It is clear that technology is increasingly seen as providing opportunities for personalization, flexibility, and differentiation, and the development of 21st-century skills.

It is less clear how technology can best be utilized in schools serving students who have struggled in school, fallen off track to graduation, or dropped out altogether. On the one hand, online credit recovery has long been a staple in alternative education. And all too often, it is the equivalent of an electronic workbook in a sterile computer lab with few opportunities for the development of the higher-order, critical thinking skills necessary for postsecondary success. On the other hand, blended learning holds promise as a strategy to help students develop exactly those skills. A blended learning classroom can incorporate the best elements of face-to-face classrooms and virtual learning environments for this population—accelerating learning gains, building next-generation skills, and ensuring college readiness.

[Jobs for the Future] is currently exploring how schools can implement blended learning in a way that delivers a rigorous, college-ready academic experience with proper social supports for their students, as well as an expectation for postsecondary completion.

To hold teachers 100% responsible when they can account for only “10 percent of the variability in student test scores” is insane, especially in light of the fact that other factors such as “family income and education levels” account for 90% of the variability.

I am usually not a conspiracy theorist. But my scorecard shows 11 members of the [Georgia] English/Language Arts Standards writing team had ties to companies with a financial interest in the committee’s decision.

Adding insult to injury, no members of the Work Group were K-12 teachers and no teachers were mentioned in the Gates/Pearson curriculum announcement.

The andragogical model as conceived by Knowles is predicated on four basic assumptions about learners, all of which have some relationship to our notions about a learner's ability, need, and desire to take responsibility for learning:

1. Their self-concept moves from dependency to independency or self-directedness.
2. They accumulate a reservoir of experiences that can be used as a basis on which to build learning.
3. Their readiness to learn becomes increasingly associated with the developmental tasks of social roles.
4. Their time and curricular perspectives change from postponed to immediacy of application and from subject-centeredness to performance-centeredness.

A grown-up man won't sit still in a classroom while a teacher drones on about subjects that don't interest him. Andragogy recognizes that adults demand to learn things that are relevant to them, and that leverage their own life experiences rather than assuming they know nothing. Adults don't want sweeping coverage of a topic; they want to learn the parts that are interesting or relevant to them now, so they tend to prefer problem-based learning that shows the immediate applicability of what they're learning.

If adults won't stand for sitting for hours, learning about things they don't find interesting or relevant, why is it that children do? And why should they? The common response to the second question is that children don't know what they need to learn, so they need educators to decide for them. To some degree this is true; however there's overwhelming evidence that all people learn better when they're interested in the topics, and there's similar evidence that there are correlations between what we enjoy doing, what we're good at, and what we'll end up doing professionally. Typically, though, we don't teach children what fits their interests, motivations or natural talents. We simply use a one-size-fits-nobody technique that enables us to teach each student in a class of 25 almost equally poorly.

We could vote for people with the guts to run and pay for our schools properly. But we don't. We vote for people who cut a billion dollars from education, then blame the victims.

Those politicians should be ashamed of themselves.

But so should we.

[Those opposed to teaching about climate change and evolution] are making a pedagogical argument, that it is somehow good pedagogy, good critical thinking, for students to learn both. That it is somehow a good pedagogy for students to learn good science and bad science.

Upon hearing someone castigate students for being insufficiently motivated, a noneconomist might be inclined to ask two questions.  The first is:  “Motivated to do what, exactly”?  Anything they’re told, no matter how unengaging, inappropriate, or, well, demotivating?  Whenever I see students made to cram facts into their short-term memories for a test, practice a series of decontextualized skills on yet another worksheet, listen passively to a lecture, or inch their way through the insipid prose of a corporate-produced textbook, I find myself thinking of a comment made by Frederick Herzberg, a critic of traditional workplace management:  “Idleness, indifference, and irresponsibility,” he said, “are healthy responses to absurd work.”

Summarizing his study’s findings for The New York Times, Friedman said: “The message is to fire people sooner rather than later.”

Friedman was speaking specifically about value-added ratings of teachers—which use student scores on standardized tests to determine a teacher’s relative effectiveness—and whether they are sufficiently accurate and reliable to guide personnel decisions. His answer? An unambiguous “yes.”

...

The problem with the approach that Friedman and others advocate is that it assumes we have all these wonderful, high-quality teachers just waiting in the wings to take over the jobs of the bad teachers we fire. In reality, there is no such supply, even in a bad economy with high unemployment. We have a shortage, not a surplus, of great teachers—and so it’s naïve or shortsighted (or both) to think we can somehow fire our way to a great educational system.

There are almost four million K-12 teachers in the United States, which is more than twice the number of lawyers and doctors combined. Teaching is America’s largest profession. And so we need teaching to be a job that an average person can do reasonably well, which means we probably need to rethink how the job is structured.

A starting point would be to look at—and reconsider—the number of hours U.S. teachers spend at the front of the classroom each week compared to the time they spend planning lessons and collaborating with colleagues. It’s no secret that American teachers spend many more hours teaching than their colleagues do in higher-performing nations. Elsewhere, teachers often teach fewer lessons each week than U.S. teachers, but they spend significantly more time on planning and collaboration.

If we focused on creating environments that kids would want to choose rather than loading our schools full of restrictive policies and if didn't over-regulate the curriculum, didn't make school so much pressure for both students and teachers, if we didn't set the path of learning down for students instead of letting them find their own way, if we didn't setup school to be a game of winners and losers competing for high marks, would we have such high figures of both homeschoolers and dropouts?

there is a place where human diversity is considered something quite negative... that's in the traditional school, in the traditional classroom. In those places we assume that all humans are essentially the same, that they develop at the exact same pace, that they have the same skills - and should have the same skills. This is not just an assumption, it is the law in the United States and many other nations. It drives almost all educational policy coming from Washington, Westminster, Canberra, Ottawa. It is even "built in" in most spaces, where matching desks line up in matching rooms and matching schedules move children through matching days.

And it is time for us, as we head toward the middle of the 21st Century, to stop all this.

Lecture, we now can see, most often leads to superficial understanding, and therefore we must have a superficial assessment instrument appropriate for superficial understanding -- the test.

For the past three years, real per-pupil spending in schools has declined in Florida and (I would guess) most states. During and since the Lesser Depression, declining funding and annual layoff notices comprise the status quo.

For the past ten years, there has been a federal mandate for annual high-stakes testing in seven out of 12 grades. High-stakes testing is the status quo.

For the past twenty years, there has been the creation and dramatic growth of quasi-non-governmental (or quango) schools we call charter schools. Charters are concentrated in large cities, some of which have been the focus of efforts to replace locally-governed public schools with charter schools (Chicago, New York, New Orleans, and Washington, DC). In a large number of cities, the growth of charter schools is the status quo.

"The idea was to have a college of education that was part of the solution, as opposed to one that was only defining problems," Ms. Koerner said. "For a research level-one college, it's a different perspective."

Technology can help these kids.  But only if the kids want to be helped.

Well, sure. That's true for any student, isn't it? But the 'black kid from West Philadelphia' rhetoric doesn't sit very well with me. Ugh.

I’m more interested in having our students leave a mark than get a mark, and so are they. So, lets be genuine with them. Push them to create  great stuff about important ideas and students will not only rise to the challenge, they will be able to articulate what they have learned and why it matters.  Do this and don’t cheapen it with a mark, share your descriptive feedback offer  a genuine response. Let them know that when it comes time to write the report card you’ll turn the great things they have created into a grade and all they have to do is keep creating things~the wonderful thing about people is we actually do great things when we are given the chance, a purpose feedback and an audience

If you wonder why the US education system is spir[a]ling downwards, I think we've spent the last 10 years breaking what worked and not fixing what was broken.

uniquely American solutions -- charter schools, private school vouchers, entrepreneurial innovations, grade-by-grade testing, diminished teachers' unions, and basing teachers' pay on how their students do on standardized tests -- may be appealing on their surface. To many in the financial community, these market-inspired reform ideas are very appealing.

Yet, these proposed solutions are nowhere to be found in the arsenal of strategies used by the top-performing nations. And almost everything these countries are doing to redesign their education systems, we're not doing.

If you are looking to increase a child's anxiety, desire to escape and fear of failure, or decrease their intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy then it makes perfect sense to grade students.

However, if you are interested in helping children learn, you might want to consider leaving the grade out and only providing them with the formative comments they need to improve.

Surpassing Shanghai: An Agenda for American Education Built on the World's Leading Systems by Marc S. Tucker and colleagues takes benchmarking one step further. The systems of schooling in Shanghai (China) Finland, Japan, Singapore, and Ontario (Canada) are analyzed, since students in those countries or provinces consistently outperform American students on international tests of academic performance.

According to this analysis, six key factors underlie the success of those top performers:

1. Funding schools equitably, with additional resources for those serving needy students

2. Paying teachers competitively and comparably

3. Investing in high-quality preparation, mentoring and professional development for teachers and leaders, completely at government expense

4. Providing time in the school schedule for collaborative planning and ongoing professional learning to continually improve instruction

5. Organizing a curriculum around problem-solving and critical thinking skills

6. Testing students rarely but carefully -- with measures that require analysis, communication, and defense of ideas

blaming teachers as a group for the ills of poor schooling and then expecting those very same awful teachers to turn around and work their hearts out to remedy those ills is simply goofy

I'd probably use a stronger word than 'goofy.'

From John Dewey to Jean Piaget, educators have generally agreed that while didactic teaching has its place, small children learn mainly from interacting and not passive listening, understanding and not memorizing, reading for fun and not simply decoding. "The good news," says Deborah Stipek, dean of the School of Education at Stanford University, "is that children can be taught basic academic skills - fundamentals of reading, writing and mathematics - in a way that uses, rather than destroys, their natural desire to learn. Vocabulary can be taught by conversation, awareness of print developed through reading and talking about books and mathematics learned with games like a pretend restaurant."

Drill-and-skill is not how middle-class children got their edge, Dean Stipek says, so "why use a strategy to help poor kids catch up that didn't help middle class kids in the first place?"

Research has shown that the key factor in student success is being engaged. Students who are not engaged are less likely to perform well in school, more likely to fail classes, and less likely to graduate. In the 2006 Civic Enterprises report, The Silent Epidemic, high school dropouts reported that the most frequent reason for leaving school was that classes were not interesting.

Emerging research in the education world suggests that a tougher approach to high school academics might leave students no better prepared for college and work, while also increasing the number of high school dropouts. The National Research Council concluded that high school exit exams have decreased high school graduation rates in the United States by 2 percentage points without increasing achievement. In Chicago, a 2010 study found no positive effects on student achievement from a school reform measure that ended remedial classes and required college preparatory course work for all students. High school graduation rates declined, and there was no improvement in college enrollment and retention rates among students who did graduate.

we’re entering a digital age where students access the information they want—how they want it, when they want it and where they want it (think personalized learning at any time, place or pace). This will have a profound effect on critical thinking as people are increasingly fed only the exact type of information (specific political views, topical book themes and local environmental conditions) and sources (individual blogs, new media and ethnically oriented online spaces) to which they digitally subscribe. In many ways, hyperpersonalized (customized) digital spaces have the potential to limit students to only the content that they want to see, hear and read about. While considering personalization and technology, we need to think about the role of critical thinking, diversity and chance (serendipity), and their importance to learning and society, and to the long-term implications of driving digital personalization (customization) in terms of the future of public education.

I see a sea of students eager to learn. I see a sea of students who are misidentified, over-defined and under-appreciated. I see students who are failed; I see legacies ended before they even began. I see the look of hopelessness in the eyes of students who can tell they are being failed

If  education was really about learning…

…we’d let kids ask more questions and then give them support to find their own answers.

…we’d see dunking milk in cookies as a science opportunity, not just a snack.

…we’d only give kids giant test booklets if they needed to use the paper build a tower to explore force & motion.

…we’d label our kids with terms like “mostly visual learner, hilarious, excels in reading, struggles with addition, loves baseball” instead of “Proficient” or “Basic”

…we’d stop making copies of low-level worksheets and give more blank sheets of paper for brainstorming.

…we’d make it our goal to get kids to ask questions in class that we cannot answer, nor Google the answer to.

…we’d stop spending billions on textbooks.

…we’d celebrate mistakes far more than we celebrate earning “A’s”.

…success would be overcoming obstacles and embracing struggle, not “perfect papers”.

…we’d invite an engineer or scientist to class to answer questions and not just because it’s a grade level standard.

…we’d talk more about finding their passion than about Friday’s Spelling Test.

…we’d take the best theories of gifted education, special education, and everything in between, and make a school where ALL kids needs are met.

…our kids would never question “Why do I have to learn this?” because they’d be too busy investigating.

…inquiry would rule over lecture.

…professional development would be differentiated, meaningful, and steer clear of reading PowerPoint slides.

…every school would be filled with the type of collaboration happening on Twitter every single day.

…we wouldn’t hear things like “We don’t teach that since it’s not tested.”

Education might not be about learning right now.  But, that doesn’t mean your classroom can’t be about learning.

I don't usually quote posts in their entirety. That's how awesome this one is...

New teachers struggle with classroom management because, given the choice, most students would not sit through their lessons. This should tell us we need to throw our interest behind improving the lessons, not finding new carrots and sticks for getting kids to listen while we teach.

I hear a lot of people ask "What has Finland done to improve their education system", but it might be equally as important to ask, "What has Finland not done to their education system". While most Anglo-American cultures have spent their limited time, effort and resources on content-bloated, standardized, prefabricated, top-down mandated curriculums with test-based accountability and market-based competition, Finland has focused on broad & creative learning, personalization, professional responsibility, collaboration and trust.

You don't make change by simply making those who have less power than you do what ever it is you demand. To believe otherwise is to ignore what research has been telling us for a very long time.

A prominent researcher in the field of motivation and psychology Edward Deci explains in his book Why We Do What We Do:

The proper question is not, "how can people motivate others?" but rather, "how can people create the conditions within which others will motivate themselves?"