My earlier post on coverage of the new National Institute on Early Education Research report noted that journalists hadn’t picked up the “mo’ money, even mo’ kids’”angle. Should have checked USA Today’s coverage before I said that. Greg Toppo was all over it. See how he handled it here.
Toppo also noted the existence of a new website called savvysource.com, which offers parents a way to judge the quality of preschools in their communities. Toppo quotes the site’s founder as saying it is “kind of a combination of Zagat’s and Craigslist” for parents of young kids.
Follow-up: Look for letters in newspapers around the country from pre-k supporters. The advocacy group Pre-K Now which, like this blog, gets support from The Pew Charitable Trusts sees the AP story on the NIEER report as a hook for supporters to write to newspapers and demand more money to be spent to raise program quality.
Hechinger blogs
Tough love (but it’s really frustration)
A summer ‘bridge’ to collegeSiobhan Curious, who teaches at Quebec’s version of community college, was having a lousy day even before a failing student walked in to make it worse. Kalia had failed the same class in the autumn because she didn’t come to class. After skipping the first two weeks of her second try, she came to the office [...]
Chicago will subsidize jobs for City Colleges gradsFor students with weak academic skills, a summer “bridge” to college-level classes can improve the odds of success, reports Education Week. “Summer bridge programs can provide an important head start on college,” said Elisabeth Barnett, a senior research associate at Teachers College, Columbia University, and the Community College Research Center in New York. “They can increase [...]
After college, what will you earn?Chicago will give $2 million to companies that hire City Colleges graduates, reports the Chicago Sun-Times. “You hire one of our community college kids, we’ll pay their stipend for the first four weeks of work,” Mayor Rahm Emanuel said in a commencement speech for the system’s graduates. “I want the rest of the country and [...]
What value-added models can—and can’t—tell us about teaching and learningIf college is an investment, students should have some idea what they’ll earn with a degree in nursing or marketing or whatever from College X vs. College Y, writes Daniel de Vise in College, Inc. Soon more information will be available about post-college employment. Especially as college continues to get more expensive, students rightfully want to [...]
The worst eighth-grade math teacher in New York CityGetting your middle-schooler in front of a high-quality teacher for even one year will improve his or her chances of going to college and earning a good salary later in life, according to a recent study. The study’s authors used value-added modeling—predicting how well a given student will do on a standardized test, controlling for [...]
For 10 months, Carolyn Abbott waited for the other shoe to drop. In April 2011, Abbott, who teaches mathematics to seventh- and eighth-graders at the Anderson School, a citywide gifted-and-talented school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, received some startling news. Her score on the Teacher Data Report, the New York City Department of [...]