Month: July 2018

NOTE: Teacher Ed News will resume the week of August 27.

GLOBAL
Al-Fanar Media. Canadian Teachers Offer a Refugee-Education Handbook   At the heart of the book is a collection of 30 lesson plans to prepare teachers for working with refugee children, and 11 lesson plans for teachers to use with refugee children.

DevDiscourse. New Zealand to strengthen education system with help of Maori experts   Te Ahu o te reo Māori will support teachers to deliver te reo in the classroom and is the start of our plan to better integrate te reo across the education system.

DutchNews.nl. Post summer shortage of 1,300 primary school teachers looms   Tens of thousands of pupils will be affected by the teacher shortage and school heads are being forced to take emergency measures to soften the impact, the council said. This will involve using more part-time and trainee teachers and taking on more classroom assistants.

News India Times. United Sikhs collaborates with NYC’s Department of Education on school curriculum   The advocacy organization, United Sikhs, is collaborating with New York City’s Department of Education to create lessons on Sikhism for fifth and sixth graders.

UNITED STATES
AACTE. FY19 Appropriations Move Forward as Election Season Kicks Into High Gear
Here are the results for selected federal programs important to the education profession:

Congress.Gov. H. R. 1772 Accessible Instructional Materials in Higher Education Act or the AIM HIGH Act

Deans for Impact. Working in common to build the Common Indicators System Network   Over this past academic year, the CIS Network has collected data on more than 3,500 teacher candidates, 500 program graduates, and 100 employers across four common indicators. To our knowledge, it’s one of the largest cross-institutional research efforts ever undertaken in educator preparation.

EdWeek.
1) 3 Things to Know About the New Bill Promising ‘Debt-Free’ Higher Education   The Aim Higher Act preserves the TEACH grant program, which provides student aid to those who agree to teach certain subjects in high-needs schools… The legislation also preserves the current section of the Higher Education Act that deals with teacher-preparation programs under Title II, as well as Public Service Loan Forgiveness that allows teachers to cancel out their higher education debt under certain circumstances.
2) Anti-Test Movement Slows to a Crawl   “The folks who were unhappy and leading the opt-out movement have other things on their plate,” said Jeff Henig, a professor of political science and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. When it comes to testing, “maybe everyone is just taking a breath.”
3) Does ESSA Require Teachers to Be Highly Qualified?   ESSA got rid of the requirement in the law it replaced, the No Child Left Behind Act, that teachers must be highly qualified, which typically meant they needed to have a bachelor’s degree in the subject they are teaching and state certification. Instead, states must come up with their own definition of an “effective teacher.”
4) Generalizing ‘For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood … and the Rest of Y’all Too‘  The key idea is that if you teach students who come from a very different culture than you do, you have to make a serious effort to understand the students’ culture and leverage this understanding to engage students as you teach.
5) How Many Seats Do Teachers Get on the State Board of Ed.? In Most Places, None   State boards of education are often tasked with establishing high school graduation requirements, implementing federal education laws, establishing standards for accreditation of school districts and teacher-preparation programs, and setting statewide curriculum standards…
6) Make Teacher-Prep Programs Accountable for Graduates’ Performance, Teachers Say   Teach Plus, a nonprofit group that supports teacher leadership, released a report on a survey that asked 755 teachers from 26 states and the District of Columbia about their views on teacher-prep accountability. They found that teachers want more transparency on how well teacher-prep programs are preparing educators to teach.
7) Woodrow Wilson Foundation President Arthur Levine To Step Down Next Year   Well-known for his critiques of teacher-education programs, Levine has spent his tenure at the foundation advocating for attracting nontraditional candidates to the profession and improving the quality of teacher preparation.

Encoura.
1) ACT® Acquires NRCCUA®  ACT® , Inc., the nonprofit developer of the ACT® test and other assessments taken by millions of individuals annually worldwide, announced today that it has acquired The National Research Center for College and University Admissions™ (NRCCUA®), an educational data science and research organization.
2) Is The PROSPER Act what students want?   As summer heats up and colleges and universities combat summer melt, it’s time to face the reality that chances of reauthorizing the Higher Education Act (HEA) in 2018, and possibly even 2019, have also melted away.

Hechinger Report. Disrupting education, the NFL way: Hiring more black public school teachers helps students get to the goal line  And if a vast proportion of the hiring managers are white, it’s likely that their social networks are predominantly white, too… This has a profound professional impact when principals and school district leaders recruit from within their social circles, be it from a university or non-profit teacher prep program. This kind of hiring needs to be called out for what it really is — discrimination.

InsideHigherEd.
1) Can a $49 English Test Pass Muster?   …the Duolingo English Test costs just $49 — as little as one-fifth the price of the widely used Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and its closest competitor, the International English Language Testing System (IELTS)…
2) FAFSA for Your Phone   Education Department this week will take another step toward mobile access to the federal student aid application.
3) The Democratic Alternative   The minority party offers its take on the Higher Education Act, including free community college, larger Pell Grants and tougher accountability …The Democrats’ bill is almost a point-by-point rejection of PROSPER…

Teach+Plus. TAKING STOCK: A Teacher Perspective on Informing and Improving Teacher Preparation Programs   Teach Plus used a mixed-methods research approach that included holding focus groups in several states and conducting a national survey of current public school teachers.

NEW YORK CITY
Chalkbeat. Some teachers are spending their summer creating culturally relevant content  …more than 400 other educators came together at the Reimagining Education summer institute at Teachers College of Columbia University to learn how to provide students with academic experiences that reflect the diversity of their schools… Many of the people who lead the presentations and workshops are people of color, notes Detra Price-Dennis, an assistant professor of Elementary and Inclusive Education at the Teachers College of Columbia

Diverse Issues in Higher Education. MAYME HOSTETTER was named president of Relay Graduate School of Education. She is a former middle school English teacher with nearly a decade of experience in higher education. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University, a master’s degree from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education and an Ed.D. from Teachers College of Columbia University.

The Atlantic. Can Richard Carranza Integrate the Most Segregated School System in the Country?   He asked a friend about transferring to the School of Education… he switched his major… It was time for him to be a student teacher, and he was nervous… But as soon as he stepped into the classroom, all of that went away.

Wall Street Journal. Success Academy High School Sees Wave of Teacher Departures   Success Academy founder Eva Moskowitz said in an interview that her well-trained teachers often get poached…“What really makes me sad is the number of first-year teachers who quit and decided never to teach again,” said Natasha Venner

NOTE: Teacher Ed News will resume the week of August 27.

GLOBAL
DevDiscourse. UNESCO report says millions of children deprived of education in South Sudan   …Minister Deng Deng Hoc Yai, Minister of General Education and Instruction.  “We must build schools; work to encourage girls to go to school, and train more teachers to retain and attract students.”

Education International. Indonesia: governmental promise to hire 100,000 teachers and bridge the teacher gap   “We need to replace retired teachers every year, as people should not be worried over a shortage of teachers. However, all appointed teachers must be prepared to serve in disadvantaged and border regions,” Vice-President Jusuf Kalla stressed…

ScooNews. [India] After seeking International schools, students will now seek internationally trained Teachers   This international course is incredibly flexible in terms of delivery and is structured across three diverse learning experiences – Online, Hybrid, and face- to- face interaction… Applicants who opt for the on-campus component at the D’Youville College campus in Buffalo, New York will have the added advantage of participating in the graduation ceremony, getting insights into the local culture and visiting the mighty Niagara Falls…

UNITED STATES
Association of Teacher Educators. Summer Induction Symposium For New Education Professors [Aug. 4, Albuquerque, NM]

Chalkbeat. Mentors matter: Good teaching really can be passed down to student teachers, new research finds  “Taken together, the point is that teachers who are … effective appear to be very promising mentors,” said Matt Ronfeldt, a University of Michigan professor who co-authored all three papers.

EdWeek.
1) After Outcry, College Board Restores 250 Years to Proposed AP History Course
2) ‘Juuling’ and Teenagers: 3 Things Principals and Teachers Need to Know   ‘Juuling’ can be really difficult for teachers and principals to detect.
3) One-Third of Parents Fear for Their Child’s Safety at School   That increased to 49 percent when respondents were asked if they would favor arming teachers and staff who met some conditions, including “80 hours of training on the use of force, weapons proficiency, legal issues and first aid; and approval by the school board and local law enforcement.”
4) Which Preservice Programs Are Enrolling and Graduating Teachers of Color?   The Urban Institute has created a publicly available data tool that allows users to look at school enrollment and graduation rates by race, comparing colleges and universities to their undergraduate preservice teaching programs.

InsideHigherEd. Americans Still Believe in Higher Ed’s ‘Public Good’   Noah D. Drezner, an associate professor of higher education at Teachers College and the study’s lead author, said he sought to design a survey that examined “Americans’ understanding of the various ways that colleges and universities contribute to society, beyond the return to individuals.”

Learning Policy Institute. How Money Matters for Schools   Investments in teacher quality (teacher ability, teacher education, and teacher experience) have been found to be particularly effective in raising achievement.

NYTimes. A Better Way to Run Schools: The New Orleans turnaround shows the power of giving more freedom to teachers and principals — and then holding them accountable for their performance.  This spring, he graduated from Xavier University, a historically black Catholic college here, and he recently started his first job — as a middle-school social studies teacher in New Orleans. [cf. rebuttals in readers’ comments]

The Inquirer. A former drug dealer made good and became a Philly teacher. So why is he thinking of leaving the profession?

Urban Institute. Which Colleges Are Helping Create a Diverse Teacher Workforce?   We examined which programs are contributing to a representative teacher workforce by comparing the share of students of a given race in the college’s teaching degree programs to the share of students of that race in the university as a whole. [incl. interactive graphics, enrollments and completions]

NEW YORK STATE
NYSED Program Updates. Creating a Pipeline for Educators [see p. 15/16] Ongoing programs include Teachers of Tomorrow, which provides more than $20 million annually to school districts to aid in recruiting and retaining teachers, and Teacher Opportunity Corps, which provides financial support to individuals from diverse backgrounds to enable them to complete a teacher preparation program.

NYSED Board of Regents. July Meetings
Consent Agenda:
1) Proposed Amendment to Sections 80-3.3 and 80-3.7 of the Regulations of the Commissioner of Education to Allow Individual Evaluation for Certain Certificate Titles in the Classroom Teaching Service
2) Amendment to Subpart 80-3 and Section 80-4.3 of the Regulations of the Commissioner of Education Relating to the Creation of Limited Extensions for Teachers Holding a Students with Disabilities Generalist Certificate Who Teach a Special Class in Grades 7-…

PBS Learning Media/NY. Understanding LGBTQ+ Identity: A Toolkit for Educators

NEW YORK CITY
NY Daily News.  City should offer sex ed to elementary students, Mayor de Blasio’s task force says   The task force report also calls for health lessons in all city schools to be delivered by teachers who have received high-quality training in sexual health education and urges the Education Department officials to explore the feasibility adding a required certification for all teachers “on inclusivity and consent.”

GLOBAL
NYTimes. Mao 101: Inside a Chinese Classroom Training the Communists of Tomorrow   Students must now complete up to five courses to graduate — including a class on Marxism, one on morality, a modern Chinese history course, and “situation and policy education,”

TES [UK]. Teachers ‘should model risky behaviour for pupils’

UNITED STATES
American Institutes for Research (AIR). Better Data May Equal Better Prepared Teachers   The lack of easy data sharing between K–12 systems and teacher preparation may be costly, in terms of the quality of instruction by new teachers. Without knowing how graduates perform in the first years in the profession, preparation providers are hard-pressed to know how to improve their programs.

Chalkbeat. To reinvent career education, these Indiana districts are making up their own rules   The coalition is also requesting the ability to create its own district teacher licenses. The licenses don’t have to meet the usual accreditation requirements from the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation. Teachers would still have to follow rules for criminal background checks, but the coalition members hope the licenses would have fewer requirements and let more people teach classes in subjects affiliated with career and technical education.

EdWeek.
1) Is There a Link Between Civics Requirements and Teacher Working Conditions?   Social studies teachers … tend to enter the classroom through traditional teacher-preparation programs rather than through alternative programs like Teach For America.
2) No More SAT for Teachers Who Want Certification in Michigan   Sen. Marty Knollenberg, a Republican from Troy, says the SAT doesn’t measure enthusiasm, passion or competency in a certain subject. He says it can be another hurdle to getting people into the teaching profession. The new law kicks in on Sept. 25.
3) Parkland Survivor David Hogg: Nothing More Powerful Than a ‘Pissed-Off Teacher’   “We want our educators like you to be armed—armed with books, papers, pencils, computers, and the supplies and resources you need to help us soar and thrive in this world,” he said.
4) Reading Is Fundamental. But It’s Not a Fundamental Right, Court Rules   And here’s a take from Camika Royal, a teacher-educator: Apparently, the state of Michigan is required to have schools, and schooling is compulsory, but the state is not required to actually teach students to read.

InsideHigherEd. Ed Department Says It Didn’t Botch State Authorization Delay   A notice confirming the two-year delay in putting the new rule in place “was on public inspection Friday (6/29),” the department said. Though the document was “published on paper July 3, the effective date was still Friday (6/29).”

NPREd.
1) Senators to DeVos On TEACH Grant Debacle: ‘Urgent That These Mistakes Are Fixed’   The Education Department confirms that just 15 percent — 1,671 recipients — had their loans changed back to grants.
2) The Ongoing Battle Between Science Teachers And Fake News   A recent study out of Penn State showed that one-third of science teachers are open to the idea that climate change could be naturally occurring, instead of human caused. This poses a particular challenge to people like Susan Yoon, who are training the next generation of science teachers. She’s a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education.

NYTimes.
1) Cynthia Nixon. Parent. Activist. Governor?  We should be focusing on how to eliminate high stakes consequences associated with tests for students, teachers and schools and to reduce testing.
2) Migrant Shelters Are Becoming Makeshift Schools for Thousands of Children  Teachers at the schools are sometimes not state-certified as teachers, according to these accounts… ICE standards say children held at family detention centers should have a curriculum and state-certified teachers essentially identical to those at a regular public school.
3) Trump Administration Reverses Obama on Affirmative Action   In a pair of policy guidance documents, the Education and Justice departments told elementary and secondary schools and college campuses to use “the compelling interests” established by the court to achieve diversity. 

ProvidenceJournal. SAT requirement waning in R.I., and nationally | Poll   Salve Regina adopted a test-optional admission policy in 2011, with two exceptions, nursing and education, because licensing in those professions requires graduates to pass standardized exams.

NEW YORK STATE
CICU Schools of Education survey. CICU is collecting feedback for NYSED on the Independent Sector Schools of Education’s awareness of the Next Generation Learning Standards, inclusion of the standards in your programs, and involvement in or help with implementation of the standards in your program

NYSED.
1) Notice of Adoption

• Grade-Level Extensions for Certain Candidates Who Hold a Students with Disabilities Generalist CertificateSubject: Grade-level extensions for certain candidates who hold a Students with Disabilities Generalist certificate. Purpose: To expand the pool of qualified teachers of students with disabilities is to extend the grade levels in which they can teach

2) Office of Higher Education. June Newsletter

• Grade-Level Extensions for Certain Candidates Who Hold a Students with Disabilities Generalist Certificate
• Reinstatement of the Educational Technology Specialist CST Safety Net
• Educator preparation providers (EPPs) may now choose to pursue accreditation through CAEP or AAQEP.
• Multi-Subject: teachers of Childhood (grade 1–Grade 6) part two: mathematics Practice quiz

3) Open Comment Period.

• Reinstatement of the Educational Technology Specialist Content Specialty Test Safety Net for Candidates Seeking Certification Purpose: To allow candidates to take either the redeveloped CST or the predecessor CST. Public comment will be received until: 60 days after publication of this notice – by AUGUST 26, 2018. Data, views or arguments may be submitted to: Rebecca Coyle, NYS Education Department, Office of Higher Education, 89 Washington Avenue, Room 975 EBA, Albany, NY 12234, (518) 473-9763, email: [email protected]

4) Statement from Chancellor Betty A. Rosa and Commissioner MaryEllen Elia on Trump Administration’s Repeal of Obama-Era Guidance for Schools

New York State Teacher Certification Exams (NYSTCE). Ongoing Recruitment for Content Experts for Teacher Certification Examination Test Development

Professional Standards and Practices Board (PSPB). March meeting minutes,  April meeting minutes

NEW YORK CITY
Teachers College. Unshaken: Scholarships have helped Ayesha Rabadi-Raol overcome the unthinkable to achieve her dreams   Ayesha is interested in the experiences of “transnational” immigrant student teachers, and – in the current political climate — in helping them “take advantage of TC as a place of activism and change to provide a platform for socially and historically marginalized populations.” She hopes to become a teacher educator herself after completing her dissertation.