Schott Foundation's 2009 report on Opportunity to Learn

The most recent report from the Schott Foundation, Lost Opportunity: A 50 State Report on the Opportunity to Learn in America , "employs a state-by-state comparison of academic proficiency as illustrated by the percentage of students scoring at or above proficiency on the eighth-grade National Assessment of Educational Progress reading exam and access to high-performing schools as measured by the Opportunity to Learn Index (OTLI)." Unfortunately, Nevada falls into the lowest category (with 8 other states and the District of Columbia) that " provide neither a moderately proficient school system nor equitable access to the systems' best schools or resources." (from the web site: http://www.otlstatereport.org/national/summary/intro#staterankings)

Collaborative editing

Some of you may already use Google Docs to collaborate on creating and editing presentations, documents, spreadsheets, etc. Now you can do that without ever leaving your MS Office application. Google Cloud Connect lets you work in MS Office software and then share your edits to Google Docs. See this article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. Or view the application site directly at: http://tools.google.com/dlpage/cloudconnect

New issue of IES newsletter available

IES activities are reported through their newsletter. Several of these may be of interest...

The news includes articles about:

• A cooperative agreement with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching that involves the use of 90-day research cycles

• A 3-D project designed to enhance the social competencies of youth with Autism Spectrum Disorders

• Research findings from the National Center for Research on School Choice

• A new website application for accessing public and private school data

• Upcoming training opportunities

Click here to read the newsletter, http://ies.ed.gov/whatsnew/newsletters/

Projections of Education Statistics to 2019

New report out from NCES that covers "statistics on enrollment, graduates, teachers, and expenditures in elementary and secondary schools, and enrollment and earned degrees conferred expenditures of degree-granting institutions. For the Nation, the tables, figures, and text contain data on enrollment, teachers, graduates, and expenditures for the past 14 years and projections to the year 2019. For the 50 States and the District of Columbia, the tables, figures, and text contain data on projections of public elementary and secondary enrollment and public high school graduates to the year 2019."
I will also put a link to this source in the Education subject guide on the "Statistics and Demographics" page. http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2011017

New reporting for teacher prep programs proposed for 2012

Here is an historical summary of legislative reporting requirements (federal) as provided in Education Week (March 8, 2011).

Federal Requirements

1998 Amendments to the Higher Education Act of 1965
• Traditional teacher-preparation programs create report cards on enrollments in traditional teacher education programs and the passing rate of candidates on teacher-certification or -licensing tests.
• States create report cards ranking teacher-preparation programs based on the passing rates on those assessments, as well as those in state-approved alternative-certification programs. They also identify low-performing and “at risk” programs.
Higher Education Opportunity and Access Act of 2008
In addition to previous requirements, the law requires:
• Reporting on alternative-certification programs both inside and outside higher education programs.
• Preparation programs to report on the average scaled scores, as well as passing rates, on all licensing tests, broken out by the stage at which candidates take the tests.
• Preparation programs to report on admissions, the number of candidates by field, demographics of program participants, the number of faculty supervising clinical experiences, and programming on technology instruction and working with special populations.
• Preparation programs to set and report on goals for increasing the number of teachers prepared in shortage fields.

Fiscal 2012 Proposals
• Would eliminate some reporting requirements.
• Preparation programs would be expected to report on three outcome measures:

• Achievement growth of students taught by program graduates;
• Graduate job-placement and retention rates; and
• Graduate and employer satisfaction

• Would end the TEACH grant program and replace it with the Presidential Teaching Fellows program.

SOURCE: Education Week

Shared curricula recommended to address new Common Core Standards

A diverse group of signatories representing all levels of education, both sides of the political spectrum and business are promoting the developing of "lean" curriculum guidelines to help link the new common core standards to teaching. “To be clear, by ‘curriculum,’ we mean a coherent, sequential set of guidelines in the core academic disciplines, specifying the content knowledge and skills that all students are expected to learn, over time, in a thoughtful progression across the grades,” the document says. “We do not mean performance standards, textbook offerings, daily lesson plans, or rigid pedagogical prescriptions.” The full text of the statement along with the names/affiliations of the signatories are available here:
http://www.ashankerinst.org/curriculum.html

Exciting news from TED

Those of you who are fans of the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) talks will be pleased to hear they are focusing on education, according to this news item in the Chronicle (Mar. 2, 2011)

"Long Beach, Calif.—The leaders of the annual TED conference, known for featuring short, carefully prepared talks on big ideas about technology and society, hope to apply their approach to education.
This week they announced TED-Ed, which will provide a hand-picked set of free online educational talks (expected to be even shorter than the conference talks), many submitted by educators themselves but enhanced by TED officials. An online forum, the Ted-Ed Brain Trust, will encourage discussion of how to reform teaching using the videos and other technology.
The system is not up yet, but the online forum is scheduled to open as early as next week, says Logan Smalley, whose title is TED-Ed catalyst. The videos will be added in the coming months, he says.
The project will also create an updated listing of the more than 900 existing TED talks, arranging them by categories that align more neatly to academic disciplines."