Edward Fiske, former education editor of the New York Times, and Helen Ladd, distinguished professor of economics at Duke University, recently spent a month in London studying two successful low-income districts. Since they live in North Carolina, they were well aware of that state’s recent plunge into charter schools, vouchers, and a district composed of the state’s lowest performing schools.
They drew several lessons from what they saw. First, the schools were well funded.
But what impressed them most was the district-wide approach to school improvement.
They write:
“The power of districtwide strategies. Leaders in both Hackney and Tower Hamlets adopted areawide strategies to improve student outcomes. Rather than focusing on a handful of low-performing schools, they sought to strengthen the overall capacity of the borough to serve all children in the area. They established a culture of cooperation and mutual responsibility in which strong schools helped weaker ones, headteachers (principals) and teachers collaborated across schools and borough leaders were able to deploy resources flexibly and efficiently in order to minimize any systemic inequities.
“The area-wide approaches that we observed in London contrast sharply with school improvement strategies in the U.S. that focus on improving a few isolated schools while ignoring the broader needs of districts as a whole. Likewise, the London approach is antithetical to having charter schools function as independent entities with no stake in the overall success of the districts in which they are embedded.
“The concept of areawide reform strategies is gaining attention in the U.S. in the form of proposals that would put groups of struggling schools under centralized management. Analysis of the London Effect suggests that these will be successful only to the extent that they exist in geographically coherent areas united by a coherent vision shared by all relevant stakeholders. “Innovation zones” set up by local school boards as part of a districtwide strategy could fit this bill. “Achievement districts” consisting of a hodge podge of geographically disparate low-performing schools under state control most certainly would not.”
They were also impressed with the accountability system, which rely more on helpful inspection than on standardized testing. Also, they acknowledged the importance of programs tailored to help the children with the greatest needs.
Is North Carolina willing to learn from the lessons of London? Unfortunately, the North Carolina learns from ALEC, not research.
Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article60118256.html#storylink=cpy
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Many UK teachers are completely fed up with the micromanagement; loads of mandates that create mountains of work that they consider frivolous wastes of precious teacher time. This may be great perspective from one consultant expert to another but the teacher burnout and teacher shortage in the UK is very real. Again experts not consulting with actual teachers who are in it for the long haul of doing the actual work instead of being tapped for consultancy.
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this is from 2004 but I keep it on my desk top …http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0ahUKEwjW9-_rtPrKAhWDWT4KHXtjCxwQFggcMAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Ffinance.tc-library.org%2FDefaultFiles%2FSendFileToPublic.asp%3Fft%3Dpdf%26FilePath%3Dc%253A%255CWebsites%255Crockefeller_tclibrary_org_documents%255C197_1749.pdf%26fid%3D197_1749%26aid%3D2%26RID%3D1749&usg=AFQjCNGlAGjimnY5ufsxF5YRedSd3CkANw&bvm=bv.114195076,d.cWw
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“Lessons from North Carolina’s school based accountability system” Ladd (2004)
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yeah NC ushered in the accountability movement. . .precursor and close cousin to VAM. That’s why I don’t understand lauding Jim Hunt by progressives all the time. I think he sort of started us down the reform path that has ultimately hurt our schools so badly.
in fact, progressives in NC have yet to find a new hero for public education, which to me shows a lot of sleeping at the wheel. Jim Hunt has not been in office in 14 years.
One of the first things our more conservative G.A. put in was cursive as a requirement for 3rd grade, because during the ABCs period that Ladd describes, teachers stopped teaching cursive because they were so busy teaching for a test, which did not include cursive.
But again, in NC I get frustrated at the blame game heaped on our conservative (and yes, ALEC loving) G.A. when actually the weakening of our schools began with this accountability movement. Most sharp folks I know in education see this. I do know there are some conservative candidates (well, one) for state supe who calls things like this out (also the over and hasty diagnosing of ADD and the medicating of children to fit them into this format of “education”).
“Progressive” really doesn’t mean anything to me in NC. It’s not true. Progressive here has a destructive side to it. . .albeit conservatives get the blame for their meat cleaver style budget setting.
I prefer honesty in looking back at where we’ve been. All I hear is blame.
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NBER Publications by Helen Ladd
Contact and additional information for this author • All NBER papers and publications • NBER Working Papers by Helen Ladd
Working Papers and Chapters Public Universities, Equal Opportunity, and the Legacy of Jim Crow: Evidence from North Carolina
with Charles T. Clotfelter, Helen F. Ladd, Jacob L. Vigdor: w21577
December 2012 Algebra for 8th Graders: Evidence on its Effects from 10 North Carolina Districts
with Charles T. Clotfelter, Helen F. Ladd, Jacob L. Vigdor: w18649
June 2012 The Aftermath of Accelerating Algebra: Evidence from a District Policy Initiative
with Charles T. Clotfelter, Helen F. Ladd, Jacob L. Vigdor: w18161
Teacher Credentials and Student Achievement in High School: A Cross-Subject Analysis with Student Fixed Effects
with Charles T. Clotfelter, Helen F. Ladd, Jacob L. Vigdor: w13617
Published:
Clotfelter, Charles T. & Ladd, Helen F. & Vigdor, Jacob L., 2007. “Teacher credentials and student achievement: Longitudinal analysis with student fixed effects,” Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 26(6), pages 673-682, December.
Charles T. Clotfelter & Helen F. Ladd & Jacob L. Vigdor, 2010. “Teacher Credentials and Student Achievement in High School: A Cross-Subject Analysis with Student Fixed Effects,” Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 45(3). citation courtesy of
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Thanks, Diane
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
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Here is the thing. Charters seem to have unlimited income sources, because those “investing” in them get a return on their investment through a bottomless pit of taxpayer dollars. Those same taxpayer dollars, we’re told, don’t exist when it comes to true public neighborhood schools — no, those dollars/budgets get cut to the bone. Meanwhile, the fix is simple, is it not? When your roof leaks, you fix it..either you patch it or you need even a more substantial repair or replacement, but you don’t raze your home to fix a leak, right? The whole scrapping of our public schools lock stock and barrel and replacing them with untrained, unqualified TFAs, 24 year old principals, talent officers, etc., hasn’t helped Johnny read, has it? Skimming off the smarter kids, the kid who can speak English, the kids from families with available and/or “invested” parents – and leaving the rest behind is foolish nonsense — all that does is perpetuate the lie that charters work. They may work for some kids, but when a charter operator took over an entire school with the same kids, it failed. Some kids are going to require remedial classes. When you kit that first block in mathematics, the rest of the blocks are hard(er) to understand. Common core was/is a disaster; it didn’t help to take standard math and turn it into something neither the kids nor the parents could easily grasp.
Practice makes perfect. The neediest kids need more, not less. The cutting back of staff, of teachers, of putting larger classes in place, losing art, losing gym, losing social studies, losing science – ridiculous. Slashing the budget when the kids need more, and taking those monies and giving them to charters that start out with 1 and 2 grades and add on each year…how the heck did we arrive here?
Charters that treat children like criminals are not havens of learning. It has to stop.
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Donna:
well put.
😎
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The fact that the government incentivizes the destruction of public schools is repulsive. The public is not leading the charge to change to a system of privatized schools. This is corporate and government led, and they won’t even let citizens vote on the issue.
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Not all is rosy in the UK. They now have “Teach First”, a sort of TFA but somewhat better. They have Academies, UK speak for charter schools, but at least there is some control and accountability, so the bad ones get closed. Also, the Government is not in the pocket of big business to anything like the extent in the US. Hopefully some sense will continue to prevail there.
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This exactly the approach I described in my entry to the Fordham Institute’s recent contest (also encompassing a community involvement aspect to boost gains on school letter grades, very prescribed and added in each year).
But I don’t think conservative efforts want ideas that will help public schools, as you note.
(I did send my paper to the Governor and also to our state supe).
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I would add that in my ardent quest to understand everything I can about the history and politics of NC’s public schools, I think more than any ALEC agenda, the assumption that such endeavors as National Boards (something I myself was never really convinced was a good use of resources) create such a bloat, even a sub-culture, within progressive leadership that I don’t think the paradigm will ever go back; not for another fifteen to twenty years, at least. When and if total support for public schools does come back around, I hope progressives will ask themselves what they (we) might have done to contribute to the rancor against the public school machine. Such reflection is the only real way to save our schools, I think.
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I am underwhelmed by this report. The renaming of districts (innovative, Strive, empowerment, takeover) and rearrangement of how “assets” are distributed too often becomes a way to ignore entrenched poverty –the ssue that must be addressed. At worst we see an new version of red-lining and segregation.
I am also surprised that the Inspectorate system is praised. Well, that system is the same system that the Gates Foundation ( with a little help from the Helmsley Charitable Trust and their friends at the National Center for Teacher Quality) want to foist on every teacher preparation program in the US.
The Gates Foundation just awarded a grant to the Teacher Preparation Inspectorate, US (TPI-US) created to operate iin partnership with the United Kingdom Inspectorates organized as the for-profit Tribal Group, but with criteria from the National Center for Teacher Quality, infamous for rating teacher prep programs then sending those ratings to US News and World Report.
The October, 2015 grant from Gates to “Teacher Prep Inspection — US, Inc. is for $3,248,182.
Dr. Edward Crowe, co-founder of Teacher Preparation Analytics, is leading the Gates Inspectorate project. acronym TPI-US. Beginning in the fall 2013 Crowe managed the development and first pilots of the TPI-US inspection process, then in 2014, led four “trial inspections” of elementary preparation programs. These inspections were conducted at Southern Methodist University, the University of Houston in Texas, New Mexico State University, and Eastern New Mexico University. Additional inspections were being conducted in 2015 in Florida, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, and North Carolina (I have not found the names of these programs).
In these pilots, a manager is hired to recruit inspectors and oversee the program. Preferred inspectors are experienced teachers organized in teams of four. Inspectors visit the teacher preparation program during a four-day period (with little advance notice).
Inspectors are trained to observe student teachers in their classrooms. They also observe the kind and level of support that clinical supervisors provide and the instruction offered by faculty who teach specific courses. In addition, members of the team examine program documents (syllabi, reading lists, assignments), and conduct interviews with: (a) program leaders, (b) program faculty, (c) principals in schools where students teach, and (d) recent graduates of the program. All of this “evidence” is rated against the Inspectorate’s criteria to arrive at judgments.
Programs were evaluated in four areas that comport with NCTQ standards
1. Quality of Selection. The program admits students who have a GPA of 3.0 or higher, are drawn from the top-third of the college-going population (based on standardized tests), and are representative of the state and districts served by the programs.
2. Quality of Content and Teaching Skills. Ensuring candidates know the content standards they will teach, are well-versed in scientifically based reading instruction, display classroom-management abilities, and know how to assess students and use data.
(Programs must support and propagate the Common Core, and use preferred textbooks two of these from Pearson.
Note that NCTQ’s “experts” enlisted to approve the standards for teacher education include:
—Sir Michael Barber, Chief Education Advisor, for Pearson International—publisher of texts, tests K-12, and teacher education, including on-line learning.
—Doug Lemov, Managing Director of “The Taxonomy of Effective Teaching Practices” project for Uncommon (charter) Schools, trustee of the New York Charter Schools Association and of KIPP Tech Valley Charter School. Author of Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques that Put Students on the Path to College. Lemov is known for promoting from extremely authoritarian teaching techniques.
—Merideth Liben, Director of Literacy and English Language Arts for Student Achievement Partners. Liben worked on the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and developed tools for analyzing text “complexity,” mathematical formulas and rules for selecting texts that comply with the Common Core State Standards (CCSS)..
3. Quality of Clinical Placement, Feedback, and Candidate Performance. The program chooses and trains the supervisors who monitor and offer guidance to student-teachers for improved practices. The program ensures candidates have an opportunity to practice in high-performing, low-income schools. The program ensures candidates demonstrate content knowledge and teaching skills. The program succeeds in producing new teachers equipped to improve student learning without additional training. (The criterion of being classrom-ready or job-ready means that the candidate has met or exceeded the criteria for judging experienced teachers “effective” before day one of teaching.)
4. Quality of Program Performance Management. The program uses specific and rigorous checkpoints to gauge candidate progress. The program makes improvement based on surveys of principals and candidates and analyses of student-achievement outcomes.
The more I dig into the details of the Gates-funded Inspectorate system the more clearly I see that Gates wants to this program to become the national model, replacing curent state and national accediting processes.
It is also intended to eliminate the voice and scholarship of education faculty from teacher preparation. Approved reading lists go with this package along with deals with Pearson, Lemov, and promoters of the Common Core.
Beware of Gates-funded programs and projects and Inspectorates modeled on those from the United Kingdom. For the not so obvious policy agenda for this initiative see “http://www.nctq.org/teacherPrep/review2014/findings/nationalPolicies.jsp”
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IMO, NBER working papers get implemented into policy, if the result will benefit the agenda of the 0.1%.
Only 35% of the richest people think that all American children should have really good public schools. 85% of the rest of us, think they should.
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England can teach us about greater income equity since they rank among western nations, unlike the U.S., which ranks among poor countries.
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“Strategies to improve student outcomes.;” is THE conversation!
Plan strategies to meet the objectives is WHAT EVERY REAL TEACHER DID…back then, before businessman was placed at the top, who mandated his strategies —which came down the pike from the EIC, through Gates and Pearson.
Click to access eic-oct_11.pdf
I often write here about objectives and outcomes, and one reader here accused me of describing ‘old’ ways of doing things.
The incessant chatter around the words “curricula” and ‘standards’ is finally giving way to talking about exactly what worked before WE, the veteran professionals were sent packing.
A LIST OF OUTCOMES was all I ever received back then; FOR over 40 years,no PRINCIPAL gave me a curricula to teach, just the expected outcomes! I created THE lessons to meet specific objectives to achieve the outcome LWBA (learner will be able to) WRITE COHERENTLY.
If I could post a photo here, I would show you the 1988 NYC, ESSENTIAL LEARNING OUTCOMES… which on pages 37 through 40, contain everything my students were expected to DO! LIKE IN PERFORMANCE STANDARDS. FOUR PAGES!
I PLAN TO BRING IT TO THE NPE CONFERENCE.
Think of the CC. All I received was four pages of essential outcomes for the 7th grade speaking ,listening, reading, writing “STRANDS” IN GRADE 7. This slim publication contained the ALL the strands for KG _12. Imagine, a time before GATES!
So, little ole, me, at age 50, NEEDED TO PLAN the activities/LESSONS using the STRATEGIES that my education and 30 years of best practice , had shown WORKED… if learning is the goal.
It is soon refreshing to know that London and Finland helping the novice teacher to grasp the things that MUST BE iN PLACE for learning to occur in little Johnny or Jane, or Maria, Shenequa and Juan’s brain.
It is heartening to hear conversations in this special teacher’s room, where I have been hearing how hurt my colleagues are, as they try to teach while following anti-learning strategies.
You see, all a bright educator requires — one who knows her discipline– is the outcomes that must be met, and some support in the classroom —BOOKS AND A BLACKBOARD for example, would have helped me to meet the outcomes of the reading & writing strand on pages 39 to 40. THERE WERE NO COMPUTERS BACK THEN!
There were no books, either…NOT ONE in that 7th grade classroom on York Avenue…. so i bought $4000 worth of YA literature (which I knew from experience were wonderful) and I also copied the best stories from the many English literature texts that I had used when I subbed in East Ramapo, for all the seventh (and 8th, and 9th) grade English teachers in 3 Middle schools.
* Yeah. I bought it. MY money, and when they threw me into the rubber room they gave all my books, 1000 book library by then, to other teachers! Hmmm…. isn’t theft a crime in most workplaces? http://www.whitechalkcrime.com
What London and Finland are doing to support REAL teachers like me and YOU, makes all the difference, if we are ‘turn around’ failing schools implementing & RENEWING strategies that work in ways that KIDS ACTUALLY LEARN!
The schools were easily MADE TO FAIL when the EIC INVENTED FAILURE and proved it by REMOVING the most experienced, veteran teacher-practitioners who had honed their skill in practice…like doctors and lawyers do in order to succeed in their complex disciplines.
WE are the essential INGREDIENT for ESSENTIAL OUTCOMES.
Offering the novice practitioner strategies is a great first step. IN 1958 II learned these strategies at Brooklyn College, in my ed courses and BECAUSE I had a full year of student teaching in 4 very different classrooms, by the time I faced my first crazy class, in 1963, I had some strategies that would help me show these non-reading 10 year olds, how to decode and make meaning!
But then, everything old is new again… except me — and the books that I own!
Books INFORMED my practice, that year when I had nothing but a room and a class list for the sixth and seventh grade, at a new magnet school on the East Side of Manhattan.
I used books by teachers, because there were no workshops to help me. Isolated as I had been in all four decades of my career, I used my noodle to figure out THE WAYS IN WHICH (how in LRDC lingo) I could motivate these young, emergent writers to get the thoughts and to get them down in ways that could be READ!
I have more to say about the strategies I borrowed from a book by Nancy Atwell, in my next comment, but to end this I want to Thank HER! There was no internet for my entire practice so it was the wonderful books that other teachers wrote that gave me so much about Best Practice. including the one called “BEST PRACTICE,” by Zemelman, Daniels & Hyde (1993)
https://books.google.com/books/about/Best_Practice.html?id=1pqcAAAAMAAJ
I see in my google search for the link to that book, that several editions have been printed. I have the first, with a preface entitled RENEWING OUR SCHOOLS!
So, to conclude:
In 1993 the move to RENEW our public education was ongoing. The Pew research was in 1995 -8. The way to do this, was to see what worked best, and share it.
Instead, a plan was being hatched, NOT to renew or refresher schools, but to REPLACE THEM…. so out went BEST PRACTICE and teachers like me..and the EIC, with the media they owned and a government shill like Duncan, created a national narrative not about renewal, but REFORM!
see next comment re NANCY ATWELL with links to her award-winning STRATEGIES… TRUST ME, the irony will not escape you.
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” I borrowed from a book by Nancy Atwell, in my next comment, but to end this I want to Thank HER! ” My immediate supervisor set up a New England exchange and called it NEREX (Gordon Ambach was commissioner in NY, Mark Shedd in CT, Greg Anrig in MA) and he brought Nancy together with New England educators… her work was warmly received through the NEREX exchange…. they also had a group working in exchange for math programs…. Sandy Feldman I think was the New York rep; did you know her? I only met her once . Charlie Mojowski was the Rhode Island representative.
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dont’ be intimidated by people who insult the “old ways”…. This is one document that NEREX prepared that Nancy Atwell participated in. http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED246484.pdf you don’t need to read it because you know it and could probably write most of it.
My friends are still doing teacher education training in Greater Boston; Linda is sometimes called “deadly” and Rosemarie is called a dinosaur. Someone writing here last year was a doctoral student and she was told not to include research or citations that were prior to 2000 and that is just malarkey/bologna. It is anti-intellectual and does not accept that research is canonical and we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us.
I still revere Jeanne Chall, Carol Chomsky, and Blanche Serwer (who did research in the First Grade Reading projects) and Donald Durrell no matter how long ago it was. Most of Durrell’s work is being confirmed by Keith Stanovich now with added research and statistics to prove the concepts.
One snarky , frat boy humor site calls us “Little Ramona of the 1960s rock band” but they are foolish in their so -called modernism of computer algorithms and drinking games. So illegitimis non carborundum ….I’m with you
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if you follow Helen Ladd’s work, she (and others she writes with) have described how the schools have been re-segregated under these policies. She has also described the cohort of children in schools as a factor similar to what David Berliner is saying about sociological variables (not just individual students but cohorts)…. I would give her a second reading. She is not like the Podgursky who writes NBER papers about “Principal Pension Payoff” that get drilled into the Fordham Institute/Education Next network of policy players. Jack Hassard has tried to get some similar data gathering from his involvement — I don’t see that coming-out of Massachusetts — just more hyper marketing sales from the Pearson experimental lab.
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resegregation discussed by Helen Ladd http://www.ncpolicywatch.com/2015/05/04/duke-university-economics-professor-dr-helen-ladd-discusses-a-troubling-trend-of-resegregation-with-the-expansion-of-ncs-charter-schools/
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http://www.nber.org/papers/w21078
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In her research, Helen Ladd re-cofirms this concept that Audrey Amsrein Beardsley brought forth from David Berliner’s work… “Standardized achievement test scores are much more related to home, neighborhood and cohort than they are to teachers’ instructional capabilities……Teachers have huge effects, it’s just that the tests are not sensitive to them.”
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cx. Amrein
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Jean, I love your comments. Yes, this old dinosaur could write a book about what works, but my writing is strictly from the bottom. Berliner, Ladd, Hansard and Podgursky offer the data, so thanks for the links, but my voice is different then the academic… it is the voice of the classroom teacher-practitioner. And yes, home and neighborhood is crucial to outcomes, but the instructional capabilities of the teacher are tantamount to success… which is why everyone remembers THAT special teacher!!!
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PS AMEN!
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It is snowing, and I wish that I could show you how beautiful it is here in my woodlands where the red cardinal glows midst the snow-covered branches, but I have more thing to say about strategies that teachers need to learn.
SO, here is some background on MY EXPERIENCE WITH ESSENTIAL OUTCOMES AND CREATING STRATEGIES FOR LEARNING by using teacher written books (notice absence of the word ‘teaching.’)
I had been a second grade teacher for many years, easily ‘teaching’ writing and reading to eager 7 year olds… eager because MY strategies ENGAGED THEM! But , these new middle school kids would be 12 & 13 yrs old! I needed help, and the principal was ‘busy.’ Luckily Bill Gates was engaged in doing what he did best, creating his business.
You see, I had no assistance, so, I did what I had done for my entire career, I turned to teacher-written books and things that worked which I read in The American Educator.
I grasped pedagogical tenants and had 3 graduate degrees, by then, but I needed classroom strategies for this particular assignment! I turned to Nacny Attwell.*
*Wait until you read the last paragraphs r: Nancy, in this comment… Don’t skip…
It was pre-internet, back then, and all I had was what I already knew worked, — and what I could find among the books written by teachers at which Heinnemen and Stenmore* published.
* Ironically, Phillipa Stratton at Stenmore asked me to write a book about the magic that I created that practice, but I was already under assault, and in a rubber room.
God works in mysterious ways; eh May King?
That summer, I found the book with a teaching tool that I could adapt “IN THE MIDDLE”
by Nancy Atwell http://www.heinemann.com/authors/109.aspx
I only had her book, and not the learner workshops in the link above. I created MY OWN STRATEGIES to work with over 130 NYC kids each day!
I didn’t know if I could make her ‘Reader’s Letter’ strategies work, this kind of conversation between a teacher and her students, was a perfect tool to get the kids talking about books & it gave me a way to see their writing, because they would be ‘putting those thoughts on paper’ — for an audience… ME!* One parent used the relationship that these letters forged with 13 year old girls, in her masters’ thesis.
I read every word that these kids wrote to me, and I WROTE BACK EACH WEEK TO EACH STUDENT… something that Attwell DID NOT do IN BOOTHBAY, MIANE where she had about 17 students!
MY RESPONSE to their letters and the “Dear Boys & Girls” letters I wrote each week, modeled MY writing for the. But suddenly, I connected* to each kids in ways I could not have anticipated. The letter-writing curricula made me famous, because it worked.
*Today, one of those ‘kids’, Chalcey Wilding, a Professor of English, reached me with a message on Facebook. She is in her thirties now… Wow!
Thus, I owe my BEST PRACTICE TO THE MENTORSHIP I GOT FROM A BOOK, and from years of engaging children to READ!
Now for a piece of Irony….HOLD ON TO YOUR HAT…. look what I just found….. as I searched for the links above:
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teaching_now/2015/03/award-winner-nancie-atwell-advises-against-going-into-teaching.html
It says: “Upon receiving the award, Atwell, who teaches at the Center for Teaching and Learning, a nonprofit demonstration school she helped found in Edgecomb, Maine, in 1990, said she was honored to represent her profession and that she felt “validated every day just by the experiences I have with children in the classroom.”
“But she doesn’t seem keen on encouraging others to follow in her footsteps. Following the award ceremony, Atwell appeared on CNN’s New Day to talk about the award and the state of education. When asked what she would tell a student considering a career in teaching, she said that she would discourage them unless they could find a job in a private school.”Public school teachers are so constrained right now by the common core standards and the tests that are developed to monitor what teachers are doing with them,” she said. “If you’re a creative, smart young person, I don’t think this is the time to go into teaching unless an independent school would suit you.”
Seriously. Here is the woman who made my curricula possible.
Sometimes, I think that God speaks, but I am not sure what the message is… because I want to believe that teachers — like her, and LIKE ME — should be the ones explaining what WORKED WHEN WE WERE THE ONES FACING THOSE CHILDREN — with nothing more than A LIST OF ESSENTIAL OUTCOMES!
An aside:
I actually possess ALL the materials that I used to inform my practice for middle school when I returned to full-time teaching and a middle school in NYC.I will bring many with me to the NPE for my Sue-talk at the Poster Presentations.YOU see, All I offer is what I know, THE WAY IT WAS when learning was the goal.
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curmudgucation discusses the new “white flight”…. resegregation through charterhttp://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2016/02/nj-red-bank-and-new-white-flight.html
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