New teacher evaluation systems in Tennessee have rough road ahead
Rebecca Sellers, an eighth-grade English teacher at the Lester Pre-K-8 school in Memphis, looked wary as she walked into the teachers’ lounge on a Monday afternoon last fall. The previous week, the school’s assistant principal, Isaac Robinson, had dropped in, unannounced, to watch Sellers teach as part of Tennessee’s new evaluation system.Now he was about [...]
When charter schools fail, what happens to the kids?
More states are closing failing charter schools, but shuttling students back to mediocre public schools could be doing the system’s most vulnerable children more harm than good.
Canadian two-year colleges show path to jobs
TORONTO—At the University of Manitoba, where she enrolled after high school, it seemed to take Angela Conrad forever to satisfy her degree requirements by taking courses in women’s studies, Greek mythology, and other courses she considered impractical. All she really wanted was a job in marketing. “It takes people two years, sometimes three years, to [...]
As some schools plunge into technology, poor schools are left behind
CHICAGO – On a recent Friday morning, 15-year-old Jerod Franklin stared at his hands as he labored to type up memories of the first time he grilled steak. Next to him, classmate Brittany Levy tackled a piece about a trip to the hospital. The Bronzeville Scholastic Institute ninth-graders were working on writing assignments in the [...]
Free courses may shake universities’ monopoly on credit
Just as the Internet has made news free and music cheap, it may be about to vastly lower the cost of one of the most expensive commodities in America: college. Several new companies and organizations with impressive pedigrees are harnessing the Internet to provide college courses for free, or for next to nothing. And while [...]
Report: Miami district needs to improve teacher evaluations
A report to be released Thursday by a national research group on teacher quality suggests the Miami-Dade school district is not doing enough to get rid of underperforming teachers.
U.S. education pressured by international comparisons
Americans learn a bit more every year about the strengths and shortcomings of the education systems in other countries, thanks to a steady raft of international test data, academic scholarship, and analysis arriving from home and abroad. Today, elected officials of all political stripes and advocates for a range of school policies scrutinize the results [...]
Japanese strategy for improving teachers is catching on in Chicago
In the sunlit library at Jorge Prieto Elementary on Chicago’s’ northwest side, an experiment is under way. A provisional classroom has been set up. A white board sits at the front of the room, and 20 eighth-graders are seated at library tables. Math teacher Michael Hock is giving a lesson about the distributive property. Scattered [...]
