Nationally-recognized experts, Linda Darling Hammond, Douglas Harris and Thomas Kane will present and discuss concrete proposals for how to incorporate test-based performance measures into new teacher evaluations
Co-sponsored with the American Federation of Teachers and held the second Wednesday of every month during the school year, this series is designed to engender lively and informative conversations on important educational issues. We deliberately invites speakers with diverse perspectives, including views other than those of the AFT and the Albert Shanker Institute. What is important is that these participants are committed to genuine engagement with each other. Watch the Conversation videos.
The Albert Shanker Institute hosted a meeting and reception for Afro-Cuban civil rights activists Leonardo Calvo, Manuel Cuesta Morua, and Rafel Campoamor on June 3 from in Washington, D.C.
In the wake of No Child Left Behind, the demands on educational testing are heavier than ever – from diagnosis to instructional improvement to gate-keeping to accountability for students, teachers, and schools. What would a useful assessment system look like at the state and local levels? What are the conceptual and practical issues that must be confronted to achieve such a system?
This workshop session offered an overview of research on why the early acquisition of broad content knowledge is crucial to young children’s later academic success, and provides a guide so that the design, choice, and use of teacher training materials is improved by careful focus on content suitable for three and four year olds. The presenters discussed these findings and what they mean for the improvement of professional development programs for early childhood educators, and offered examples from four new research-based teacher training modules in the content domains of oral language development, early literacy, mathematics, and science.
Districts across the country are struggling to improve low-performing schools, many using school improvement formulas imbedded in state and federal law. But what can research tell us about the relevance of family and school context to learning? About the “social capital” such contexts produce? About how effective these efforts have been and are likely to be? And about what is really known about “what works” to help schools improve?
The quest to define and measure teacher effectiveness has sparked useful research on many different fronts, using different means to gauge various important outcomes. But it has also prompted many ieffective, punitive redesigns of techer evaluation systems. How do we create a system that is clear, fair, and useful for improving practice?
In May 2010, ASI gathered together a remarkable group of researchers, policymakers, journalists and other leaders gathered in Washington, D.C., on May 3 for a thoughtful, in-depth, off-the-record discussion on the role of civic education in the United States.
The fifth meeting of district partners in the Albert Shanker Institute’s “good schools” seminar series was convened in the wake of the first round of the Obama Administration’s $4.3 billion Race to the Top competition. Although only two states were declared as winners, scores of others made plans and passed laws that changed state education systems in ways that could be positive or negative, depending on the care with which these changes are planned and implemented.
Education reform will fail a vast number of U.S. students unless the role of career and technical education (CTE, formerly called vocational education) is reconsidered, recast and placed in the mainstream of K-12 curriculum design. These were some of the conclusions of a small group of top federal and state policymakers, educators, business and labor leaders, practitioners, researchers and other workforce experts who took part in an informal conversation on Feb. 17, hosted by AFT president Randi Weingarten and sponsored by the Albert Shanker Institute.