Month: August 2019

NOTE: Teacher Ed News will resume the week of Sept. 2

GLOBAL
Boston Globe. The ugly legacy of Ronald Reagan   In October 1971, when Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon had their little racist chat, several members of Teachers for East Africa and Teacher Education in East Africa were in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda for the US Agency for International Development, teaching their students, who (notwithstanding Reagan’s remark about footwear) were delightfully shoe-shod. 

Brookings Institute. Scaling education programs in the Philippines: A policymaker’s perspective   … system-wide approaches for improving teacher quality and encouraging responsive instructional practices to improve learning outcomes.

NYTimes. The Schoolteacher and the Genocide: He dreamed of educating the children in his village. But soon he learned that it was dangerous for the Rohingya to dream.   A friend of his, who taught Quranic school in the morning and afternoon at the mosque, suggested that Futhu hold a small class teaching children English and Burmese during the day. There were so many children who wanted to learn, the friend said. Together they collected two dozen students. 

UNESCO. Meeting Commitments: Are Countries On Tra­ck To A­chieve SDG 4? Target 4.c: By 2030, substantially increase the supply of qualified teachers, including through international cooperation for teacher training in  developing countries, especially least  developed countries and small island developing States

Wall Street Journal. To Really Learn, Our Children Need the Power of Play: The U.S. can learn a big lesson from Finland’s education system: Instead of stress and standardized testing, schools should focus on well-being and joy   The cultural shift is profound. Instead of annual, high-stakes standardized tests, Finnish children are assessed all day, every day, by a much more accurate instrument: trusted teachers who are selected, trained and respected as elite professionals.

 

UNITED STATES
AACTE. AACTE Welcomes New Dean in Residence to National Office

AACTE/SCALE. June/July edTPA Community Newsletter
1) New national director
2) 2020 national conference
3) Updated handbooks ant templates available
4) Annual and Biannual Summary Reports Available

Chalkbeat. I convinced my teachers to walk our students’ neighborhoods. It changed our school.   I had raised the idea that our teachers should tour the city of Camden. By “tour,” I didn’t mean take pictures and stop at a local restaurant to eat. I meant that teachers should walk on the same streets as their students to and from school. They should see the coexistence of pride and poverty…

EdWeek.
1) 5 Big Ed-Tech Problems to Solve in 2020: Q&A With ISTE’s Richard Culatta   District leaders have flagged a big problem, and ISTE is working to solve it: Until recently, there was no vendor-neutral program to teach teachers how to use technology effectively, Culatta said… He said that a teacher would never say they were a “Houghton-Mifflin teacher, I only use textbooks by Houghton-Mifflin.  Give me a break. Immediately, there were would be a conflict of interest.
2) Can PEMDAS Solve That Viral Math Problem? Teachers Debate   When writing problems, math teachers should be clear in what they’re asking of their students, teachers said. And there’s value in teaching students how to be clear communicators of math, too.
3) Teacher-Licensing Scheme Lands Memphis Man in Court   Authorities said Mumford directed the stand-ins to appear at test sites in Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi, where they would falsely identify themselves as the teachers who were registered for the test. “Defendant Mumford obtained tens of thousands of dollars from teachers and aspiring teachers during the conspiracy,” the indictment said.

Hechinger Report. Opinion: Why every English teacher should assign Toni Morrison [by J. Snider, Columbia Univ.]

NEPC. Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice: How Do Teachers Teach–Then and Now   How do most teachers teach? The short answer is that teachers draw from two traditions of teaching…

TeachThought. The TeachThought Podcast Ep. 173 How Can We Prepare Teachers For Deeper Learning?

US Federal Register. Notice Inviting Postsecondary Educational Institutions To Participate in Experiments Under the Experimental Sites Initiative; Federal Student Financial Assistance Programs Under Title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965, as Amended   Under the ESI, the Secretary has authority to grant waivers of certain title IV, HEA statutory or regulatory requirements to allow a limited number of institutions to participate in experiments to test alternative methods of administering the title IV… and (4) allowing institutions to pay low-income students for work experiences required by their program, such as student teaching and clinical rotations. 

 

NEW YORK STATE
NYSATE/NYACTE. Call for Nominations: R. Neal Appleby Outstanding Teacher Educator Award

 

NEW YORK CITY
Teachers College.
1) Celebrating a Family’s Exceptional Support: Thirty years of Jaffe Peace Corps Fellows  … support for Teachers College’sPeace Corps Fellows Program– a master’s degree program that prepares Returned Peace Corps Volunteers to teach in under-resourced New York City public schools…
2) Celebrating a Landmark Southern Educator – and TC Hero: Mississippi honors the late Jane Ellen McAllister, the nation’s first black woman to receive a Ph.D. in Education   Her Teachers College professor and advisor, Mabel Carney, subsequently wrote that “the real history of the study of American Negro education on the advanced level” began with McAllister’s TC thesis, titled “The Training of Negro Teachers in Louisiana.”
3) Teaching Residents at Teachers College (TR@TC). Summer Edition Newsletter

GLOBAL
DutchNews. Aspiring teachers fail entry test, adding to shortage woes   Over a quarter of the aspiring teachers failed the entry tests over the last few years, the paper writes, with history forming a particular stumbling block.

NZ Herald. Kindergarten teachers agree to $75 million collective pay parity deal   The new collective agreement will see entry level trained teachers’ pay go from $48,410 to $51,358 while the most senior staff will receive up to $107,770.

 

UNITED STATES
AACTE. Deal Struck to Raise FY20 & FY21 Budget Caps   For now, the next step to watch is the allocation of funding to each of the 12 appropriations bills in the Senate…including the Teacher Quality Partnership grant program, the Special Education Personnel Preparation grant program, and Title II of the Every Student Succeeds Act.

Brainerd Dispatch. Smith co-introduces bill to boost sagging teacher numbers across country   The Addressing Teacher Shortages Act would allow school districts across the country to apply for grants to help them to attract and retain the quality teachers they need.

CNN. Bill de Blasio: Public pre-K programs changed my children’s lives. Other American families deserve the same   One of my first priorities as President will be to provide universal pre-K for every child in the United States, as well as universal 3-K and full-day kindergarten. We’ll also create 500,000 new teaching jobs in the next 10 years.

Education Dive. Study: Latino children attending more racially isolated elementary schools   … white principals and teachers are less likely than nonwhite educators to say their university pre-service training programs adequately prepared them to work with students of color and those from low-income families. … One effort to better support educators working in diverse schools is the Reimagining Education Summer Institute at Teachers College, Columbia University, held earlier this month. Professor Amy Stuart Wells launched the institute in 2016 as a professional development initiative focusing on racial and ethnic diversity 

EducationWeek.
1) A Syllabus for the Next Democratic Debates: School Police, Race, and Teacher Pay   Nearly every K-12 plan released so far includes mentions of teacher pay, and many mention the need to make systemic efforts to train, recruit, and retrain more teachers of color.
2) Ways to Better Serve Often-Misunderstood English-Learners With Disabilities  A new brief from New America, English Learners with Disabilities: Shining a Light on Dual-Identified Students, offers a series of recommendations to help educators “more accurately identify ELs with disabilities and provide appropriate instructional services”…
3) What Ed. Schools Can Do About School Shootings (And Other Overwhelming Problems)[by C. Morphew, Johns Hopkins Univ. School of Education]. We want to provide schools, communities, and policymakers with knowledge and tools to make informed decisions, and to provide educators and families with the best practices to foster a safe and healthy school climate. This means revamping our own teacher- and administrator-preparation curriculum to include the best research and practice in safe and healthy schools as an integral part of training 21st century educators. 

Hechinger Report. Inside one school’s efforts to bridge the divide between white teachers and students of color   Most states “do not yet provide a description of culturally responsive teaching that is clear or comprehensive enough to support teachers” throughout their careers, the analysis found.

InsideHigherEd. Harris Would Give Billions to HBCUs and Minority-Serving Colleges   She’ll … provide $2.5 billion to support HBCU programs that will generate Black teachers, an expansion of her previous plan to increase teacher pay.

NJSpotlight. Where are teachers of color as schools try to serve students of color?   Higher education officials told lawmakers in recent hearings that students of color are having trouble passing the required teacher certification exams, like the Educational Testing Service’s Praxis exam. As a result, state education officials said this year they are looking to measure whether or not the state’s high school graduation tests adequately prepare students of color for the skills demanded by the Praxis. What’s more, white students typically make up three-quarters of the enrollment in college teaching programs to begin with.

NYTimes. Vivian Paley, Educator Who Promoted Storytelling, Dies at 90   In addition to teaching children, she mentored a generation of teachers, held workshops and lectured about her experiences in the classroom… Gillian D. McNamee, a protégé of Ms. Paley’s at Lab and now director of teacher education at the Erikson Institute in Chicago, said that after Ms. Paley would ask children what story they wanted to tell, she would connect it to other stories or to a book or something that happened in class.

Rand Corporation. Principal and Teacher Preparation to Support the Needs of Diverse Students: National Findings from the American Educator Panels

Stanford GSE. “If you don’t have a strong supply of well-prepared teachers, nothing else in education can work”  Stanford GSE professor emerita Linda Darling-Hammond talks about educating teachers for the 21st century.

Tampa Bay Times. Which Florida teachers are ‘content experts’?: The Board of Education sets a definition through emergency rule.   Any “in field” teacher with a valid certificate “per the course code directory” would be considered to have expertise in the subject area. Alternatively, these options also exist: • In math, science and computer science, you must have at least a bachelor’s degree in the subject area from an accredited institution…

The Economist. Why America lost so many of its black teachers: Before 1964 nearly half of college-educated African-Americans in the South were teachers  While higher teacher accreditation standards reduce the number of black teachers, they have done little for students of any ethnicity: teacher licensing test scores are weakly related to outcomes for students. 

USNews & World Report. Kentucky Launching Teacher Recruitment Campaign  …education officials say a growing teacher shortage has become critical and they are launching a recruitment campaign…Officials say the shortage is caused by teachers leaving the field and fewer college students pursuing an education degree.

US Congress, House Committee on Education and Labor. Archive of hearing proceedings “Educating our Educators: How Federal Policy Can Better Support Teachers and School Leaders.”

 

NEW YORK STATE
NYSED.
1) Office of Higher Education July Newsletter
a) School Counselor Education Program Registration Requirements and Certification
b) Educational Technology Specialist CST Safety net
c) Revised Science Content Specialty Tests
d) EDTPA PASSING SCORE INCREASING IN JANUARY 2020
e) FINGERPRINTING FEE INCREASE
f) U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION EXPERIMENTAL SITES INITIATIVE: FEDERAL WORK STUDY
2) Teacher Opportunity Corps RFP info for 2016-2021 

NYTimes. Teachers Barred From Carrying Guns in New York Schools

 

NEW YORK CITY
CBS New York. Change Coming To Way Teachers Educate NYC Public School Students, Highlighting More Cultures In The Classroom   …the DOE is claiming “research shows that when students see themselves and their peers reflected in the books they read and the lessons they learn, academic outcomes improve.”

Chalkbeat. Pre-K teachers prepare to vote on ‘historic’ pay deal — but some say it leaves them behind   Pre-K advocates hope the dramatic raises for certified teachers will stem the churn of teachers who leave community organizations for bigger paychecks in public schools — and also encourage assistant teachers like Wong to earn the credentials needed to lead their own classrooms. 

Hechinger Report. TEACHER VOICE: Looking back on my first year of school[by R. May, Success Academy]  I took out a pen and carefully wrote out a script for the whole day, fastening it to my clipboard… I’d spent six weeks in teacher training learning how to manage a classroom and provide high-quality instruction just the summer before. 

Wall Street Journal.New York City Adopts ‘Culturally Responsive’ Education in Schools   Christopher Emdin, an associate professor of science at Teachers College, Columbia University, started a competition for low-income students to write and perform rap songs about science. “Once they’re motivated and excited, magical things happen,” he said. “They want to study more.”