For the past several years, two of the more common claims from the ed reform community are that class size is unimportant to student achievement and that test scores provide an effective way of evaluating teachers and schools. Interviewing for my new job at a French/English bilingual school, I was struck by how much the school deviated from those two central ideas.
When giving my sample lesson for the interview, I taught a class of 19 students. All classes at the school are capped at 20, and many have closer to 15 students. The school website and brochure both advertise this feature.
In addition, during my interview, the headmaster expressed his view that the public schools focused too heavily on test preparation, and that although they used testing to measure student progress, they were not beholden to them- a draw for parents.
Ed reformers have talked a lot in recent years about…
On June 1st I was hired to a new job at a bilingual French/English private school as a third grade teacher. Although I was happy at the charter school where I was working and proud of the work that I did this past school year, the fact that I was only a long term sub…
read more »I finished up my role as a collaboration teacher at my school today, and gave my final Japanese and French lessons to two different classes. As a final presentation to the students, I showed them some of the calligraphy that I made while I was studying it in Japan. I have a few works I…
read more »There has been a lot of debate for the past several years over whether or not to use “value added” data as a metric for evaluating teachers. Washington D.C. is already making 50% of a teacher’s evaluation dependent on their value added rating. I thought I’d weigh in on the debate, as I happen to…
read more »I freely admit that I don’t understand how to run a multi billion dollar software company. I’m still intrigued, therefore, that Bill Gates continues to believe that he is qualified to make education policy. In today’s New York Times, Sara Mosle discusses a plan from Gates, along with Michael Bloomberg and Arne Duncan, that would…
read more »During my interview for Teach for America in the spring of 2007, the interviewer asked me to explain what I felt was the cause of the achievement gap. I replied that I thought schools serving primarily low income and minority students were educating children who faced severe challenges in their lives due to poverty, and…
read more »My early days in Japan with the JET Program were full of cultural misunderstandings. I brought with me a lot of assumptions about how schools should work and how students should learn that simply did not mesh with the Japanese teachers’ views. I had to unlearn a lot of things and be willing to understand…
read more »Teachers, like any other profession, should be evaluated and held accountable for their job performance. I don’t honestly know anyone who doesn’t believe this. If you listen to many of the ed reformers though, you’d think otherwise. I found this rather bizarre tweet from a StudentsFirst blogger in my Twitter feed today, retweeted by StudentsFirst…
read more »This month I’ve gotten the rare chance to spend Sunday evenings without planning or preparation. After finishing my second long term substituting assignment at my school in March, I become a collaboration teacher and day to day sub wherever I’m needed. On collaboration days (Tuesday and Thursday) I teach World Languages and Culture to students…
read more »It’s been an interesting week in education news. Michelle Rhee is taking heat for her failure to acknowledge a memo regarding cheating in her district, and Ben Chavis’s American Indian Public Charter School had its charter revoked by the Oakland Unified School District because of Chavis’s money embezzlement. It comes to my mind that so…
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