improvement programs backed by research. In particular, they analyzed when district administrators were willing to push back against set practices based on new research, and whether it helped to work with outside partners, such as research groups. 

Academics believe that a fixed mindset may in fact be more conducive to educational success
There is no evidence to support the theory that growth mindsets predict academic achievement, a new study has claimed.

If anything, the research states, a fixed-intelligence mindset helps individuals with below-average intelligence to achieve higher levels of education than they might otherwise.

And it found that, contrary to popular belief, boys were not more likely than girls to demonstrate a growth mindset.

The academics, from Case Western Reserve University, in the US state of Ohio, conducted three different studies, with a total of 393 adults. The aim was to see whether those people with a growth mindset were more likely to succeed than those with a fixed mindset.

Haverford professor Oberfield sees both sides.

"Despite some important differences, the teaching climates of charter and public schools do not match the enthusiastic expectations of proponents or the worst fears of critics.”

Algebra is one of the biggest hurdles to getting a high school or college degree — particularly for students of color and first-generation undergrads.

It is also the single most failed course in community colleges across the country. So if you’re not a STEM major (science, technology, engineering, math), why even study algebra?

That’s the argument Eloy Ortiz Oakley, chancellor of the California community college system, made today in an interview with NPR’s Robert Siegel.

At American community colleges, 60 percent of those enrolled are required to take at least one math course. Most — nearly 80 percent — never complete that requirement.

Oakley is among a growing number of educators who view intermediate algebra as an obstacle to students obtaining their credentials — particularly in fields that require no higher level math skills.

Their thinking has led to initiatives like Community College Pathways, which strays away from abstract algebra to engage students in real-world math applications.

Vocational education is having something of a resurgence these days, after enduring years out in the cold. The idea that seems to be striking the strongest spark is apprenticeship, having students spend a substantial amount of time in real workplaces learning from highly skilled workers how to do the work they do. 

But, a few days ago, David Leonhardt, the New York Times columnist, wrote a piece in which he says hey, whoa, wait a minute; advocates "have not thought through the downsides [of apprenticeship]." Leonhardt had read a piece in the Wall Street Journal by Eric Hanushek, reporting on research he had done with Ludger Woessmann and several other colleagues.  "The largest problem of skills in the U.S. today isn't a shortage of young workers with specific competencies," Hanushek says in the WSJ article.  "Instead it is a need for more general cognitive skills that give workers the ability to adapt to new circumstances and new jobs."

However, digital equity is not a magic fix for closing the achievement gap. The achievement gap existed long before the invention of the internet. Creating true equality for all students is far more complex than simply giving them all laptops. Further studies have shown that even when students in high-poverty schools have greater access to technology than their peers in low-poverty schools, their test scores remain lower.

While digital equity is a part of closing the achievement gap, it's not the solution. Digital technology can be used to widen the achievement gap or to help close it.

Educators from all grade-levels are coming to realize the benefits of technology in the classroom. Typically, education is one of the last industries to make extensive change, holding on to antiquated methods and practices. But through the digital transformation and the rise of educational technology, teachers have begun making drastic changes to their instruction, assessments, even the physical make-up of their classrooms, and at a much faster rate than expected. These current trends are making headlines in education because of the ways in which they are impacting student learning:

The hottest issue in high schools these days is the sharp rise in U.S. graduation rates — up to a record 83 percent — and whether it is real or an elaborate scam.

I think the latter.

There has been an accelerated use of online credit-recovery courses, which allow students to substitute a few weeks of work online for a course that usually takes months in a classroom. But there is no research showing students learn much in the courses — used by 88 percent of school districts — that got them to commencement.

Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley analyzed nearly 170 passages in four common elementary reading assessments: the Basic Reading Inventory, the Qualitative Reading Inventory, the Developmental Reading Assessment, and the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills, or DIBELS. They looked at how often passages used rare or common words, multisyllabic words, and those whose meaning changes by context.

All of the reading tests showed more complex texts as students moved from grade to grade, but the researchers found they changed in different ways over time, and some tests used more complex words and passages than others even within the same grade.

In the 2015-2016 school year, about 21 percent of public students in Washington were chronically truant, meaning they missed 10 school days for unexcused reasons, and 26 percent were chronically absent, meaning they missed more than 10 percent of the school year for either unexcused or excused reasons. The rates were higher in high schools and in the city’s poorer wards.

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Critical thinking isn’t a skill, nor is it content knowledge or even evidence of understanding. While it involves and requires these ideas, critical thinking is also very much a state of mind — a willingness and tendency to sit with an idea and ‘struggle wonderfully’ with it.

In critical thinking, there is no conclusion; it is constant interaction with changing circumstances and new knowledge that allows for broader vision which allows for new evidence which starts the process over again. Critical thinking has at its core raw emotion and tone. Intent.

Lakoff researches how framing influences reasoning, or how the way we say something often matters much more than what we say. And he has used his research to inform how Democrats can better frame their party positions. He consolidated his advice for Democrats in his book, Don’t think of an elephant! The title conveys one of its main insights: if you negate a frame, you strengthen a frame. In other words, if you say “don’t think of an elephant,” you can’t help but think of one.

More high school students in the US are graduating than ever before, in part because of rising grade-point averages. But a new study suggests the trend isn't cause for celebration.

One of the most unusual courses in high school these days is TOK, the initialism for Theory of Knowledge, part of the International Baccalaureate program. Most Americans have never heard of it.

It is a course on critical thinking and how we know what we claim to know. It demands a lot of writing and thus, by the standard teenager definition, is not easy. But most of the IB teachers I have encountered, and many of their students, call it special and deep, a distinctive element of a program now offered in nearly 900 U.S. high schools.