Category: teachers

Eliminated, or Replaced?

High-school seniors statewide were no doubt miffed if they heard the news out of Raleigh on Sept. 5: Gov. Roy Cooper signed a bill into law titled “AN ACT TO REDUCE TESTING ADMINISTERED TO STUDENTS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS.” The bill’s first sentence stipulates that no tests will be eliminated until the 2020-21 school year, making members of the Class of 2020 ineligible for the legislature’s largesse. We’re very much in favor of reducing the amount of time students spend taking tests, especially useless tests that are never used to target areas of weakness or make adjustments to an individual’s course of instruction. However, the law contains another significant loophole regarding NC Final Exams. Its first section reads, No later than March 15, 2020, the State […]

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Things are Dippy over at DPI

The new website didn’t help matters. Ever since he took office in January 2017, relations between NC Superintendent of Schools Mark Johnson and advocates for the state’s teachers and public schools have grown ever more acrimonious. If Johnson had wanted to establish warmth and collegiality with teachers and the various groups that claim to speak for them, several missteps have placed obstacles in the path: He commented, during a Q&A session at a statewide meeting of school boards, that a starting salary of $35,000 for new teachers was “a lot of money” for starting teachers, presumably in their 20s. At the time (January 2018), the Raleigh News & Observer reported that Johnson himself was earning  $127,561. He tweeted that teacher pay was “on the right […]

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Teaching STEM with NASA Ambassadors

GUEST BLOG On July 20, 2019, we will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing, and it will be the topic of much media attention. That means that summer 2019 is a perfect time to teach students about space and space travel. Most teachers, however, are not well-versed enough in these topics to feel comfortable  teaching astronomy, space science, or space history. Because of this, most students graduate from American high schools and universities with a lack of knowledge about space and our place in it. One of NASA’s earth-bound missions is to change that equation. Its engineering center in Pasadena, CA, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), is probably best known as a pioneering developer of robotic space missions, but did you know […]

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Testing Should Help

A TED talk from April 2013 by “creativity expert” Ken Robinson—who has been criticized of late for being idealistic and clueless—makes a really simple point: tests should be diagnostic. He states, “Standardized tests have a place. But they should not be the dominant culture of education. They should be diagnostic. They should help.” At this writing, most students in Wake county have recently undergone the annual ritual of high-stakes testing, during which time virtually no other learning could take place at each school. There’s plenty to despise about the state-mandated standardized testing that occurs every May. Here are just a few of the common criticisms that angry parents have piled on in recent years: Testing wastes an inordinate amount of instructional time, as teachers are […]

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Newer Discipline Practices and School Safety in Wake County

In September 2017, two students were stabbed, and one was murdered at a public school in New York City. Some have blamed the school’s ineffective alternative discipline practices—practices that were adopted in response to guidance from the Mayor’s office to avoid major discipline referrals and suspensions. NC public schools are also developing and implementing alternatives to suspensions and expulsions. Could it happen here in Wake County? Over the past decade, public schools in the state of North Carolina have been actively encouraged to replace more traditional methods of applying discipline—typically, punishments for misbehavior—with Positive Behavior Intervention and Supports (PBIS), which is often referred to as “School-Wide Positive Behavior Supports,” or SWPBS. We discussed PBIS in our previous piece on this topic. The NC Dept. of […]

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We Should Focus on Teacher Quality

Teacher quality is the Holy Grail of education reform. Among education professionals at all levels, there’s widespread agreement that student achievement is more closely aligned with teacher quality than with any other factor, including poverty, the presence of other stressors in the environment, such as gang violence, and even learning disabilities. Stanford economist Eric Hanushek publishes research that helps to narrow down “teacher effectiveness.” When this quality is quantified, Hanushek finds that students who have the most effective teachers (with effectiveness in the 90th percentile) learn on average 1.5 years’ worth of material in a single school year. But students who are taught by teachers whose effectiveness rates in the 10th percentile learn only one-half year’s worth of material in one school year. “No other […]

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