Month: September 2018

GLOBAL
NYTimes. France Bans Smartphones in Schools Through 9th Grade. Will It Help Students? However, he acknowledged that phones were a top concern of the young teachers he trains, who inevitably ask how to deal with smartphone use in class. “Most of them think that they will be more protected with the law,” he said. “Let’s wait and see. But I doubt it.”

Project Syndicate. Education in the Age of Automation One potential barrier to this approach is a dearth of well-trained teachers. In Sub-Saharan African countries, for example, there are some 44 pupils for every qualified secondary school teacher, on average; for primary schools, the ratio is even worse, at 58 to one.

The World Bank. Educating for the future: The case of East Asia   3. Select and support teachers throughout their careers To help teachers become more efficient in implementing 21st century curricular reform, more and better pre- and in-service teacher training and development are needed.

 

UNITED STATES
Chalkbeat.
1) Have you thought about teaching? Colorado teachers union sells the profession in new videos  There are a lot of factors contributing to a shortage of teachers in Colorado and around the nation. One of them — with potentially long-term consequences — is that far fewer people are enrolling in or graduating from teacher preparation programs.
2) Michigan’s ‘band-aid’ for filling teaching jobs is expanding. Here’s what you need to know.   It shows that teachers with alternative certification are concentrated in Detroit, largely at charter schools, and that they’re disproportionately at a handful of schools.
3) With the alarm sounded statewide over shortages, Chicago forges ahead with a teacher experiment   …in Illinois, where education advocates say the teacher shortage has become dire, residencies have the potential to address a host of problems, from filling critical vacancies in special education to building an on-ramp for career changers and community members who have deep ties to their neighborhood schools.

EdWeek.
1) A New Day for Teacher Prep   By working in close collaboration with one another and with states and P-12 partners, AAQEP members are positioned to get better and better at developing profession-ready educators with the capacity to support success for all students. It’s a new day for accreditation in educator preparation.
2) Dual-Language Learning: 6 Key Insights for Schools   “That’s been one of our biggest challenges, to find a pipeline of teachers, qualified teachers. We’ve been finding an alternate way to help certify teachers that we need.”
3) New Teachers Are Often Assigned to High-Poverty Schools. Why Not Train Them There?   “This is a new movement in education,” Darling-Hammond said in an interview. “It’s the sign of a new way of thinking about how to bring in new teachers productively. It’s a great antidote to the traditional U.S. way of putting teachers in classrooms and letting them either sink or swim.
4) What K-12 and Higher Education Can Learn From Each Other It is important for K-12 educators to realize that higher education is built on research, not teaching. . Moreover, while Ph.D.s often tend to be the instructors of record in college courses, there is actually very little in terms of the academic preparation for a doctorate degree that prepares them for classroom instruction. This, too, is a sharp contrast to K-12, where teachers largely must undergo a teacher-preparation program to become certified. 

Encoura. How Prospective Student Mindsets Influence Major and College Choice   ROI-seeking Career Pragmatists, along with career-minded Career through Academics and Experiential Interest students, are more likely to prefer an in-state public institution. These Mindsets are often sensitive to price, and likely overlap heavily with students interested in studying healthcare, education, and social work.

Hechinger Report. Ten jobs that are safe from robots   High school teachers need at least a bachelor’s degree and, to work in public schools, a teaching license or certification… Due to its highly interpersonal nature, high school teaching ranks very low on the automation-risk scale.

InsideHigherEd.
1) Education Dept. Blocked From Canceling Debt Collection Contracts
2) Multiple Measurements to Predict Success “We’ve got enough evidence now for people to move in the direction of using multiple measurements,” said Elisabeth Barnett, the lead researcher on the project from the Community College Research Center and a co-author of the report. “One thing becoming clearer is that high school GPA is an especially good measurement.”
3) Positive View of Higher Ed, With Lots of Caveats When it comes to attitudes about certain colleges, the public view is mixed. The public is more likely to have a favorable view (and any view) of public than of private higher education.

Vox. Hillary Clinton and Helen Keller could soon be out of Texas classrooms. Moses gets to stay in.   The board took a preliminary vote to make a number of changes to curriculum, including scrapping mention of Clinton and Hellen Keller from sections on citizenship and removing a phrase referring to the “optimism of the many immigrants who sought a better life in America.”

 

NEW YORK STATE
NYSED. State Education Department Announces Bronx International Community High School Teacher Named 2019 Teacher of the Year   He earned his Master of Arts in Secondary Education with a specialization in History from Bard College. Susso holds a professional teaching certificate in 7-12 social studies.

NYS Board of Regents.
1) Early Childhood Workgroup’s Blue Ribbon Committee Final Recommendations [Comm. incl. TC Prof. Souto-Manning]
Strengthening the Early Childhood Workforce

• Elevate Teacher Preparation and Professional Development
• Develop Career Pathways for Childhood Educators
• Recruit a High Quality Workforce
• Strengthen Teacher and Leader Preparation
• Develop Concentrations in Early Childhood Teacher Certification

2) Proposed Addition of a New Section 80-3.16 to the Regulations of the Commissioner of Education to Allow Individuals Completing a Program Accredited by the American Speech, Language, and Hearing Association (ASHA) to Obtain an Initial Certificate in Speech
3) Proposed Amendments to Section 80-3.7 of the Regulations of the Commissioner of Education Relating to the Initial Certificate Requirements for Individuals Who Have a Graduate Degree and Two Years of Postsecondary Teaching Experience in the Area of Certification
4) Proposed Amendment to Section 80-1.5 of the Regulations of the Commissioner of Education Relating to the Reinstatement of the Educational Technology Specialist Content Specialty Test Safety Net for Candidates Seeking Education Technology Specialist Certification
5) Proposed Amendment to Section 80-1.5 of the Regulations of the Commissioner of Education Relating to the Extension of the edTPA Safety Net for Candidates Who Receive a Failing Score on the Library Specialist edTPA

 

NEW YORK CITY
NYPost. City may have to pay out $1.7B over biased teaching exam   The teachers’ case involves the Liberal Arts and Sciences Test, a state-mandated exam that city educators and job applicants were required to take from 1993 to 2004… Four teachers in 1996 first filed a suit over the test. They targeted both the state and city, but an appeals court ultimately let Albany off the hook since the city is the teachers’ employer.

Teachers College. Center for Innovation in Teacher Education and Development (CITED). TeacherEd Confidential: Venture Capitalism and the Academic Underbelly [Oct. 3 7:30pm]

The 74. Investigation: New Records Reveal What It Takes to Be One of the 75 NYC Teachers Fired for Misconduct or Incompetence Between 2015 and 2016   Termination in New York City does not result automatically in revocation of a state teaching certificate, and most of the fired teachers retained their license.

GLOBAL
Education International. Germany: “Higher investment in teacher education is overdue”  In a joint communiqué released on 10 September, the Gewerkschaft Erziehung und Wissenschaft (GEW) and the Verband Bildung und Erziehung (VBE) demand higher investment in teacher training, so that it can be quantitatively and qualitatively expanded and improved.

Egypt Independent. Egypt’s Education Ministry to open 34 Japanese schools nationwide  The ministry also signed a contract with 700 teachers to work at the Japanese schools in a selection process that took three months, Shawki added. The ministry will start training the teachers on September 13.

NZHearld. Teacher shortage threatens Māori language courses   Auckland University’s director of secondary teacher education Dr Ngaire Hoben said there was a “critical shortage” of trainees preparing to teach te reo Māori.

UNESCO. World Teachers’ Day 2018 International Conference  This year’s theme, “The right to education means the right to a qualified teacher,” has been chosen to remind the global community that the right to education cannot be achieved without the right to trained and qualified teachers. [Oct. 4-5]

 

UNITED STATES
AACTE.
1) 2019 Strategic Planning Process
2) Degrees of Change: UConn Increases Diversity in Teaching Programs   Over the past two years, the percentage of students of color enrolled in the five-year integrated bachelor’s and master’s program has increased by 10 percent to 30 percent for the class entering this year. And enrollment of students of color in the teaching certificate program for college graduates is now 25 percent.

American Public Media. Hard Words: Why aren’t kids being taught to read?  Most teachers nationwide are not being taught reading science in their teacher preparation programs because many deans and faculty in colleges of education either don’t know the science or dismiss it. As a result of their intransigence, millions of kids have been set up to fail.

Daily Herald. Teacher shortage spurs non-traditional hires in Utah County  Utah’s ARL program, short for Alternative Routes to Licensure, allows individuals without an education background, especially those with a bachelor’s degree in another field, to train on the job and teach while pursuing a teaching license.

Deans for Impact. Five Colleges of Education Join Together to Address Statewide Call to Action  Leaders of five Illinois colleges of education today announced they are joining forces to create the Illinois Ed Prep Impact Network, which will address a need identified by the state’s school superintendents and the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) to ensure that every child has access to effective teachers.

EdWeek.
1) Climate Change Is Not Up for Debate. Why Do So Many Teachers Act Like It Is?   Inadequate training deters teachers from presenting climate change in accordance with the scientific consensus. But so does the ideological polarization of public opinion on climate change.
2) Differentiating Instruction: It’s Not as Hard as You Think (Video)
3) For Educators Vying for State Office, Teachers’ Union Offers ‘Soup to Nuts’ Campaign Training   See Educators Run has held three trainings since 2017 and graduated about 200 educators. Any NEA member who is running for office, or considering a run, can apply for a space, and the program is free for participants.
4) How I Talk to My White Preservice Teachers About Diversity  … in this class we are going to grapple with issues that are going to make them uncomfortable. This is important because they are going to be teachers. It’s especially important because they are mostly young, white women.
5) Is What Once Made U.S. Schools Great Now Holding Them Back?  The United States had very few people with educations above the primary school level, so it had to turn to teachers who had only a little more education than their students…Because the women who filled these new positions were expected to resign as soon as they got pregnant, it made no sense to invest in the development of their skills…The teachers were treated as interchangeable parts of the machine, just like the workers on the factory floor. 

Hechinger Report.
1) Kids struggle to read when schools leave phonics out   The schools of education were complying with the letter of the law, but many faculty members didn’t really understand the science themselves. The professors needed training.
2) Teachers colleges struggle to blend technology into teacher training  But while would-be teachers are coming in comfortable with technology, this doesn’t translate into knowing how to use it to engage young minds or to tailor a lesson to meet the learning needs and styles of individual students.

InsideHigherEd.
1) Marygrove Launches P-20 Partnership  The Marygrove College campus in Detroit will become a “cradle-to-career” site under new plans announced Thursday, hosting pre-school through graduate-level education, including a teacher-education program designed to emulate the hospital residencies used to prepare doctors for their careers.
2) We Need to Rethink Training for Ph.D.s   Why aren’t our graduate programs teaching students how to teach… rather than preparing them for the far more rare research job?

NMPED. New Mexico Has More Exemplary and Highly Effective Teachers Than Ever Before  Teachers across the state have shared that NMTEACH helps improve their practice, their students’ academic growth, and bolsters the state’s continued efforts to improve teacher preparation and mentoring, individualize professional development, and dramatically expand teacher-leadership opportunities.

NYTimes. Does Teacher Diversity Matter for Students’ Learning?  Yet the teacher work force is becoming more female: 77 percent of teachers in public and private elementary and high schools are women, up from 71 percent three decades ago… Long term, the evidence suggests it would make a difference to train and hire more diverse teachers. 

Time Magazine. ‘I Work 3 Jobs And Donate Blood Plasma to Pay the Bills.’ This Is What It’s Like to Be a Teacher in America Nursing shortages in some parts of the U.S. have led to signing bonuses, free housing, tuition reimbursement and other perks, while teacher shortages have contributed to some states increasing class sizes, shortening school weeks and enacting emergency certification for people who aren’t trained as educators.

US News & World Report. Best Education Schools, Ranked in 2018

Ranking	Students who took an assessment to become a certified, licensed teacher: 2016-2017
1 UCLA	133
2 Harvard	36
2 UW-Madison	209
4 Stanford	89
4 U. of Penn.	36
6 NYU	190
7 Teachers Coll.	248
8 Vanderbilt	90
9 U. of Wash.	182
10 Northwestern	43

US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions. Full Committee Hearing. The Every Student Succeeds Act: States Leading The Way [10:00am Oct. 25]

Washington Post. The importance of asking hard questions about what students learn in school   The research on the inequities in school curriculum is staggering. An analysis conducted by the Education Trust recently found that a significant percentage of educators are not delivering rigorous content in math — and the problem is especially acute in schools with concentrations of poverty, where families aren’t able to supplement the lack of rigor.

 

NEW YORK STATE
NYSED
1) Board of Regents Sept. meetings
2) State Education Department Announces Proposed Changes to Every Student Succeeds Act Regulations
The Commissioner may also place under preliminary registration review any school… excessive use of uncertified teachers or teachers in subject areas other than those for which they possess certification.
3) State Education Department Awards $2 Million to 25 Mentor Teacher Internship Programs  These programs enable experienced teachers in a district or BOCES to provide guidance and support to beginning teachers in their first or second year of teaching.

 

NEW YORK CITY
Teachers College. Global Education Symposium Discussing science education and the role of STEM and general and science literacy; Teaching science and technology for the 21st century. Speakers incl: TC faculty F. Mensah, J. Riccio, M. Siegel [Oct. 11-12]

Urban Educator CGCS. Palm Beach District Partners with NYU To Prepare Teachers   Because coursework and mentoring with NYU Steinhardt faculty take place online, students will be immersed in classrooms in the School District of Palm Beach County without having to be on the university’s campus.