“Culture isn’t the most important thing. Culture is the only thing.”—Jim Senigal, CEO Costco (retired) Recently, a colleague of mine could not stop talking about CNBC’s production of The Costco Craze. I recorded it and watched it last night, and, I too, cannot stop talking about it. Why? While the report is about retail giant [...]
The details of Wysocki’s truncated career at a D.C. elementary school presents a road map of the missteps possible when districts incorporate student standardized test scores in teacher evaluations.
by Stuart Singer, The Teacher Leader When No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was first presented in the early years of the Bush Administration it represented a significant shift in educational policy. End-of-course exams like Virginia’s Standards of Learning (SOL) were soon to become a measure of a school’s success. The initial requirement of a 70% [...]
This week I am blogging from the NASSP Conference in San Francisco. I used to say, "show me the data." However, it has gotten to the point that I no longer need to look at a school’s data to know that a school is thriving or struggling. I can simply listen to what the staff [...]
by Stuart Singer, The Teacher Leader There are few lightning rods in the educational landscape of 2011 that rival the debate on the role of testing in the evaluation of student, teacher and school performance. However, another perspective on this topic was addressed in a recent Mel Riddile post which discussed research indicating that frequent [...]
According to a report by Catherine Gewertz of Education Week, a study released today by the Center on Education Policy, indicates that testing at the high school level will increase. More states are using assessments as barriers to graduation and requiring other exams that are not linked to graduation. Twenty-eight states now have such requirements, [...]
Recently, Jay Mathews of the Washington Post, in preparation for an article on the accuracy of school incident reports, asked me to respond to the following question: "Do security incident reports adequately describe the climate of a school?" Here is my complete response. The answer is simple. No single data point can accurately depict student [...]
"There are three kinds of lies; lies, damn lies, and statistics."–Mark Twain The release of the 2009 PISA results this past week has created quite a stir and has provided ample fodder for public school bashers and doomsayers who further their own philosophical and profit-motivated agendas by painting all public schools as failing. For whatever [...]
by Stuart Singer, The Teacher Leader "It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the data. It biases the judgment." – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle It has been argued that teachers should not be responsible for exam results if they have minimal or no input into the process. When teachers lack opportunities [...]
“Successful teaching cannot begin until students are regularly attending class.”—The Teacher Leader Student attendance is the proverbial elephant in the middle of the room when it comes to discussions of school improvement. How can teachers be held accountable for student achievement when students have poor attendance? How can school and principals be held accountable for [...]
RT @chendrie:Richard Ingersoll #ewa12 US teaching force is changing dramatically: ballooning numbers, more rookies, more females, more exitsRT @chendrie: Deborah Ball: It's time for America to stop talking about the teachers as people & start respecting teaching #ewa12 #edchat
