Marshall Memo 628

A Weekly Round-up of Important Ideas and Research in K-12 Education

March 14, 2016

 

 


In This Issue:

1. The debate on “no excuses” classroom discipline

2. “PLC lite” versus the real thing

3. The case for a very different high-school math curriculum

4. Are we conditioning girls to be scaredy-cats?

5. Teaching ELA and math students to use their brains in similar ways

6. Avoiding common errors applying Carol Dweck’s mindset thinking

7. The science achievement gap and how it might be closed

8. Short item: An infographic on where STEM college graduates work

 

Quotes of the Week

“We must embolden girls to master skills that at first appear difficult, even dangerous.”

            Caroline Paul (see item #4)

 

“Ours has become a quantitative century, and we must master its languages. Decimals and ratios are now as crucial as nouns and verbs.”

            Andrew Hacker (see item #3)

 

“The research is overwhelmingly against retention, but facts are merely an annoyance to those with strongly held opinions.”

            Rick DuFour and Douglas Reeves (see item #2)

 

“Educators rename their traditional faculty or department meetings as PLC meetings, engage in book studies that result in no action, or devote collaborative time to topics that have no effect on student achievement – all in the name of the PLC process.”

            Rick DuFour and Douglas Reeves (ibid.)

 

“The absence of misbehavior doesn’t mean the presence of high levels of learning.”

Stacy Birdsell O’Toole (quoted in item #1)

 

“Students cannot just ‘track’ the teacher, follow every direction, and repeat right answers in choral back-and-forths; they also need to learn to track arguments, pay attention to their work, and evaluate evidence in order to agree or disagree respectfully. And they need to have ample opportunities to make mistakes, both behavioral and academic, no matter how uncomfortable that makes their teachers.”

            Elizabeth Green (ibid.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. The Debate on “No Excuses” Classroom Discipline

            In this Chalkbeat article, author/editor Elizabeth Green examines school discipline policies in light of the much-discussed video of a New York City charter school teacher harshly reprimanding a first grader for an incorrect paper http://nyti.ms/1XpZ6bR. “It’s complicated,” says Green. “More than perhaps any other issue in education, the discipline question finds individual students, teachers, and parents pulled between two poles of a heated, high-stakes, and very personal debate.”

On one side are those who argue that the “no excuses” approach adopted by many charter schools is the only way to keep students on task and solve racial and social-class inequities that are exacerbated by lax discipline. Strict teachers are nothing new, but the no-excuses approach evolved in the 1990s to address the challenge of chaotic classrooms and disrespectful students in high-poverty schools. The approach was partly inspired by the “broken window” approach to community policing, which held that “sweating the small stuff” (fixing broken windows and other symptoms of disorder) created a climate that discouraged more-serious crimes. The “small stuff” in schools includes messy desks, gum chewing, pen tapping, doodling, trash on the floor, untucked shirts, loud talking, laughing at classmates, whining, eye rolling, teeth sucking, loud yawning, noisy movement from class to class, and running in the hallways.

On the other side of the debate are those who argue that no-excuses tactics are abusive, racist, and not an effective way to close the achievement gap. Green summarizes three arguments in this vein:

The end doesn’t justify the means. Even if students make significant academic gains in no-excuses classrooms, the argument goes, harsh treatment by teachers and administrators leaves emotional scars. Most no-excuses schools advocate “warm-strict” – a balance of high expectations within nurturing relationships. But it’s clear that some educators get carried away and act in ways that can easily be experienced by students as abusive – for example, the New York City teacher in the video tears up a student’s incorrect paper in front of the class and raises her voice as she sends the girl away from the group. The real question, of course, is what happens downstream for students – how they do in subsequent grades, college, and life. Data are just beginning to be gathered on that.

No-excuses tactics perpetuate racist forms of control. The concern here is the impact of white educators harshly disciplining children of color. Although no-excuses schools were all founded on the principle of dramatically improving the life trajectories of their students, critics charge that overly strict discipline tactics – even in the hands of educators who are African American and Hispanic – have the effect of controlling and diminishing the bodies, cultures, speech patterns, and creativity of students of color and feed the school-to-prison pipeline. The definition of “disrespect,” frequently given as the reason for suspensions and other punishments, is particularly open to racial bias, say the critics.

No-excuses discipline doesn’t teach the habits of success. “The absence of misbehavior doesn’t mean the presence of high levels of learning,” says charter educator Stacy Birdsell O’Toole. Another charter administrator worries that strict, controlling discipline during school hours doesn’t prepare students to handle themselves responsibly in less-structured environments. “All the silence had prepared them only for situations with tight supervision and no social interaction,” says Green. “As soon as they found themselves a bit older, on the bus without their teachers, they didn’t have the tools to resolve conflicts without putting themselves in danger. And how could they? The school hadn’t taught them.” The same argument is made about teaching very structured procedures in English and math classes. It might produce high scores on standardized tests, but students can fail to develop the independent thinking skills that are essential for success in college and life.

Green then presents three arguments that are made by supporters of the no-excuses approach:

Structure is actually anti-racist. “Looking at test scores,” says Green, “all the highest academic results ever produced for poor students and students of color have come from no-excuses schools… No schools, no-excuses or otherwise, have successfully educated large numbers of low-income students of color at the levels they desire, but no-excuses schools have come closest.” This has been true even when standardized tests became more rigorous following the rollout of Common Core standards (although not in all no-excuses schools). College retention has also been impressive – one study showed that 44 percent of KIPP graduates earned four-year college degrees compared to only 8 percent for low-income students generally. “The obsession with small details and perfect compliance that no-excuses fosters might not feel like liberation,” Green continues. “But, defenders argue, subtracting freedom in the short term is actually the more radical path to defeating poverty and racism in the long term.”

No-excuses consequences don’t have to hurt kids. If practiced with skill and within a day-to-day climate of warmth and high expectations, strict consequences can be very helpful to students, the argument goes. Taking the example of correcting students’ grammar and speech patterns, which might inhibit students from speaking, John King (founder of a successful Boston charter school and now Acting U.S. Secretary of Education) says, “If done well, you’re giving kids lots of opportunities to speak. You say the sentence back to them grammatically correctly, or you ask them a question.” The challenge for rapidly expanding charter networks is ensuring that balance of warmth and strictness in every classroom. “The more ‘replication’ schools emerge,” says Green, “the farther away each new school is from the good intentions of those who created the philosophy – and the higher the risk of teachers misinterpreting the idea and falling down the slippery slope toward a disconnected desire for control and compliance.”

No-excuses schools are capable of change, and they are changing. Green reports that the schools in question are learning from early mistakes and fine-tuning their approach to discipline. She’s seeing more-careful staff training, close monitoring of classrooms, and clear statements by school leaders like this one from Stacy Birdsell-O’Toole to her teacherss: “We are not a yelling school. We do not yell at kids. If I see you yell at a child, I’m going to pull you to the side, I’m going to have a talk with you, and then you’re going to go back and you’re going to be successful.”

Green concludes with her own opinion on the debate. The no-excuses approach to teaching “needs radical overhaul,” she says. “The behavior first, learning second formula prescribed by broken-windows theory – and for that matter, by most American schools – can successfully build compliant, attentive students, at least in the short term. But it cannot produce students who think creatively, reason independently, and analyze critically. Students cannot just ‘track’ the teacher, follow every direction, and repeat right answers in choral back-and-forths; they also need to learn to track arguments, pay attention to their work, and evaluate evidence in order to agree or disagree respectfully. And they need to have ample opportunities to make mistakes, both behavioral and academic, no matter how uncomfortable that makes their teachers… I’m saying that educators need to embrace new, more complicated structures that feel messier in the short term but build more permanent learning in the long term.”

Green believes that no-excuses schools have the greatest potential to be successful with all students, and is encouraged by the way they are looking at their data and developing increasingly effective practices.

 

“Beyond the Viral Video: Inside Educators’ Emotional Debate About ‘No Excuses’ Discipline” by Elizabeth Green in Chalkbeat, March 8, 2016, http://bit.ly/22fvvoQ; Green can be reached at [email protected].

Back to page one

 

2. “PLC Lite” Versus the Real Thing

            In this article in Kappan, PLC guru Rick DuFour and author/consultant Douglas Reeves say that, unfortunately, “PLC Lite” is the most accurate way to describe the current state of professional learning communities around the country. “Educators rename their traditional faculty or department meetings as PLC meetings,” say DuFour and Reeves, “engage in book studies that result in no action, or devote collaborative time to topics that have no effect on student achievement – all in the name of the PLC process. These activities fail to embrace the central tenets of the PLC process and won’t lead to higher levels of learning for students or adults.” They list the characteristics of a true professional learning community:

-   A teacher team takes collective responsibility for students’ learning;

-   A guaranteed and viable curriculum is established, specifying the knowledge, skills, and dispositions students are expected to acquire, unit by unit.

-   Frequent, common, team-developed interim assessments measure students’ mastery of the curriculum.

-   These assessments identify the students who need additional time and support; students who would benefit from enriched or extended learning; teachers’ individual strengths and weaknesses based on what their students learned; and areas where none of the team members were able to bring students to proficiency.

-   A system of interventions guarantees that struggling students get additional time and support in ways that don’t remove them from new instruction.

All this flows from the four questions school staff are continuously asking themselves:

-   What do we want students to learn?

-   How will we know if they have learned it?

-   What will we do if they haven’t learned it?

-   How will we provide extended learning opportunities for students who have mastered the content?

 “We recommend that faculty members keep a very simple one-page protocol that helps them focus on these questions,” say DuFour and Reeves. “Meetings that only address standards, that focus entirely on disciplinary issues and parent complaints, or that center on employee issues may be very interesting, but they do not represent the work of high-performing PLCs.”

They go on to discuss three areas that are particularly important in productive professional learning communities:

            • Assessments – DuFour and Reeves draw a distinction between on-the-spot checking for understanding and periodic interim assessments – two equally important but quite distinct success factors. With the former, teachers direct questions at randomly selected students, move around the room checking students’ work, and use whiteboards, clickers, and exit slips to see how well students are grasping the material and follow up accordingly. Students are also involved in assessing their own understanding and taking increasing responsibility for improving their work.

With interim assessments, team members give students a test or performance-based assessment and use the results to identify struggling students, provide timely, systematic support, give students another chance to demonstrate their proficiency, and use the data to improve their classroom skills. DuFour and Reeves are scathing in their assessment of the “uninformative” interim assessment process they see in many schools. It often amounts to little more than shallow test prep including very brief team conversations concluding with, “Thank goodness that’s over – now we can go back to what we were doing.” Even if state tests consist largely of multiple-choice questions, teachers’ job “is not to mimic state tests but to challenge students to show what they know in ways that exceed traditional tests.”

            • Data analysis – “Many PLC Lite schools have no process for collective analysis of student learning,” say DuFour and Reeves. Without that structure, teacher teams may spend time discussing their policy about student use of cell phones or sharing preferences about how to teach a skill (“I’ve always taught it this way”). All too many teams fall into the time-honored rut of teach, test, hope for the best, assign students to remediation, and move on. “Perhaps the worst examples of faux data analysis are the unfortunately named ‘war rooms’ in which district leaders display data from the previous year’s state tests and use this as a vehicle to publicly praise and humiliate principals and faculty members,” say the authors. “This is what military veterans call ‘fighting the last war’… The best examples of data analysis lead to specific actions by teachers and administrators so that an examination of the data leads to interventions and changes in instruction, feedback, and support.”

            • Interventions – The key question is, “What happens in your school when students don’t learn what you have deemed is essential?” say DuFour and Reeves. “The least effective response to this question is that students must repeat a grade or a course… The research is overwhelmingly against retention, but facts are merely an annoyance to those with strongly held opinions.” What does work? Systematic, intensive, focused, immediate follow-up instruction at the individual or small-group level. “These interventions do more than improve student success,” say DuFour and Reeves. “They also dramatically improve faculty morale. Imagine what next year would be like if we had fewer repeaters and more elective classes. It might begin to restore the joy of teaching and the reason most teachers entered the profession: to make a positive difference in the lives of students.”

 

“The Futility of PLC Lite” by Rick DuFour and Douglas Reeves in Phi Delta Kappan, March 2016 (Vol. 97, #6, p. 69-71), www.kappanmagazine.org; the authors can be reached at [email protected] and [email protected].

Back to page one

 

3. The Case for a Very Different High-School Math Curriculum

            In this New York Times article, Andrew Hacker (Queens College) makes the case for rethinking our high-school and college math curriculum to focus on quantitative literacy. Researchers have found that U.S. adults are embarrassingly inept at solving everyday math problems – for example, computing the cost of a carpet given its dimensions and the square-yard price. An OECD study ranked the U.S. a dismal 22nd out of 24 countries in basic numeracy skills, behind Estonia and Cyprus.

            The solution, says Hacker, isn’t forcing students to take more math, but teaching a different kind of math. “Calculus and higher math have a place, of course,” he says, “but it’s not in most people’s everyday lives. What citizens do need is to be comfortable reading graphs and charts and adept at calculating simple figures in their heads. Ours has become a quantitative century, and we must master its languages. Decimals and ratios are now as crucial as nouns and verbs.”

            Why is secondary-school math so divorced from what’s useful outside of school? Even statistics courses, says Hacker, are far too technical; he sat in on some AP statistics classes and found that the syllabus was “practically a research seminar for dissertation candidates” – binomial random variables, least-square regression lines, pooled sample standard errors, and more. “Many students fall by the wayside,” he says. “It’s not just the difficulty of the classes. They can’t see how such formulas connect with the lives they’ll be leading.” Two-thirds of high-school students who took AP statistics in 2015 failed to get credit for the course at selective colleges. The same was true of a community college statistics course designed by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching: abstruse content and huge student attrition.

            The reason for all this arcana, says Hacker, is that many mathematics educators look down their noses at “easy” citizen statistics courses, which they believe are dumbing down the curriculum. College math professors tend to be purists – the content has to be done at their level or not at all – and they don’t think they’ll get promotions and tenure for teaching real-world courses.

            In fact, Hacker argues, solving everyday problems is not only more interesting and relevant to students, but it’s also quite demanding. In the college course he teaches in New York City, for which the only requirement is middle-school arithmetic, students wrestle with comparative statistics on cell phones and landlines, trends in birth rates in different states, and measuring time using decimalized days and weeks. “What’s needed is a facility for sensing symptoms of bias, questionable samples, and dubious sources of data,” says Hacker.

He believes this kind of math should take the place of algebra and geometry in high school – except for students who want to pursue a more-abstract, advanced math track. For most students, says Hacker, “all those X’s and Y’s can inhibit becoming deft with everyday digits.”

 

“The Wrong Way to Teach Math” by Andrew Hacker in The New York Times, February 28, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/opinion/sunday/the-wrong-way-to-teach-math.html?_r=0;

Hacker’s new book is The Math Myth and Other STEM Delusions (The New Press, 2016).

Back to page one

 

4. Are We Conditioning Girls to Be Scaredy-Cats?

            In this New York Times article, former San Francisco firefighter Caroline Paul, who’s run into countless burning buildings and crawled down a lot of smoky hallways, says she was frequently asked, “Aren’t you scared?” She found it strange and insulting to have her courage doubted. Her male colleagues were never asked this question. Of course all firefighters are scared at times – so why the expectation that women are more fearful than men?

            Paul believes it’s because girls are conditioned from a young age to be skittish. Mothers, fathers, and teachers warn them away from activities that seem risky, like playing on the fire pole in a playground. Boys, on the other hand, are told to face their fears, be brave and resilient, and deal with the bumps and bruises that are part of a rough-and-tumble childhood. According to a 2015 study in The Journal of Pediatric Psychology, parents are four times more likely to tell girls to be careful than boys because of an unconscious belief that females are more fragile than males.

            “When a girl learns that the chance of skinning her knee is an acceptable reason not to attempt the fire pole,” says Paul, “she learns to avoid activities outside her comfort zone. Soon many situations are considered too scary, when in fact they are simply exhilarating and unknown. Fear becomes a go-to feminine trait, something girls are expected to feel and express at will. By the time a girl reaches her tweens no one bats an eye when she screams at the sight of an insect. When girls become women, this fear manifests as deference and timid decision making… Books on female empowerment proliferate on our shelves. I admire what these writers are trying to do – but they come far too late.”

            Not that injuries are good or girls should be reckless, says Paul, advising parents and educators to use common sense and carefully supervise potentially dangerous activities. “But risk-taking is important,” she concludes. “[B]y cautioning girls away from these experiences, we are not protecting them. We are failing to prepare them for life… We must embolden girls to master skills that at first appear difficult, even dangerous. And it’s not cute when a 10-year-old girl screeches, ‘I’m too scared.’”

 

“It’s Not Cute to Be Scared” by Caroline Paul in The New York Times, February 21, 2016,

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/21/opinion/sunday/why-do-we-teach-girls-that-its-cute-to-be-scared.html

Paul’s new book is The Gutsy Girl: Escapades for Your Life of Epic Adventure (Bloomsbury USA, 2016)

Back to page one

 

5. Teaching ELA and Math Students to Use Their Brains in Similar Ways

            In this article in Kappan, former ELA teacher Nancy Gardner and math teacher Nicole Smith argue that the Common Core standards form a natural bridge between the seemingly disparate subject areas of English language arts and math. The similarities:

            • Grit – In both subjects, the new standards emphasize perseverance – sticking with a task, especially a difficult one. In ELA, this manifests itself in getting students to read more-difficult texts. “We want all students to have a productive struggle with texts,” say Gardner and Smith. “Sometimes this means more time devoted to shorter passages” – for example, spending two weeks delving into just two chapters of Frankenstein. In math, Common Core ramps up the importance of solving word problems with real-world relevance. “Teaching perseverance depends heavily on the questioning skills of teachers,” say the authors. “Teachers need to understand the how and why of good questions so they can help students dig deeply and avoid superficial responses.”

            • Supporting claims – In both ELA and math, Common Core standards involve using claims, reasons, and evidence to back up arguments. In ELA, this means returning again and again to the text for actual evidence, versus the previous emphasis on relating texts to one’s own personal experiences and opinions. In math, students are asked to show the steps of solving a problem or completing a proof. “This means students start to articulate why a given answer must be true – or how a logical conclusion can be reached,” say Gardner and Smith. “In both ELA and math, the focus shifts from finding the what answer to how to find the best answer and why that answer is best. The conversation may even continue to include whether there is a best answer.”

            • Precision – In ELA, this includes close attention to grammar and word choice in students’ writing and in the texts they read – for example, why did the author use the word catastrophe rather than problem? In math, students are called upon to know what level of precision is necessary for a given task – for example, is the best unit of measurement centimeters or millimeters? – and debating with classmates about the most efficient and elegant way to solve a problem. “The importance of precision goes beyond being right,” say the authors, “to a deeper understanding of how right or how effective something is or isn’t.”

            • Structure analysis – In ELA, why did the author use particular images or rhyme schemes? Why did the writer choose this extended metaphor? Why was the argument constructed this way? In math, students need to learn how to step back and look at the big picture as they analyze mathematical structure, looking for similarities, differences, and patterns. “This helps students make formulas their own and reach past the superficial level of memorizing a formula,” say Gardner and Smith.

            • Using tools strategically – Common Core standards ask students to use vocabulary and grammar with skill and careful intent. This is essential given the way students are bombarded with words and ideas from the Internet and other sources, and the challenging nature of tasks they will face in the years ahead.

 

“Math and ELA Meet at the Common Core” by Nancy Gardner and Nicole Smith in Phi Delta Kappan, March 2016 (Vol. 97, #6, p. 53-56), www.kappanmagazine.org; Gardner can be reached at [email protected].

Back to page one

 

6. Avoiding Common Errors in Applying Carol Dweck’s Mindset Thinking

(Originally titled “Mindset 20/20”)

            In this article in Education Update, Laura Varlas takes stock of how Carol Dweck’s 2006 book, Mindset, has been applied in schools. Three critical observations:

            • Effort. Some educators think Dweck is saying they should reinforce effort, not outcomes. Not so! says Dweck: “Our work shows that you can praise the outcome as long as you also talk about the process that led to the outcome… Telling kids just to try hard is not helpful. It doesn’t tell them all the strategies, resources, and input they’ll need to get there.” British educator Chris Hildrew agrees, “If our students fail a test, it’s not helpful to say ‘at least you tried hard,’ because clearly it was the wrong kind of effort.” Better to ask, “What strategies did you use? What didn’t work? What can you do differently next time?” Another approach is giving students commentary on their classwork, saving grades for summative assessments, and working with students to see where they’re at, what they don’t understand, and what they should try next.

            • False mindsets. Some teachers give lip service to the growth mindset but secretly hold fixed beliefs about some students’ ability to succeed. Or they might frown on mistakes rather than treating them as integral to learning, or make the work easier so students won’t have to struggle. Dweck talks about the confusion-clarity cycle: “You get confused when you face something new. Then it becomes clear, and then you are ready to face the next round of confusion and work through that… Often, when kids feel confused about something, they feel like they’re back to square one.” She suggests giving a pretest and using it later to show struggling students the progress they’ve made.

            • Triggers. All of us, teachers and students, are a mix of fixed and growth mindsets, says Dweck. Acknowledge that. Fixed thinking is part of you but it’s not you! She and her Stanford colleagues are searching for what activates fixed thinking – for example, encountering frustration about not having the knowledge or skill to do something well. Washington, D.C. principal Dawn Clemens and her colleagues urge students to train their brains to take a logical rather than an emotional stance toward learning problems: “I need to study these things for the next test” versus “The test was unfair and my teacher doesn’t like me.” And here’s a strategy for working with a student with a negative mindset: give his or her “fixed side” a name (Dwayne) and then use it to convey a growth message: “Let’s see if we can get Dwayne to really listen to this feedback and plan what to do next.”

 

“Mindset 20/20” by Laura Varlas in Education Update, March 2016 (Vol. 58, #3, p. 1, 4-5), available for purchase at http://bit.ly/1nJFGT5; Varlas recommends Jo Boaler’s website as a good resource for Mindset professional development: https://www.youcubed.org.

Back to page one

 

7. The Science Achievement Gap and How It Might Be Closed

            In this article in Educational Researcher, Paul Morgan, Marianne Hillemeier, and Steve Maczuga (Pennsylvania State University/University Park) and George Farkas (University of California/Irvine) document the significant gaps in U.S. students’ science achievement by race, income, and ELL status. For example, the 50th- percentile scores of English language learners are lower than the 10th-percentile scores of non-ELL students. “Low levels of science achievement are no longer a ‘gathering storm,’” say the authors, “but now are rapidly approaching a ‘Category 5’ in their potential to derail the nation’s long-term global competitiveness. If left unaddressed, and given the nation’s increasing economic disparities, low science achievement may be experienced by growing segments of the U.S. adult population. The result may be an electorate with more limited ability to understand pressing public policy issues necessitating greater scientific literacy as well as lower employment and economic prosperity.” Climate change, genetic engineering, and hydraulic fracking are current issues requiring sophisticated understanding.

It’s clear that disadvantaged children enter kindergarten with knowledge deficits about the natural and physical world, say the authors, which is attributable to to less exposure to early science talk, reading, and experiences. Although disadvantaged students make steady progress in science achievement as they move through the grades, it’s not enough to catch up with more-advantaged peers, so the gap persists – their graphs of subgroups’ progress through the grades are virtually parallel to each other.

Morgan, Hillemeier, Maczuga, and Farkas investigated the degree to which several factors affected science achievement: family characteristics; parenting quality; school demographics; school academic climate; students’ general knowledge; reading and math achievement; and approaches to learning. They found that parenting quality had relatively little impact on students’ science achievement, but their math and reading proficiency were key factors as they moved through the grades, along with self-regulation, the degree to which their school had a high concentration of poor and minority students, and the instructional resources teachers had at their disposal.

These findings point to the importance of intervening early to fill in knowledge gaps – in early-childhood and preschool programs and parent education – and then working on a broad front in elementary and middle schools to bolster students’ reading, math, and behavioral proficiency. The quantity and quality of science instruction are crucial as well. “After the early-elementary time period,” say the authors, “children, especially those who are at risk, may begin to internalize views of science as ‘hard’ or for ‘eggheads’ or mistakenly resulting from fixed ability, leading elementary and middle-school teachers to confront attitudinal as well as academic barriers when trying to address science achievement gaps.” But the authors are optimistic that, with attention to the key factors, the science gap can be narrowed.

 

“Science Achievement Gaps Begin Very Early, Persist, and Are Largely Explained by Modifiable Factors” by Paul Morgan, George Farkas, Marianne Hillemeier, and Steve Maczuga in Educational Researcher, January/February 2016 (Vol. 45, #1, p. 18-35), available for purchase at http://edr.sagepub.com/content/45/1/18.short; Morgan can be reached at [email protected].

Back to page one

 

8. Short Item:

            Infographic on where STEM college graduates work – This data-rich display https://www.census.gov/dataviz/visualizations/stem/stem-html/ shows the flow from college to various professions.

 

“Where Do College Graduates Work? A Special Focus on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math” United States Census Bureau, July 10, 2014

Back to page one

 

           

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

© Copyright 2016 Marshall Memo LLC

 

If you have feedback or suggestions,

please e-mail [email protected]

 


 


About the Marshall Memo

 


Mission and focus:

This weekly memo is designed to keep principals, teachers, superintendents, and others very well-informed on current research and effective practices in K-12 education. Kim Marshall, drawing on 44 years’ experience as a teacher, principal, central office administrator, and writer, lightens the load of busy educators by serving as their “designated reader.”

 

To produce the Marshall Memo, Kim subscribes to 64 carefully-chosen publications (see list to the right), sifts through more than a hundred articles each week, and selects 5-10 that have the greatest potential to improve teaching, leadership, and learning. He then writes a brief summary of each article, pulls out several striking quotes, provides e-links to full articles when available, and e-mails the Memo to subscribers every Monday evening (with occasional breaks; there are 50 issues a year).

 

Subscriptions:

Individual subscriptions are $50 for a year. Rates decline steeply for multiple readers within the same organization. See the website for these rates and how to pay by check, credit card, or purchase order.

 

Website:

If you go to http://www.marshallmemo.com you will find detailed information on:

• How to subscribe or renew

• A detailed rationale for the Marshall Memo

• Publications (with a count of articles from each)

• Article selection criteria

• Topics (with a count of articles from each)

• Headlines for all issues

• Reader opinions (with results of an annual survey)

• About Kim Marshall (including links to articles)

• A free sample issue

 

Subscribers have access to the Members’ Area of the website, which has:

• The current issue (in Word or PDF)

• All back issues (also in Word and PDF)

• A database of all articles to date, searchable

    by topic, title, author, source, level, etc.

• A collection of “classic” articles from all 11 years

Core list of publications covered

Those read this week are underlined.

American Educational Research Journal

American Educator

American Journal of Education

American School Board Journal

AMLE Magazine

ASCA School Counselor

ASCD SmartBrief/Public Education NewsBlast

Better: Evidence-Based Education

Center for Performance Assessment Newsletter

District Administration

Ed. Magazine

Education Digest

Education Gadfly

Education Next

Education Week

Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis

Educational Horizons

Educational Leadership

Educational Researcher
Edutopia

Elementary School Journal

Essential Teacher

Go Teach

Harvard Business Review

Harvard Educational Review

Independent School

Journal of Education for Students Placed At Risk (JESPAR)

Journal of Staff Development

Kappa Delta Pi Record

Knowledge Quest

Literacy Today

Middle School Journal

Peabody Journal of Education

Perspectives

Phi Delta Kappan

Principal

Principal Leadership

Principal’s Research Review

Reading Research Quarterly

Responsive Classroom Newsletter

Rethinking Schools

Review of Educational Research

School Administrator

School Library Journal

Teacher

Teachers College Record

Teaching Children Mathematics

Teaching Exceptional Children/Exceptional Children

The Atlantic

The Chronicle of Higher Education

The District Management Journal

The Journal of the Learning Sciences

The Language Educator

The Learning Principal/Learning System/Tools for Schools

The New York Times

The New Yorker

The Reading Teacher

Theory Into Practice

Time Magazine

Wharton Leadership Digest