“Our purpose in sharing this report is to spur much-needed dialogue about the shift to competency-based education and how that shift can be done in ways that advance equity, ensure teachers have the tools they need, and open up new opportunities for truly effective high school learning. There are no prescriptions here. Instead, we hope the reader will find the evidence cited thought-provoking and engage in serious conversation about the compelling questions the report raises.”
K-12 education should prioritize teaching critical thinking, problem solving, and teamwork across subject areas. Teaching students to become analytical thinkers, problem solvers, and good team members will allow them to remain competitive in the job market even as the nature of work changes.”
“All applicants to Harvard are ranked on a scale of one to six based on their academic qualifications, and athletes who scored a four were accepted at a rate of about 70 percent. Yet the admit rate for nonathletes with the same score was 0.076 percent—nearly 1,000 times lower.”
“People who frequently use many types of media at once, or heavy media multitaskers, performed significantly worse on simple memory tasks.”
“Although we’ve witnessed hate-fueled moments many times before, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about them when they occur. If we don’t, it means we’ve normalized them… Although such moments can feel confusing and out of control, there is a time-tested model we can rely on to help contextualize these events.”
“More than ever, it’s really important for Americans to closely examine the costs of abandoning public institutions and hand them over to corporate interests to save a few dollars on our tax bills. This is a case study of what happens when we do that. Spoiler alert: It ends badly.”
“Tuition Tracker is an interactive tool designed to help parents and students find the “right” college or university among thousands by using search criteria, such as desired location, price and size, to filter results.”
“For Lepore, history is essentially a writing problem: how we know what we know (or think we do), how different forms and genres transmit different kinds of signals, what it might mean to encounter a gap between the evidence and the truth. Her work has confronted the tension between what a reader needs to know for a story to work and the limits of what can be known, and what makes the difference between a person and a character.”
“In his legacy as prophetic radical and political pragmatist, in the almost unimaginable bravery of his early journey and the resilience of his later career, in his achievements as a writer, activist, crusader, intellectual, father, and man, the claim that he was the greatest figure that America has ever produced seems hard to challenge.”
“Rigor is not about making student tasks and assessments harder, but about creating high expectations for learning, supporting students as they perform at higher levels, and allowing students to demonstrate that they have learned at those levels.”
“At critical moments in time, you can raise the aspirations of other people significantly, especially when they are relatively young, simply by suggesting they do something better or more ambitious than what they might have in mind.”
“Meanwhile, new research documents the challenges that beset the effort seemingly from day one. And there remains little evidence that proficiency-based education has boosted student learning, in Maine or elsewhere.”
“Respondents from individualistic cultures (France, US, UK) saved young people, while collectivists (China, Japan) chose old people. Citizens living under strong institutions (Finland, Japan) chose to hit jaywalkers more often than those with weak institutions (Nigeria, Pakistan).”
“It wasn’t long ago that the worry was that rich students would have access to the internet earlier, gaining tech skills and creating a digital divide… But now, as Silicon Valley’s parents increasingly panic over the impact screens have on their children and move toward screen-free lifestyles, worries over a new digital divide are rising. It could happen that the children of poorer and middle-class parents will be raised by screens, while the children of Silicon Valley’s elite will be going back to wooden toys and the luxury of human interaction.”
Ms. Kern said she prioritizes accuracy over speed… Ms. Kern said Apple News also strives to provide readers with views from both sides of the political debate. When Apple in June unveiled a special section on the midterm elections, it highlighted Fox News and Vox as partners. Apple said there are as many people reading traditionally left-leaning publications as traditionally right-leaning publications on Apple News.”
“Lawyers, activists, and researchers emphasize the need for ethics and accountability in the design and implementation of AI systems. But this often ignores a couple of tricky questions: who gets to define those ethics, and who should enforce them?”
Copyright
Every week I send out articles I encounter from around the web. Subject matter ranges from hard knowledge about teaching to research about creativity and cognitive science to stories from other industries that, by analogy, inform what we do as educators. This breadth helps us see our work in new ways.
Readers include teachers, school leaders, university overseers, conference organizers, think tank workers, startup founders, nonprofit leaders, and people who are simply interested in what’s happening in education. They say it helps them keep tabs on what matters most in the conversation surrounding schools, teaching, learning, and more.
– Peter Nilsson