Word: schooled
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...public-school teacher, I have witnessed the downside of teachers' unions and agree with Joe Klein's "Failing Our Schools" in some respects [Feb. 8]. However, using only test scores as a gauge for accountability--as required for the Race to the Top funding that Klein extols--doesn't allow administrators to fully evaluate how successful and hardworking a teacher is. Socioeconomics, student support at home and how students are grouped from classroom to classroom may stack results to favor some teachers and unfairly disadvantage others. The unions and government must work together to establish fair accountability and a system...
Does Klein recall the final exam of his high school senior English course? If he believes standardized testing is such an effective indicator of teaching success, did he succeed in his chosen profession because of that exam or despite it? Is that what he remembers most clearly about the greatest teachers he had? Or was it something else...
...Boom!" Leroy Hayes describes sitting in his seventh-grade English class at Philadelphia's Shoemaker Middle School when he heard the explosion. It was startling but not necessarily surprising, he says. Crazy stuff happened all the time at Shoemaker. Once, he recalls, a student urinated into a soda bottle during class and threw it in a math instructor's face. Crazy stuff. After hearing the big explosion, Hayes and his friends rushed out of the room and discovered that someone had set off fireworks in the corridor. "The school was in chaos," the 11th-grader remembers of the 2005 incident...
Three years later, students walk through Shoemaker's halls quietly in single-file lines, the school's walls are graffiti-free, test scores have increased dramatically, and packages are presumably being delivered on time. If this sounds like an entirely different school, that's because it basically is. In fall 2006, the School District of Philadelphia gave the building over to Mastery, a local operator of charter schools - that is, ones that are publicly funded but privately managed. The adults left, the kids remained, and the once failing school has been turned around...
...known for a long time that there are too many bad schools in the U.S., dropout factories that shove barely literate children through the system. Because of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) - the George W. Bush - era education law that forces every school to report whether it makes "adequate yearly progress" toward nationwide math- and reading-proficiency standards - we can now point to exactly which schools are the lowest performing and the least improving. With that information in hand, the question becomes, Well, what do we do about it? (See TIME's special report on paying for college...