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While it may seem radical or heavy handed, having all kids apply to college is actually a GOOD thing, in my view. I used to work at a school that had very low numbers of kids taking the SAT’s/ACT’s and attending college. We implemented a course called, Senior Seminar, in partnership with Reach for College and College Summit, which led to a significant (~80%) increase in college attendance rates. In our first year of implementing the course, we found that of kids who took the class, about 90% walked out of high school with a plan – be it college, community college, trade school or military – versus only about 45% of the remaining student body having a plan for after high-school. With such great results, we rolled out the program to require ALL students to take my senior seminar class. This included PSAT’s, SAT’s, etc. (although I don’t remember th

Occupy the Classroom by Nicholas Kristof for the New York Times In this timely op-ed, Kristof discusses how taxing billionaires would do little to fundamentally change our society–if we want real change, he says, we need to invest in early childhood education. He also deftly dispenses with past criticism of Head Start by explaining Deming’s results that children who participate in Head Start have better outcomes throughout their lives. The piece ends by pointing out the need to further invest in Head Start and early childhood education. From Kindergarten to College Completion by Judith Scott-Clayton for the New York Times’ Economix Blog Scott-Clayton, a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, responds to the push for getting kids into college by raising the question of early childhood education. She makes an eloquent case that while programs to help high school students

When I was a classroom teacher, I was a big proponent of compensating teachers based on performance. A bit later on, I remember having a subsequent conversation with a brilliant young software developer… While I was focused on raising the level of respect for teachers, he summed up the issue quite simply: Teachers need to get paid more. I thought about it… Today, we’ve learned some lessons from the school reform movement. We see that accountability measures and tying educators’ pay to performance encouraged cheating by the very people who had previously acted as role models to our children. This is a business lesson gone wrong. Salespeople get bonuses, but in many cases, they have a more controlled and linear relationship with their sales. However they get to selling you a widget, you can definitively count how many items they’ve sold. In education, you can’t count the same way—bec

You can read it for yourself, right here:http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/sat-reading-scores-drop-to-lowe… One of the key statements about this article, is that “The disappointing SAT scores come as schools have made major efforts to raise scores on state standardized tests under the 2002 No Child Left Behind law. Some critics of testing say the intense focus on state reading and math exams has taken its toll on higher-order thinking skills.” I’ve also heard it explained that the decline in scores comes from the fact that more students are taking the exam… and this increase is coming from students who in previous decades may not have considered college. Regardless of where you come down on the issue, our current situation begs us all to ask the question of What rabbit we are chasing? I take an acting class, and was sitting next to my classmate w

There was a recent article that talks about standards, and how a teacher was asked to re-score an exam to help a student pass: “Richard Petkovsek, a social studies teacher there from 2001 to 2010, said in an interview that he faced growing pressure to pass students and was disgusted when a colleague asked him to review a student’s year-old history exam in hopes of turning a failing 49 into a passing 55.” “He did not do it, he said, but the student graduated; a second teacher confirmed his story. “I was pretty upset by that,” Mr. Petkovsek said.” I can remember being thought of as “by the book” when I used to teach. My kids knew that I wouldn’t change a test score, although I was happy to review a graded paper, if they thought that I had made an error in judgment. It’s clear that Mr. Petkovsek agrees with maintaining standards. But outside of education, how many of us have the integrity t