January 2010
"Race to Top" Viewed as Template for a New ESEA
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on ESEA
from Education Week on Vimeo.
The $4 billion Race to the Top competition, created under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, aims to reward states for making progress on a series of redesign “assurances,” including turning around low-performing schools, improving teacher quality and distribution, bolstering state data systems, and improving the use of data and assessments.
Those themes are likely to inform the U.S. Department of Education’s plans for reauthorization of the ESEA, of which the 8-year-old No Child Left Behind Act is the most recent iteration, said Carmel Martin, the department’s assistant secretary for planning, evaluation, and policy development, in an interview with Education Week reporters late last year. More...
Federal Legislation Offers $23 Billion for Education Jobs Fund
December 2009 - Education Week | Cash-strapped school districts hoping to avert layoffs could get a boost from legislation approved by the U.S. House of Representatives Dec. 16 that is intended to provide a jolt to the sluggish economy, in part by creating a $23 billion “education jobs fund.”
Districts and states could use the money to restore cuts to K-12 and higher education to cover the cost of compensation and benefits for teachers and other employees. The funds could also be used for services related to school modernization, renovation, and repair.
The money—which would be in addition to the infusion of up to $100 billion in education aid provided under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—would come from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, which was intended to help stabilize the banking industry.
The $154 billion measure, which redirects $75 billion in TARP funds to job creation, was approved on a vote of 217-212, with 38 Democrats joining all Republicans in opposing the legislation. The U.S. Senate may take up its own version of a jobs bill next month. More...
ED's New Tech Chief Previews National Plan
December 2009 - eSchool News | As America’s brand-new director of education technology, career educator Karen Cator underscores the determination of President Obama and U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan to develop "a transformative agenda" for the nation’s schools and colleges. She said the U.S. Department of Education (ED) will unveil the first draft of the administration’s National Education Technology Plan next month.
"Technology will be in play in every aspect of the education-reform agenda," she said.
In a speech at New York’s Princeton Club on Dec. 1, Cator–a lifelong educator, technology executive, state school official, and education advocate–gave a preview of the plan to more than 200 ed-tech providers and investors at the Ed-Tech Business Forum, a program presented by the Education Division of the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA).
In broad terms, Cator said in an interview with eSchool News, the administration’s ed-tech plan will seek to bring to fruition the president’s vow to make the United States first in the world in the number of college graduates by 2020 and to give every willing student at least one year of postsecondary education. More...
Studying Young Minds, and How to Teach Them
December 2009 - NY Times | Many 4-year-olds cannot count up to their own age when they arrive at preschool, and those at the Stanley M. Makowski Early Childhood Center are hardly prodigies. Most live in this city’s poorer districts and begin their academic life well behind the curve.
But there they were on a recent Wednesday morning, three months into the school year, counting up to seven and higher, even doing some elementary addition and subtraction. At recess, one boy, Joshua, used a pointer to illustrate a math concept known as cardinality, by completing place settings on a whiteboard.
“You just put one plate there, and one there, and one here,” he explained, stepping aside as two other students ambled by, one wearing a pair of clown pants as a headscarf. “That’s it. See?”
For much of the last century, educators and many scientists believed that children could not learn math at all before the age of five, that their brains simply were not ready.
But recent research has turned that assumption on its head — that, and a host of other conventional wisdom about geometry, reading, language and self-control in class. The findings, mostly from a branch of research called cognitive neuroscience, are helping to clarify when young brains are best able to grasp fundamental concepts.
In one recent study, for instance, researchers found that most entering preschoolers could perform rudimentary division, by distributing candies among two or three play animals. In another, scientists found that the brain’s ability to link letter combinations with sounds may not be fully developed until age 11 — much later than many have assumed. More...
Music Training Linked to Better Understanding of Speech
October 2009 - Dana Foundation | French author Victor Hugo once wrote, “Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and cannot remain silent.” A new study suggests that musical skills can also help people understand spoken words buried in a noisy cacophony. This ability may help explain why music training seems to help some people with other forms of learning and could eventually lead to new therapies for children with autism and older people with hearing difficulty.
“The brain is set up with a lot of overlap for language and music,” says Laurel Trainor, a researcher who studies how infants acquire both language and music at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. “Many of the mechanisms used to process both are the same. And all of those rely on executive functioning—or memory, attention and the ability to inhibit [distraction].” So might musical training help enhance executive function? Nina Kraus, the head of Northwestern University’s Audio Neuroscience Lab, decided to test just that. “We reasoned that the nervous system works in economical and pervasive ways when it comes to speech and music,” Kraus says. “A basic musical skill is picking out a relevant signal from a number of other sounds—so we hypothesized that musicians may be better at hearing speech in background noise because of their training.” More...
