Teacher Ed Makes a Difference

I've been away for a month or so but I thought this item was a good one to come back with. It's from Education Week:

Study: Teaching Credentials Still Matter

By Debra Viadero

If you listen to a lot of policy discussions on education, chances are that you've heard one scholar or another stand up to talk about how teacher credentials, such as holding a traditional license or having earned a master's degree, don't seem to matter much when it comes to improving student achievement.

Duke University researcher Helen F. Ladd says that there are two problems with those studies. The studies are: 1) old, and 2) focused mostly on elementary school children.

To gather newer data on the impact of teacher credentials and characteristics on high school students' achievement, Ladd and her research partners took a look at scores from the end-of-course exams that all high school students are required to take in North Carolina. They looked in particular at statewide data for four cohorts of 9th and 10th graders for whom they could find and match up data on their teachers. (The final sample included tens of thousands of students.)The bottom line, the researchers found, was that at the high school level, most measurable teacher credentials do indeed matter. And they have a large enough impact on student achievement, Ladd and her colleagues say, to suggest that they ought to figure into policymakers' decisions on how to raise the quality of instruction in schools.

Read the rest here.

Tests, Arizona, and IFTE

Three items today:

There's a frightening post today on Diane Ravitch's Education Week blog. Apparently the view inside the Obama administration is that we need even more tests.

NCTE has published a statement opposing the policy of the Arizona department of education which targets teachers with "accents."

And, on a more positive note, a reminder that the call for proposals for the April 2011 IFTE conference in New Zealand is now available.

Testing Teachers and National Standards

CEE member Peter Smagorinsky has a piece in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about using test scores to judge teachers.

Also, the final draft of the Common Core Standards is now available.

April in Auckland

As some of you know, the CEE Executive Committee has been working over the past couple of years to forge new and better connections to the International Federation for the Teaching of English. No doubt the best way to get involved with IFTE is to attend their upcoming conference in New Zealand. Here are the details:

Much Ado About English: IFTE Conference 2011

Please plan to attend the 2011 International Federation for the Teaching of English (IFTE) conference at the University of Auckland, April 18-21. The conference promises to deliver something special for all teachers and teacher educators who attend. The conference will have four key strands: Literacies and Literatures, Diversity and Voice, English Teachers @ Work, and New Technologies, New Practices.

For more information and details about how to register, please see http://www.ifte.net/ConferenceFront.htm (when you get there, click on OPEN).

Note that proposals are due September 1.

If Only Every School was a Charter School . . .

The cover article in the Sunday NY Times Magazine continues the media's fixation on charter schools as the solution to everything. Of course they're only following Secretary Duncan's lead. Good rejoinders here and here.

More enlightening is this exchange between Diane Ravitch and Mike Rose.

Speechless

Here's an alarming piece from The Guardian about what the Texas textbook revisers want to put in and take out. Slavery, for example, is out.

Good News, Bad News

In Idaho, the International Baccalaureate program is being called "anti-American."

In Arizona, ethnic studies courses are being banned and state superintendent of public instruction Tom Horne says he doesn't like Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

The National Writing Project has posted links to some great articles about how writing supports reading.

And finally, here's some research support for using literacy coaches, (especially in schools where teachers have real authority and strong relationships with their peers).