Filmmaker Critiques Education Failure
Posted on October 4th, 2010 by Jaimie Schock
Davis Guggenheim, who won an Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth, now tackles another big issue: poor education. America spends more than any other developed country on education, but its students attain bottom-bumping test scores. In Guggenheim’s new film, Waiting for “Superman,” the villains are America’s two largest teachers unions.
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Tags: Education Policy, Public Policy
Many education experts decry the length of America’s school year, saying it’s too skimpy and a century out of date. Now, President Obama has stepped into the fray, insisting the school year should be lengthened, and that teachers who perform badly should be fired.
This report discusses how 15 public high schools excelled. The schools were featured at the Fifth Annual Conference of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard University in June of 2009. At the conference, teams from each of the schools made brief presentations with evidence of their impressive achievements and then faced extensive questioning from experts about the methods by which they achieved such progress.
Many American children engage in no physical activity outside of school, and slashed state budgets mean even fewer phys-ed classes in some districts. But new studies indicate that aerobic exercise can strengthen minds, as well as bodies.
The Obama Administration has pushed for greater use of merit pay to reward teachers when students make gains in standardized tests. Yet, a new study has found that merit payments of up to $15,000 didn’t improve academic performance.
A presidential advisory panel is calling for the federal government to recruit and train 100,000 “great STEM teachers” over the next decade, recognize a master corps of the best educators, and create 1,000 schools devoted to science, technology, engineering and math.
The defeat of Washington, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty in the Sept. 14 Democratic primary could have repercussions for school reform efforts nationwide. That’s because much of the campaign revolved around Fenty’s hand-picked public schools chief, Michelle Rhee, and her high-profile shake-up of the city’s troubled school system.
As California students return to school this month, 400 eighth graders from four districts — Long Beach, Riverside, Fresno, and San Francisco — will tote something different in their backpacks: an iPad. It’s part of a pilot program meant to determine whether Apple’s popular device can replace traditional algebra textbooks.
