July 1, 2016

Kaya Henderson On The Move, For-Profit Higher Ed, Accountability Games, Online Earnestness, CTE, Higher Ed, Charters, And Teachers Unions Against Investors! Plus Cheese News.

By Bellwether

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Happy Independence Day weekend! On this date in 1863 the Army of the Potomac led by George Meade and the Army of Northern Virginia led by Robert E. Lee bumped into each other in the sleepy town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania and the course of American history was changed.

Kaya Henderson stepping down in D.C. My take:

Washington Post take here. And of course this.

Breaking: Big setback for Common Core opponents in Massachusetts (pdf).

Whitmire on LA charters.  Vergara fix bill fails in committee. Whiteboard Advisors now has an update on wellness news affecting young people.

Politico looks at the deal to buy the University of Phoenix and the involvement of administration players. If true, it wouldn’t be the first time a stock price for an education stock has been beaten up by public actions for later gain. The article didn’t include a pretty stunning series of related tweets from former administration aide Ben Miller. Chicago Trib reports that Senator Dick Durbin is not pleased but is being circumspect. Third Way’s Tamara Hiler & Lanae Erickson Hatalsky on why it’s not only for-profit colleges scamming students. Also, this is happening on the for-profit front and matters.

Here’s an old trick made new again that a lot of states are using on accountability: Improving schools is difficult, contentious, and all that. Changing rating systems and labels? So much more manageable and doable! Here’s New York. Here’s Virgina. Plenty of others.

If you give students online access to the answers, they’ll use it (earnestly say professors associated with an online company):

Modern online learning materials may include built-in questions that are used for some of a class’ homework points. To encourage learning, question solutions may be easily available to students. We sought to determine to what extent students earnestly attempt to answer questions when solutions are available via a simple button click. An earnest attempt means to try answering a question at least once before viewing the solution. We analyzed data from 550 students in four classes, at a four-year public research university, a four-year public teaching college, and two community colleges. We found average earnestness was a rather high 84%. We also found that 89% of students earnestly attempted 60%-100% of questions, with 73% earnestly attempting 80%-100%. Only 1% of students blatantly “cheat the system” by earnestly less than 20% of questions. Thus, the heartening conclusion is that students will take advantage of a well-designed learning opportunity rather than just quickly earning points.

We noted that earnestness decreased as a course progressed, with analyses indicating the decrease being mostly due to tiredness or some other student factor, rather than increasing difficulty.

OK, then.

IP issues around content are messy and there is a lot of stuff floating around without appropriate rights. Amazon’s new initiative, highlighted blow earlier this week, has run into that via The Times:

Two items — a collection of first-grade math lessons and English literature activity lessons — in the Amazon screen shot were created by authors on teacherspayteachers.com, a rival instructional resources site where educators offer lesson plans they have created.

Yes, and TeachersPayTeachers had its own problems with this, too. There is a lot of confusion about what’s allowed under teachers employment agreements and how copyright works. Here’s the NEA on that. And I took a look at some of the issues a few years ago.

The Wall Street Journal looks at Randi Weingarten’s war on professional investors who don’t share her political agenda. Chad Aldeman looks behind the scenes. Chad also takes a look at more evidence on the pension sensitivity question – this time from Oregon.

A bipartisan CTE bill to reauthorize Perkins (pdf). Overview can be found here.  Hillary Clinton higher education proposals.  PolitiFact compiles its education ratings on various candidates.

Campus speech debate. Recommendation #1 for administrators basically amounts to get a backbone. Justin Fox says you can’t have Christmas or a lot of universities without the Chinese.

Texas-based IDEA wins the Broad charter prize.  I don’t agree with all of this Neerav Kingsland post but it points up a deceptively hard question – when is better good enough? The Walton Foundation is doing more to support charter facilities.

Alyson Klein takes a look at the assessment pilot in ESSA. Hispanic students and post-secondary and career readiness (pdf). When parents don’t get that they’re supposed to be against Success Academy, so frustrating!

Here’s a nice story.

Who moved the cheese?

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