Month: July 2019

GLOBAL
Inter Press Service. Finland’s Education System Leads Globally.  In terms of what other countries, such as the United States should learn from Finland, Dr. Samuel E. Abrams, director of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Teachers College, Columbia University had this to say… Second, we should follow Finland in preparing teachers with high-quality master’s programs in pedagogical theory and practice”…

OECD.
1) TALIS Initial Teacher Preparation study   Australia, Japan, Korea, Netherlands, Norway and the United States, with Wales (United Kingdom), are participating in the study.
2) Teaching, collaboration and the future of education: insights from teachers in the Slovak Republic   …organised by Slovakia’s premier teacher training institute, Metodicko-Pedagogické Centrum (MPC), in collaboration with the OECD, and supported by Teach For All. The forum aimed to encourage greater collaboration among Slovakian teachers, but there was considerable debate around exactly how to create a culture of collaboration in schools. 

 

UNITED STATES
AACTE. Testifying Before Congress, VCU Education Dean Urges ‘Immediate and Innovative Action’  Andrew Daire, dean of the School of Education at Virginia Commonwealth University, testified at the U.S. House Wednesday about how VCU is working to prepare high-quality, dedicated classroom teachers and encouraged Congress to support similar initiatives across the country.

AAQEP. CFP Quality Assurance Symposium, Feb. 27, Atlanta [deadline July 31]

Chalkbeat. How one Illinois program aims to train more resilient, longer-lasting teachers   Students teach in the morning, then attend trainings in the afternoons. They receive a $2,000 stipend — a modest amount, but better than unpaid student teaching positions. Golden Apple requires that participants commit to teaching for five years in a high-poverty or academically low-ranking school. 

EdSource. Plan to expose all students to physics missing one element — teachers   Sixty physics majors graduated from Long Beach State this past school year, according to Galen Pickett, a physics professor at the university. Of those, 10 are expected to go on to become credentialed physics teachers…

EdWeek.
1) Beto O’Rourke’s Education Plan: A Surge in Federal Funds, With Equity Strings Attached   He also proposed providing teachers with student debt relief, working with minority serving insitutions to diversify the teacher workforce, reforming school discipline to decrease racial disparities, boosting school infrastructure funding, fully funding the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and providing incentives for teachers to seek additional training and graduate degrees.
2) K-12 Dealmaking: Age of Learning Partners With HMH, Pearson Lands Egyptian Testing Contract; ETS and Khan Academy Partner on Teacher Prep   Teacher candidates can use this product to create a personalized learning plan to prepare for the Praxis Core Academic Skills for Educators (Core) test, an exam required by many teacher preparation programs.
3) Teacher-Preparation Programs Again Have a Choice of Accreditors. But Should They?   In one notable example, Teachers College, Columbia University—the first and largest graduate school of education in the country—switched from CAEP to AAQEP and is in the early stages of the accreditation process. “The issue for us fundamentally is that CAEP is a very top-down compliance approach, whereas AAQEP is much more about peer-review—there is really a much more holistic approach to meeting standards,” said Kelly Parkes, an associate professor and the chair of the teacher education policy committee at Teachers College. “We need an accreditation process that would allow us to be flexible and sensitive to our context and our needs. … As a leader in teacher preparation, … you need to have room to have innovation and try [it] out for a year or two, … rather than being cookie-cutter.”
4) To Recruit More Teachers of Color, This District Posted a Unique Job Ad    “We are most interested in finding the best candidate for the job, and that candidate may be one who comes from a less traditional background. We would encourage you to apply, even if you don’t believe you meet every one of our qualifications described.”

Education Writers Association. School Discipline Reform: Easier Said Than Done?  Ask your local colleges’ teacher education programs if they are educating aspiring teachers about techniques to avoid student suspensions. Classroom management is always the toughest part of a new teacher’s job, and recent college graduates may face a particularly hard time if they are unaware of restorative justice or other new strategies many public schools are now embracing. 

New York Times. It’s Easy to Forget, but a Program to Forgive Student Loans Already Exists: Democrats are campaigning to fix an issue that is already starting to resolve itself for many teachers and other public servants.  Since undergraduates legally can’t borrow that much federal money, the forgiveness program is surely dominated by graduate students. A sizable number are most likely public schoolteachers, half of whom have graduate degrees.

Washington Post.
1) Amid teacher shortages, Virginia takes steps to lure students into the profession   The 188,000-student school system has issued teaching offers to graduating high school students who participate in the Virginia Teachers for Tomorrow Program, which aims to attract students to the field of education and help bolster the state’s supply of teachers. The high school students are invited to return to Fairfax as teachers once they have graduated college and become licensed, said Fairfax Superintendent Scott Brabrand.
2) The Mueller report: An educational tool for teachers — and a surprising hit with book clubs

 

NEW YORK STATE
New York Post. Regents get set to guarantee even more bad New York schools   This follows a sustained drive by the Regents to reduce teacher-training standards, water down state tests, abandon efforts to hold teachers accountable and on and on.

NYSED Board of Regents. Appointment of Deputy Commissioner for P12 Instructional Support VOTED, that the Board of Regents approve the appointment of Dr. Kimberly Young Wilkins to the position of Deputy Commissioner for P12 Instructional Support.

 

NEW YORK CITY
Chankbeat. NYC ditched its school turnaround program months ago. Principals are still wondering what comes next.   Teachers at the same school received training from Teachers College to improve writing instruction, which the principal linked to gains in student performance. But it’s unlikely, the principal said, that the school will continue the training for new teachers without the financial support of Renewal given other competing demands on the school’s budget.

City Journal. Classrooms of the Absurd: New York’s public school system embraces social-justice education theories—even as the city’s successful charter schools show what really works.  It’s complete nonsense, as is so much of the effluvia now leaking from America’s graduate schools of education, such as “implicit classroom bias”—the notion that white teachers can’t instruct black students without first having subconscious racism washed from their brains.

NYDailyNews. Non-unionized Pre-K teachers say new pay raise leaves them in the cold   At least for now, the pay raise City Council Speaker Corey Johnson heralded as “historic” only applies to about 300 certified, unionized teachers. Another 1500 non-unionized educators with identical credentials, according to city estimates, are still waiting to hear if and when they’ll be included.

Philanthropy News Digest. Columbia’s Teachers College Receives $6 Million for Dance Institute   “As a result of Jody’s foresight, commitment, and generosity, there are now generations of new certified dance teachers teaching in K–12 schools and a growing corps of faculty at universities and colleges,” said Barbara Bashaw, TC’s Arnhold Professor of Practice, director of the Dance Education Program…

Teachers College. Making Dance Education an Institution: Jody and John Arnhold Give TC $10.45 Million to Advance Dance Education Nationwide   These relationships will inspire new thinking and scholarship and foster professional networks and standardized practices to further formalize pre-K-12 dance education and teacher preparation as a field of academic study and inquiry. 

GLOBAL
International Task Force on Teachers for Education 2030. TEACHER TASK FORCE SUPPORTS CALL TO #COMMITTOEDUCATION   This worrying trend is coupled with the data showing that the proportion of trained teachers has also been falling. In sub-Saharan Africa, only 50% of teachers meet the minimum required training at secondary level, and 64% in primary, because since 2000, the focus has been on solving the teacher shortage and schools have been hiring contract teachers without qualifications to close the quantitative gaps at lower cost.

OECD Directorate for Education and Skills. How Teachers Learn. The publication… summarises the TALIS 2018 findings on teachers’ initial and professional development…

SwissInfo. Wanted: 10,000 teachers a year for Swiss schools  According to SRF, 5,000 trainee teachers graduate each year, leaving a yearly teacher shortfall of 5,000. Of these, around a fifth – 1,000 – will have dropped out of teaching within five years…

UNESCO Global Education Monitoring [GEM] Report. Education as healing: Addressing the trauma of displacement through social and emotional learning   A new policy paper …calls for better training for teachers to provide psychosocial support to migrant and refugee children who have lived through traumatic events.

University of KwaZulu-Natal. UKZN’s youngest dean makes P-Rating history  The rating, also known as the president’s award, is given to young researchers (under the age of 35) for exceptional potential, demonstrated in their published work and research outputs…Msibi, who became the youngest dean in SA when he was appointed dean and head of the School of Education at UKZN at the age of 34… He holds a master’s degree in Education from the Teachers College at Columbia University in the United States…

 

UNITED STATES
AACTE.
1) JTE Earns High Ranking, Rise in Impact Factor   In the recently released 2019 Journal Citation Reports, AACTE’s Journal of Teacher Education (JTE) achieved a 2-year impact factor score of 3.263… The impact factor increased from JTE’s last score of 3.180…
2) State of the State Webinar  For the first time since 1914, all but one state legislature in the U.S. is dominated by a single party. The result has been a pattern of conservative leaning legislation in Republican-held states and liberal legislation in states controlled by Democrats. This is a political dynamic that will have far-reaching consequences for education policymaking well into the future. 

Center for American Progress. Student Debt: An Overlooked Barrier to Increasing Teacher Diversity   For individuals who have taught, 88 percent of Black students and 76 percent of Latinx students took out federal student loans to pay for college, compared with 73 percent of white students. As the data show, Latinx students were less likely to borrow federal student loan money than Black students, but they were more likely to borrow compared with white students. 

EdSource. Teacher hopefuls offered $10,000 to enter California State University residency program   California State University is accepting applications from students enrolled in teacher preparation programs who want to spend a year in a residency program and receive a $10,000 scholarship in exchange for promising to teach in a high-needs school for two years

Education Week.
1) 14 Questions Educators Should Ask About AI-Based Products   As for fears that AI will eliminate teaching positions, Oranje is optimistic that it will not. His hope is that AI will “actually expand teaching,” he said, and that there will be a need for more educators, rather than fewer.
2) Schools still struggling with how to teach about slavery  “It’s never OK to recreate painful oppressive events, even in the name of education,” said Mara Sapon-Shevin, a professor of inclusive education at Syracuse University, who said teachers risk harming their students’ sense of belonging, safety and inclusion. “One would never simulate an Indian massacre or having Jews march into the ovens.” Nor should teachers “gamify” painful history, Teaching Tolerance Director Maureen Costello said, citing exercises like having students compete to remove seeds from cotton.
3) Teach For America’s Defenders and Detractors Are Both Wrong [commentary by TC Prof. J. Henig]  The story was about the evolution of Teach For America away from its founding mission “to tap idealistic graduates of elite universities to teach at traditional public schools in high-poverty areas” into “an informal but vital ally of the charter school movement.”
4) The Deficit Lens of the ‘Achievement Gap’ Needs to Be Flipped. Here’s How  We should be very cautious of measures and practices that can influence educators to perceive students, or groups of students, as deficient, unless we accompany those measures and practices with the training educators would need to implement them effectively and equitably.

Florida Trend. Peace Corps and the University of South Florida Announce New Paul D. Coverdell Fellows Program  The Paul D. Coverdell Fellows Program began in 1985 at Teachers College, Columbia University and now includes more than 100 university partners across the country, from the District of Columbia to Hawaii. The program is reserved for students who have successfully completed Peace Corps service abroad.

Forbes. Beto O’Rourke: Let’s Forgive All Student Loan Debt For Teachers   O’Rourke’s proposal differs from the current Teach Loan Forgiveness Program in several ways. First, it would have no limit on the amount of student loan forgiveness, which compares to a maximum of $17,500 under the current program. Second, it would apply to all public school teachers, not only those who work in low-income school or educational service agencies. Third, it may not have a five-year teaching requirement.

Heavy. Jeffrey Epstein Net Worth: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know   Jeffrey Epstein started his career as a mathematician and teacher, attending the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences before leaving without a degree to teach calculus and physics at the Dalton School.

Hechinger Report. Teaching global warming in a charged political climate   The science behind climate change is complicated and evolving, and most teachers aren’t prepared to teach it well. Many textbooks don’t touch the topic, according to science educators… A state agency [OK] funded by the oil and gas industry pumps money into teacher training and classroom materials, including books featuring a cartoon character called Petro Pete, with the goal of promoting fossil fuels. 

NEAToday. Report: Experienced Teachers Key to Students Beating the Odds   And California isn’t alone. An Arizona Republic investigation found that emergency teaching certifications in that state have increased 400 percent. Meanwhile, as Oklahoma schools opened this fall, state officials approved their 2,153^rd emergency teaching certificate—up from 32 seven years ago.

NPR.  Broken Promises: Teachers Sue U.S. Over Student Loans That Weren’t Forgiven

Washington Post.
1) Financier in sex abuse case went from math whiz to titan. He taught calculus and physics at the prestigious Dalton School, a prep school in Manhattan, from 1973 to 1975, despite not having a college degree. Attorney General William Barr’s father, Donald Barr, was headmaster at the time.
2) How student debt hinders teacher diversity   Authors of the study point to the Boston Teacher Residency as a model to replicate. The state program has a goal of ensuring that people of color constitute at least half of each graduating class. Graduates earn a teacher’s license and a master’s degree in education from the University of Massachusetts at Boston in a year. They receive a stipend, health benefits and a free education if they teach in Boston’s public schools for three years.

 

NEW YORK STATE
NYSATE. Newsletter Vol. 1 No. 2

• Preview of the Annual 2019 NYSATE/NYACTE Fall Conference
• Nominations for NYSATE & NYACTE AWARDS
• Residency Mentoring Workshop in NYC August 5-6

USA Today. Here’s where it’s best (and worst) to be a teacher   With a cost of living adjusted average teacher pay of $72,643 a year, New York public school teachers are paid better than teachers in every state except for Massachusetts. 

 

NEW YORK CITY
Chalkbeat. NYC and union officials hail move toward pay parity for pre-K teachers but some worry over educators left out of deal   Under the agreement, certified teachers with masters and bachelors degrees would see their pay increase every October through 2021. By that date, certified teachers with a master’s degree would make at least $69,000, and certified teachers with a bachelor’s degree would earn about $61,000 — a jump of almost $21,000 and more than $17,000, respectively. 

Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts.  Important Announcement from Superintendent Vivian Orlen  Ms. Yeou-Jey Vasconcelos has been appointed Interim Acting Principal for LaGuardia. Ms. Vasconcelos comes to you from Talent Unlimited High School on the East Side, where she served as principal for four years… She is passionate about the arts, holding a … Master’s in Music and Music Education from [Teachers College] Columbia University.

Teachers College.
1) Graduate Gallery 2019: Mercedes Lysaker (M.A., Music & Music Education) teaches music with strings attached   While at Teachers College, Lysaker discovered in herself a desire to “be a serious string pedagogue” – to invent “a pedagogy that really embraces everything a child is and brings into the lesson,” she said. “I think it’s my responsibility to teach everybody, exactly as they are.”
2) Teaching Residents @ Teachers College. July 2019 | Summer Edition Newsletter

GLOBAL
Center for Global Development. 30 New Findings in Global Education: RISE Conference 2019

• In rural Ghana, personal and professional challenges in the lives of new teachers are associated with lower learning and reduced socioemotional development among their students
• In middle schools in Pakistan, in-class technology together with teacher training (to help them integrate the technology effectively) increased both effort and test scores among students

Education HQ Australia. Practical experience is crucial for improving teachers’ confidence in their classroom and student management   The changing landscape of Australian society, thus classrooms, means that it might be time to review the training provided to pre-service and in-service teachers and to ensure they are prepared with what they need to know and do to meet the increasingly diverse challenges they encounter.

Education International. “The Fast Track for Newly Arrived Teachers in Sweden: the union’s perspective”   The Swedish government took the initiative of creating the so called “fast-track” into the teaching career since a relatively large group of immigrants had a background in teaching.

Forbes. Number Of Teachers Quitting The Classroom After Just One Year Hits All-Time High   Almost one in six teachers (15.3%) who qualified in 2017 left the state school sector in England within a year, according to data published by the Department for Education today…Teaching training courses have also repeatedly failed to hit their targets, with particular shortages in STEM subjects.

 

UNITED STATES
Associated Press. Official: Oklahoma emergency teacher licenses up 54% in 2018-19   State-issued nonaccredited teaching certificates allow people without a state teaching license to teach in a classroom for two years while they complete training. The vast majority of nonaccredited teachers have degrees and work experience in other professions. 

Association of Teacher Educators. 2020 Annual Meeting.  Atlantic City, NJ Feb.15-20  Call for Proposals extended to July 15

Chronicle of Higher Education. Demand for Campus Child Care Is Growing. Choosing How to Provide It Can Be Fraught.   In California, a teacher at a for-profit center is required to have only half the early-childhood-education credits required of full teachers at nonprofit centers, and assistant teachers at for-profit centers aren’t required to have any.

Education Week. Forty Percent of Elementary School Teachers’ Work Could Be Automated By 2030, McKinsey Global Institute Predicts   It’s also important that today’s educators understand how the ways in which work is gendered could affect the futures their female students face. Women may be particularly well served by receiving the training to participate in flexible and remote work arrangements that involve telecommuting, the report suggests.

Richmond Times-Dispatch. Virginia launches teaching degrees at colleges in effort to curtail teacher shortage   The state is launching 53 new teacher preparation programs and 25 new degrees, by Gov. Ralph Northam announced last week, that will let people become teachers after getting an education degree in four years.

Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning and Equity (SCALE). edTPA Team Transition News  Dr. Andrea Whittaker has decided to step away from her role as the National Director of edTPA…

UChicago Consortium on School Research. Arts Education And Social-Emotional Learning Outcomes Among K–12 Students: Developing A Theory Of Action   This does not mean that being intentional about leveraging social-emotional components is easy. To the contrary, doing intentional social-emotional work can be quite difficult at times and is not necessarily a skill that is taught in teacher-training programs.

University of North Carolina-Charlotte. Cato College of Education: UNCC Diversity Recruitment Video

Washington Post. Borrowing for college just got a little cheaper

 

NEW YORK STATE
New York Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. Excelsior: Leadership in Teaching and Learning— first fully online, open-access issue

NYSATE/NYACTE Annual Fall Conference. October 17-19 Gideon Putnam Resort, Saratoga Springs

NYS Legislature; Education Bills Passed.
1) Master’s-in-Education Teacher Incentive Scholarship. This bill opens New York’s Master’s-in-Education Teacher Incentive Scholarship program to students who pursue graduate education degrees at private, not-for-profit colleges and universities.
2)  Graduate GPA Bill. After several years of advocacy, a bill to end the requirement that students pursuing graduate degrees in education fields have a minimum 3.0 undergraduate GPA finally passed both Chambers

NYS Register.  Open Public Comment Period. Professional Development Plans and Other Related Requirements for School Districts and BOCES   (4) A teacher acting as a mentor to a new teacher in the classroom teaching service as part of a school district’s or BOCES’ mentoring program pursuant to section 100.2(dd) of this Title may, at the discretion of the school district or BOCES, credit up to 30 hours of such time toward his/her CTLE requirement in each five-year registration period. (5) a teacher acting as a mentor to a teacher candidate pursuant to section 52.21 of this Title may, at the discretion of the school district or BOCES, credit up to 25 hours of such time toward his/her CTLE requirement in each five-year registration period.   Data, views or arguments may be submitted by August 10 to: Petra Maxwell, NYS Education Department, 89 Washington Avenue, Office of Higher Education, Albany, NY 12234, (518) 486-3633, email: [email protected]

 

NEW YORK CITY
Bank Street College Prepared to Teach. Residency Mentoring Workshop August 5-6

Chalkbeat. What NYC’s departing instructional guru learned overseeing the nation’s largest school system Weinberg [TC MA, English Ed] oversaw curriculum, teacher development, college preparation efforts, and managed some of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s biggest priorities, including making computer-science classes available to all students by 2025.

Teachers College.
1) Class Action: The case for empowering our teachers.In a three part series, TC community members ponder teaching’s challenges, reflect on how TC equips teachers to thrive, and offer ideas for restoring the stature teaching deserves.
2) Student and Alumni Profiles
Kimberely Durall (M.A. ’15)   “I majored in education to keep learning while inspiring kids with a background like mine. I didn’t want the limits the world places on students to follow them into my classroom.”

Billy Fong (M.A. ’11)   Fong, who received the 2018 Empire State Excellence in Teaching Award, credits Central Park East II’s leadership for supporting him, and TC mentors such as Celia Oyler for encouraging him to think creatively. 

Raven Hebert (MA ’06) “Teaching was what Hebert wanted to do, and variety was why. At TC, inspired by science education faculty member Jessica Riccio, she embraced her “inner happy nerd” and learned to gear instruction to different students’ needs.”

Lisa McDonald (Ph.D. Candidate)  “My being a teacher stems from this brown little girl who wanted someone to take the time to know me,” says McDonald, a TC Science Education doctoral student… McDonald next encountered a teacher of color at TC, where Professor of Science & Education Felicia Mensah has acquainted her with critical race theory — racism viewed as part of America’s systemic fabric. 

Rebeca Madrigal (M.A. ’98)   “I had to create a channel for my student — his experiences in Mexico,” she recalls. “It was Fidel’s first sign he had knowledge. And it opened my eyes to what being a teacher means.”

Emily Moxey (M.Ed. ’06) As a teenager, Moxey cared for a neighboring family’s two-year-old child who was deaf. In TC’s deaf education program, she learned to “fit the instruction to the child, not vice versa.”

Kevin Paiz-Ramirez (M.A. ’13)  Paiz-Ramirez immediately thought of his TC mentor, hip-hop science educator Christopher Emdin, who advocates knowing what kids face each day, whether it’s dodging gangs en route to school or dealing with gender discrimination.

Larrolyn Patterson Parms-Ford (M.A. ’19, Music & Music Education) Brings Her Voice to the Classroom    We expect black women to be musical artists. But where are the black female music teachers?”…She’s proud of the conversations that ensued, one of which concluded with a black female student expressing her desire to one day become a music teacher as well.

Eric Williamson (M.A. ’19) Williamson learned that empowering young people to create music they find relevant inspires their broader musical curiosity. At the Teachers College Community School in West Harlem, his students performed hip hop and rap as well as classical music and standards.