Editor's note: "Blog stars" is our occasional roundup of thoughtful stuff from other ed blogs and sometimes a newspaper or two.
Don't forget course choice
From a Shreveport Times op-ed: Nearly all of us have had an experience where we were stuck in a class in which no matter how many times the teacher explained a concept, we just couldn't grasp it. Our friends around us may have understood, but it just didn't make sense to us. The class whisked along, we fell further behind, and the frustration mounted. What if we had had the chance to take the class online, at our own pace, with concepts explained multiple ways until we grasped it?
Louisiana students now have that option.
Thanks to Act 2, a law that Gov. Bobby Jindal signed into law in the spring of 2012, a student attending one of the state's lowest performing schools — those with a grade of C, D, or F — now has the right and the funding to take courses from any of the 45 state-approved high-quality course providers, so long as the student takes at least one course in her "home" district school. Students at schools graded an A or B will also have the right to take any online course that their local school does not offer, thereby expanding a student's course options, and a district could also decide to allow a student to take any online course through the program. ...
As every parent knows, every child has different learning needs at different times. If we hope to have all children succeed in school and life, then we need a system that can personalize for their different needs. While the world has changed, however, our schools have not. Instead we have an education system that mandates the amount of time students spend in class but does not expect each child to master her learning. The result is that students don't receive the support they need to master each subject before they move on to the next one. This creates gaps in every child's learning — gaps that haunt them later in their schooling. Full op-ed here.
Private schools funded through students jobs
From Jay Mathews' Class Struggle blog: Twelve years ago, I stumbled across a story that seemed too good to be true. A Catholic high school in Chicago ensured its financial survival by having students help pay their tuition by working one day a week in clerical jobs at downtown offices.
This was a new idea in U.S. secondary education. New ideas are not necessarily a good thing, because they often fail. But the creator of Cristo Rey Jesuit High School was an educational missionary named John P. Foley who had spent much of his life helping poor people in Latin America. I was not going to dump on an idea from a man like that without seeing how it worked out.
Now I know. The Cristo Rey network has grown to 25 schools in 17 states, including a campus in Takoma Park, where more than half the students are from Prince George’s County and more than a third are from the District. It is blossoming in a way no other school, public or private, has done in this region. ...
More than 90 percent of the students at the original Cristo Rey school were from low-income families. Few had been subjected to the pressures of big-city offices. But they received proper training for their clerical assignments. As the experiment proceeded, they realized the writing, reading and math skills they were learning in school were relevant to their new jobs — and their work experience would help them find jobs to pay their way through college. Full column here.
Revolution hits the universities
From Thomas L. Friedman at the New York Times: LORD knows there’s a lot of bad news in the world today to get you down, but there is one big thing happening that leaves me incredibly hopeful about the future, and that is the budding revolution in global online higher education. (more…)
Editor's note: For those new to redefinED, "blog stars" is our occasional roundup of good stuff from other education blogs.
Jay P. Greene's Blog: The Way of the Future: Coursera
Watch this video from start to finish from Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller as in right now:
I’m calling it- I think that we’ve passed Clayton Christensen’s inflection point where the disruptive technology (online learning) is better than the dominant technology (traditional universities). The required mastery element that Koller describes in the video seals the deal by itself. I’m willing to bet that it is simply a matter of performing high quality evaluations and getting the results for documentation.
Second while most of the commentary on these developments naturally focuses on higher education, which is in for a major disruption, we need to start thinking about the implications of these developments for K-12. Coursera courses are available for free to anyone. K-12 students can take these courses, and other courses suited to various educational levels will certainly be developed. Full post here.
Jay Mathews' Class Struggle: Let charters bloom. Let teachers be creative.
Petrazzuolo says if a charter doesn’t offer innovative programs, that is one reason not to approve it. ... Successful charters have exposed the weakness of that argument.
When the KIPP DC: KEY Academy began in a Southeast Washington church basement in 2001, it offered a standard curriculum of math, science, English and social studies, plus two hours a day of homework and strict discipline, very old school. Before long, despite the lack of innovation, its students were performing far above the level of their neighbors in regular D.C. public schools.
What is the secret for success? The best charters and regular schools are careful about whom they pick to supervise and teach. Most schools say they have the best principals and instructors. They say they give them strong support. The best schools actually do that. Full post here. (more…)
