No, the spell checker doesn’t do titles.
How long since we noted the Carnival of Education? Too long.
Education Carnival without a number at Dr. Homeslice
Education Carnival 131 at Education in Texas
Education Carnival 132 at Education Matters US!
Education Carnival 133 at The Red Pencil
Education Carnival 134 at MatthewTAbor.com
Education Carnival 135 at The Education Wonks
That’s about 200 blog posts whose titles you really ought to peruse, at least.
Welcome back to the chalkboard, eh?
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Education, Education blogs, Education quality, Education reform, Education spending, Education success, Teaching, Technology in the classroom, Tenure, Weblogs | 
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Posted by Ed Darrell
David Parker notes this wonderful event. It makes me hopeful for the nation, really.
David: Did you ask the guy if your students can interview him?
1 Comment | Capturing history, Current History, Education, Education success, Freedom - Economic, Freedom - Political, Heroes, Public education | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
New teachers, especially teachers from alternative certification programs, have all sorts of stories about people who observe and supervise their training and work.
There is the guy whose district bought laptops for every high school student and insisted teachers use the computers daily, but whose principal refused to look at the on-line courses he had developed to meet the district’s guidelines (and whom the principal subsequently rated down for not having the lesson plans the principal refused to look at). There is the drama coach whose supervisor complained the students shouldn’t have been out of school for the state competition, which they won. There is the mathematician from the telecommunications industry whose supervisor didn’t know geometry, or algebra, or calculus, and insisted the teacher should be offering multiplication table timed quizzes to advanced math classes. The guy whose principal thought history documentaries selected from the school’s libraries were just Hollywood movies, and therefore inappropriate for history classes.
More than enough horror stories to go around.
One teacher tells a few horror stories from his student teaching days, but tells us he went on to get his school’s distinguished alumnus award. And so, he shares some of his best material, here: Horace Mann Educated Financial Solutions, “Reach Every Child.”
Go make change.
Tip of the old scrub brush to Car Family, which is really the same guy.
Leave a Comment » | Education, Education quality, Education reform, Education success, Lesson plans, No Child Left Behind Act, Pedagogy, Public education, School discipline, TAKS, Teaching | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Educate, Inc., the parent company of Sylvan Learning Centers, traded for the last time on the NASDAQ exchange yesterday.
No, the company didn’t go out of business. It was taken private by its management, after being a public company for three years. From the Baltimore Sun morning e-mail:
Educate becomes a private company
Educate Inc. has completed its transition into a private company, ending its three-year run on public markets.
Best known for its Sylvan tutoring centers, the Baltimore company, which was purchased in a management-led buyout, traded for the last time on the Nasdaq yesterday.
The investor group that purchased the company is led by chief executive officer R. Christopher Hoehn-Saric, other executives and affiliates of Sterling Capital Partners and Citigroup Private Equity. They paid $8 a share for the company in the deal valued at $535 million.
The company announced this week that more than 75 percent of shareholders approved the deal, which came as the firm has struggled with poor product sales.
Internal reorganization was swift. The company’s website carried this note this morning:
On June 13, 2007, through a merger transaction, Edge Acquisition, LLC became the owner of Educate, Inc. In a related series of simultaneous transactions, the companies which were part of Educate, Inc. have been split into the following independent companies:
- Educate Services, which includes Sylvan Learning, Catapult Learning, and Schulerhilfe;
- Hooked on Phonics, Inc., which includes Hooked on Phonics, Reading Rainbow, and GPN;
- Educate Online, Inc., which includes Catapult Online and eSylvan;
- Progressus, Inc.; and
- Educate Corporate Centers Holdings, Inc., which is a franchisee of various Sylvan Learning and owner of Sylvan Learning Centers.
The companies are now operating independently to better serve students, families and schools across the country. To learn more about the merger and related transactions, click here.
Making a profit delivering education is rare. Milton Friedman notwithstanding, free market rules do not apply to educational enterprises in the same way they do to other services. This is one more example, or set of examples, that should give pause to any rational person considering making public schools “compete” for money to improve education for any child, especially any group of children. Sylvan Learning Centers are considered to be the top of the heap in their niche; Hooked-on-Phonics is a cliché success story. And they “struggle with poor product sales.”
I hope the company finds the education answers, the magic bullets, and can retail them at affordable prices.
The answer, by the way, probably is not 42.
1 Comment | Brain learning, Business, Business Ethics, Education, Education quality, Education spending, Education success, Free market economics, Pedagogy, Teaching, Technology, Technology in the classroom | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
If you’re in the Washington, D.C., area, get on over to the University of Maryland tonight for the junior performance and documentary finals, or tomorrow morning for the senior performance and documentary finals of the National History Day competitions.
Finalists, and their scheduled project presentations, are listed here at the National History Day site. Winners will be announced Thursday evening.
A few of the entries in the junior, individual performance category suggest just how good high school historians can be:
In that list is two semesters’ worth of enrichment for any classroom.
The National History Day webcast is also scheduled for Thursday, but I’m not sure when.
Leave a Comment » | Capturing history, Current History, Education, Education success, History, Student projects, Teaching | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Give up?
Yeah, often the students give up, too. If you don’t know the answer, your school may resemble a prison.
Gary Stager’s post with jarring comparisons is here, at District Administration’s Pulse! blog. [District Administration purges its archives about every three years, it turns out; here is a copy of Mr. Stager’s column courtesy the Wayback Machine – Internet Archive.]
When the elder Fillmore’s Bathtub son attended intermediate school, he complained of the discipline. So did a lot of other good kids. We got a call from a parent asking if we’d join in a meeting with the new principal, and hoping to learn things were really hunky dory and offer assurances to our son, we went.
Read the rest of this entry »
17 Comments | Brain development, Brain learning, Education, Education quality, Education reform, Education success, Ethics, Pedagogy, Public education, School discipline, TAKS, Teaching, TEKS, Testing, Texas | Tagged: Brain learning, Classroom management, Educatio Success, Education, Education reform, Gary Stager, Prison | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
If I need a lift, I go here. It’s how school should be — probably all the way through.
I don’t know the details of how or why this class is set up the way it is, but day after day they do things that other people use as textbook examples of what a good classroom ought to be doing, sometimes. And they do it day, after day, after day.
Carnival of Education, are you paying attention?
Wow.
I wager right now that these kids will be the top performers on the standardized tests for at least the next five years, in their classrooms and schools. The Living Classroom weblog is a valuable chronicle for how to provide quality education.
Somebody should step up with the money to track how these kids do, especially against their contemporaries. Alas, this is exactly the sort of information that will be lost, due to “lack of funding.” Fortunately, one of the women involved in the classroom made the chronicles, and shared them.
Side note: Looking at the photos, ask yourself, “Does our town offer these types of recreational facilities for use?” Washington has traditionally led the nation in setting aside land for public recreational use — this class has taken full advantage of being in a town that had the foresight to put up public art and public beaches, and other public parks and places. There is a lesson here for city planners, and for mayors and city councils who wonder how they might support their schools, run by other governmental entities.
2 Comments | Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), Brain development, Brain learning, Classroom size, Classroom technology, Education, Education blogs, Education quality, Education success, Lesson plans, Music, Pedagogy, School discipline, Teaching | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Commenter Bernarda sent a link to a Washington Post story by Robert Kaiser about Finland, a nation who redesigned its education system with rather dramatic, beneficial results. Among other things, the Finns treat teachers as valuable members of society, with high pay, great support, and heavy training.
Finland is a leading example of the northern European view that a successful, competitive society should provide basic social services to all its citizens at affordable prices or at no cost at all. This isn’t controversial in Finland; it is taken for granted. For a patriotic American like me, the Finns present a difficult challenge: If we Americans are so rich and so smart, why can’t we treat our citizens as well as the Finns do?
Why not? Why can’t we treat our citizens as well as the Finns? Their system boosts their economy and leads to great social progress — which part of that do we not want?
5 Comments | Classroom size, Creativity, Economics, Education quality, Education reform, Education spending, Education success, Free market economics, Freedom - Economic, Freedom - Political, Politics, Public education, School vouchers, Socialism, Teacher Pay, Teaching | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
The Education Wonks hosts (host?) the 121sth Carnival of Education — including a nice referral to my post on the voucher wars in Utah.
School’s out in much of the nation, and won’t last much longer in the rest (except for full-year schools). It’s a good time to reflect on what worked, what didn’t, and what to change for next year. I was especially intrigued to learn that Mr. Teacher of Learn Me Good teaches in Dallas — close by, somewhere. One wonders how an alternative certification sneaked through the human resources shredder of the Dallas ISD to get a job, and one hopes it may show a trend; and then one wonders why DISD doesn’t pay more attention to the obvious success of the guy and go back to that alternative certification well. (HR departments in Texas school districts have reputations that they really don’t like alternative certification, even when the teachers work out well; one more indication that we don’t know what the heck we’re doing in education. My experience suggests the reputation is well-earned.) [See comment on alternative certification by Mr. Teacher, below.]
There is much, much more in the carnival. The Carnival of Education is an outstanding example of what blog carnivals can be — useful packages of information, summaries of the field they cover. Spread the word.
3 Comments | Education, Education blogs, Education quality, Education reform, Education spending, Education success, School discipline, School vouchers, Teaching, Weblogs | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Main entrance to West High School, Salt Lake City, Utah. Wikipedia image
I coulda told you that. It’s my mother’s high school. (Class of ’32)
(My old school, Pleasant Grove High, didn’t make the list.)
3 Comments | Education, Education quality, Education reform, Education success, No Child Left Behind Act, Public education, Teaching | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
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Ed Darrell on Texas's Colorado River
Come on in, the water's fine. Come often: Cleanliness is next to godliness.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 