In This Issue:

  1. Successful school turnarounds in the U.K.

  2. What’s really involved in culturally responsive teaching?

  3. Ten “restorative” literacy practices that close the achievement gap

  4. How to assess a student’s alphabet letter knowledge in under a minute

  5. The value of teaching about conspiracy theories

  6. More evidence on the impact of later high-school start times

  7. The annual PDK poll of attitudes on U.S. public schools

  8. Ten “must have” young adult books

  9. A Consumer Reports-type analysis of high-school literature textbooks

10. Short item: A timeline of the earth’s temperature since the last ice glaciation

 

Quotes of the Week

“Transforming a school is a long, hard, and often lonely task. Some people want change, others don’t, and some simply aren’t prepared to wait for results to show.”

            Alex Hill, Ben Laker, Liz Mellon, and Jules Goddard (see item #1)

 

“I believe you let down 30 students a year by protecting one incompetent teacher.”

            A U.K. turnaround principal (quoted in item #1)

 

“Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.”

            Vince Lombardi Jr.

 

“Too often, when children struggle to read, educators assume the problem lies within the children themselves. But in fact, decades of research have shown that whatever children’s innate skills, strengths, and abilities may be, what really matters are the beliefs, attitudes, and actions of the teachers and other adults in their lives.”

            Deborah Wolter (see item #3)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Successful School Turnarounds in the U.K.

            “Transforming a school is a long, hard, and often lonely task,” say Alex Hill and Ben Laker (Centre for High Performance and Kingston University), Liz Mellon (Duke Corporate Education), and Jules Goddard (London Business School) in this Harvard Business Review summary of their eight-year study. “Some people want change, others don’t, and some simply aren’t prepared to wait for results to show.” The researchers identified 62 U.K. schools that were successfully turned around and sustained their improved performance over time. Here were the key building blocks their principals put in place:

            • Make a long-term commitment. Successful leaders presented a long-range plan that challenged the system and showed their commitment to making change over time. “In our study,” say the researchers, “it took at least five years to engage a school’s community, change its culture, and improve its teaching.” Most of the principals stayed at least five years.

            • Be tough but minimize expulsions. The successful principals were demanding on behavior and suspended 10-15 percent of students in their opening years, but they expelled fewer than 3 percent. “You can’t just kick kids out to improve test scores,” say the authors. “You need to show parents and students you want to help them. Show you want to fix the problem, not give it to someone else.”

            • Weed out low-performing teachers. “Too many Heads duck the issue of firing poor teachers,” said one principal. “But you have to ask yourself: who are you here to help – the students or the teachers? I believe you let down 30 students a year by protecting one incompetent teacher. Once you start thinking like that, the tough decisions become easier to make.” But the researchers also found that moving out too many teachers – more than 50 percent of a staff – was disruptive and counterproductive. The sweet spot seemed to be around 30 percent removed; less than that had little impact. “The culture of the school suddenly tipped when we had 30 percent new staff,” said one principal, “people who were serious about trying to transform the school and the community it serves.”

            • Help teachers bring their A game. “You walk into a very stressful environment,” said one principal. “Your staff have just been told they’ve failed and you’re here to sort them out. You need to convince them that you’re here to help. That their jobs will get easier and become more fulfilling if they work with you, rather than against you.” The most effective principals reduced paperwork and administrative duties, observed classrooms frequently, and got teachers informally visiting each others’ classes, mentoring colleagues, sharing best practices, team teaching, and traveling to other schools to see how they worked. “Too many poor teachers are simply moved from one school to another,” said a principal. “We need to develop them, rather than simply passing them on to someone else.”

            • Recruit effective teachers. One of the most interesting strategies was contacting high-performing schools nearby, asking for the names of teachers who were runners-up for positions but hadn’t been hired, and reaching out to them. “We got some of our best teachers this way,” said one principal. “Teachers who didn’t apply to work with us, but love being part of what we’re doing.”

• Maximize good teaching throughout the grades. The most successful schools focused on good instruction from kindergarten through college admission, and used the success of older students to motivate the youngsters.

            • Push for high student attendance. “The turning point in the schools we studied occurred when at least 95 percent of students attended all their classes,” say the authors. But this didn’t come from gimmicks and superficial attendance incentives. Successful principals addressed the underlying issue of motivation by improving the quality of teaching, bringing in external speakers to motivate students, asking students to evaluate their teachers, and getting older students mentoring younger ones.

• Engage parents and change their view of the school. Successful principals moved parent attendance at evening events from 10 percent to 50 percent. They did this by making them social events with food, drink, and student performance, offering adults education and support services like technology skills and career advice, and conducting outreach in the community.

            • Manage up. One of the scariest challenges for principals in these turnaround schools was dealing with their boards’ impatience for improved test scores and boards’ tendency to fire principals if they didn’t show big test-score gains within a year or two. Knowing that the scores wouldn’t rise until they had put in three years of hard, strategic work, the savviest principals got their supervisors focused on improvements in several leading indicators: student attendance (95 percent or higher), the quality of teaching, the percent of teachers with no absences, and 50 percent of parents at school meetings. These principals were knowledgeable and respectful of their boards but challenged them a certain amount (but not too much), educating them about the change process.

            Nine building blocks is a lot. Is it possible for a principal to do all of them at once? The authors found that even the most dynamic school leaders couldn’t, nor was that desirable. “The good news,” they say, “is our research clearly shows there’s a tipping point in each transformation when six of the building blocks are in place – not all nine… So ask yourself: which are the six easiest, or most urgent, blocks to put in place first? And which can wait until later? If you can’t engage parents, then engage students. If you can’t engage students, then teach the ones you can, better and for longer. Find the right pattern of actions for your school; see the pyramid as a menu, rather than a recipe. Select, mix, and match the ingredients that work best for you… Rather than searching for a silver bullet, put as many blocks in place as you can. Remember, the number is more important than the type.”

 

“Research: How the Best School Leaders Create Enduring Change” by Alex Hill, Ben Laker, Liz Mellon, and Jules Goddard in Harvard Business Review, September 14, 2017,

http://bit.ly/2h5f81p; Hill can be reached at [email protected].

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2. What’s Really Involved With Culturally Responsive Teaching?

            In this Cult of Pedagogy article, Jennifer Gonzalez says that “culturally responsive teaching” has been getting a lot of attention recently, which is a good thing given the increasing diversity of U.S. classrooms. “The not-so-good news,” says Gonzalez, “is that in some cases, teachers think they’re practicing culturally responsive teaching when, in fact, they’re kind of not. Or at least they’re not quite there. And that means students who might really thrive under different conditions are surviving at best.”

            Gonzalez asked Zaretta Hammond, an author and consultant specializing in this area, to share some common misconceptions and set them straight:

            • Misconception #1: Culturally responsive teaching is the same as multicultural or social justice education. In fact, each of these addresses diversity from a different angle:

-   Multicultural education is “the celebration of diversity, what we usually see in schools,” says Hammond. “While those are really noble things and critical to a high-functioning classroom and school climate, it doesn’t have anything to do with learning capacity.” It’s great for students to see their cultures reflected in school, but it won’t affect their cognitive abilities. Better than focusing on “surface culture,” she says, is learning about collectivism, an ideology common in many of the cultures from which students come. Understanding collectivism helps teachers reach diverse students.

-   Social justice education “is about building a lens for the student, really being able to look at the world and seeing where things aren’t fair or where injustice exists,” says Hammond. Again, this is important, but it doesn’t address students’ learning capacity. For example, learning about social justice doesn’t address the issue of a student who is three grades behind in reading.

Culturally responsive teaching, by comparison, “is about building the learning capacity of the individual student,” says Hammond. “There is a focus on leveraging the affective and the cognitive scaffolding that students bring with them.” The test of culturally responsive teaching, then, is whether students of color, English language learners, and immigrant students are learning. If they’re not succeeding, a teacher’s approach might need to be more culturally responsive.

            • Misconception #2: Culturally responsive teaching must start with addressing implicit bias. “You need to get to implicit bias at some point,” says Hammond. “It’s just not the starting point. If you start there, you can’t pivot to instruction. Whereas when you understand inequity by design, you can actually talk about instruction but also come back to talk about micro-aggressions. The sequencing of that is really important.”

            • Misconception #3: Culturally responsive teaching is all about building relationships and self-esteem. “There’s a big effort afoot in terms of social-emotional learning programs,” says Hammond, “trying to help students gain self-regulation, and build positive relationships with students. Here’s what the schools are finding that do surveys: After a few years of this kind of work, their positive climate has gone up, satisfaction surveys among adults as well as kids are really high, but the achievement doesn’t move.” It’s certainly true that building trusting relationships is important as an “on-ramp” to higher-level cognitive work by students, but it’s a means to that end, not an end in itself.

            • Misconception #4: Culturally responsive teaching is about implementing certain strategies in the classroom. For example, some teachers add call-and-response to their classroom routines and think that will reach diverse students. But while this is a good first step, the real question is whether call-and-response is being used to deepen student thinking. “Teachers need to interrogate their practice a little more robustly,” says Hammond, “because it’s not an off-the-shelf program, it’s not two or three strategies. It’s not plug and play.”

Hammond advocates three broader approaches to making instruction more culturally responsive: First, gamify it – that is, make routine curriculum work (like memorizing science vocabulary) into a game that involves repetition, solving a puzzle, or making connections between things that don’t seem related. Second, make it social – that is, organize learning so that students rely on each other, building on their communal orientation. Third, storify it – that is, create a coherent story or narrative about the subject matter.

            Perhaps the most counterintuitive thing about culturally responsive teaching is that it’s not just for certain groups of students. “This kind of teaching is good for all brains,” says Hammond. “So what you’re doing to actually reach your lowest-performing students is going to be good for your highest-performing students.” In short, Gonzalez adds, “the instructional shifts that will make the biggest differences don’t always look ‘cultural’ at all, because they aren’t the kind of things that work only for diverse students.”

 

“Culturally Responsive Teaching: 4 Misconceptions” by Jennifer Gonzalez and Zaretta Hammond in Cult of Pedagogy, September 10, 2017,

https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/culturally-responsive-misconceptions/

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3. Ten “Restorative” Literacy Practices That Close the Achievement Gap

            “Too often, when children struggle to read, educators assume the problem lies within the children themselves,” says Deborah Wolter, a literacy consultant in the Ann Arbor Public Schools, in this article in Phi Delta Kappan. “But in fact, decades of research have shown that whatever children’s innate skills, strengths, and abilities may be, what really matters are the beliefs, attitudes, and actions of the teachers and other adults in their lives.” Wolter believes schools need to ask three key questions:

-   What is it that proficient and fluent readers do when they encounter texts?

-   How different is that from what our most vulnerable students are asked to do?

-   What would it take for educators to close the gap?

In other words, says Wolter, “Rather than holding lower expectations for children who are struggling to read and rather than giving them lesser experiences with text and language, shouldn’t we seek to provide them with the very same kinds of resources, supports, and encouragement that the most fortunate children receive? Shouldn’t all students have opportunities to make connections between what they read and what’s going on in their own lives? Shouldn’t all students be encouraged to take ownership over their reading growth and development?”

Here are her suggestions for replicating the advantages that good readers have, rather than pigeonholing struggling readers with low-level materials, highly structured reading formats, and expectations that limit their potential for growth:

            • Access to plenty of books and other reading matter – Schools can set up Little Free Libraries, maintain a book swap table in the lobby, seek donations of quality multicultural books to share, invite the local librarian in to help families get library cards, and host regular storytelling events, book clubs, and free book fairs in their neighborhoods or apartment complexes. It’s helpful if shared books have a sticker explaining their shared status.

            • An army of adult support – Schools can enlist community volunteers and staff members to read books aloud to students, either individually or in small groups. “Reading aloud increases vocabulary, imagination, understanding of third-party narration, critical thinking skills, and comprehension,” says Wolter. “Abundant opportunities for reading aloud set all children on a path toward a lifetime of reading.”

            • Choice – Struggling students need to have a wide selection of reading matter, not just at their presumed readability level, all geared to empowering them to choose texts and expand their background knowledge, interests, motivation, and reading proficiency.

            • Exploration – Teachers need to give struggling students tricks they can use to size up a book: checking out the front cover, reading the back cover, skimming a few pages, and reading the introduction.

            • Settling in to read – All students need to be able to read in cozy corners with bean bag chairs, soft moveable furniture, an area rug, and soft lighting.

            • Reading deeply and thoughtfully – All students need plenty of independent silent reading time and encouragement to read for meaning and for fun, not always having their errors corrected if the errors aren’t interfering with meaning. Students should to be able to read ahead and go back to check on their miscues, and have time to read books that seem easy or even ones they’ve already memorized.

            • Effective strategies to get un-stuck – When students come across unknown words and phrases, it’s important that they have a repertoire of cognitive and linguistic tricks, including: covering the tricky word with their finger, reading ahead, going back to look for context clues, thinking about another word that makes sense, asking a peer or an adult, or looking up the word in a dictionary. Students should be taught to use phonetic strategies within a text, not just in isolated worksheets or computer programs.

            • Owning their language – Teachers need to recognize and respect differences in students’ accents, pronunciation, and syntax and not talk negatively about students’ diction, implying that the way they speak is inferior. “Teachers can let go of the phonemes or syntax that are different,” ways Wolter, “and instead, foster and listen for meaning and understanding.”

            • Using tools to zero in on the information in a text – Struggling readers need to do more than answer simple multiple-choice questions. They should be comfortable using highlighters, colored pencils, sticky notes, index cards, graphic organizers, and notebooks to unpack the meaning of complex passages.

            • Honing critical thinking and analytical skills – Rather than thinking about what the teacher wants to hear, students should be encouraged to discuss content with peers, develop their critical thinking, analytical, and problem-solving skills, and think about how what they’re reading is relevant to their lives. Student need to feel free to express their views, even if those views are controversial. “At the same time,” says Wolter, “teachers can assure emotional safety by not allowing bullying, claims without evidence, or racist language.”

 

“Moving Readers from Struggling to Proficient” by Deborah Wolter in Phi Delta Kappan, September 2017 (Vol. 99, #1, p. 37-39),

http://www.kappanonline.org/wolter-helping-struggling-readers/; Wolter can be reached at [email protected].

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4. How to Assess a Student’s Alphabet Letter Knowledge in Under a Minute

            In this article in The Reading Teacher, Laura Tortorelli, Ryan Bowles, and Lori Skibbe (Michigan State University/East Lansing) describe the perennial challenge of preschool and kindergarten teachers: how can they assess how many letters of the alphabet their students can name at the beginning of the year – a time-consuming task that must be done one-on-one with each student – and then monitor students’ improving proficiency throughout the year? Having data on students’ letter name knowledge is important for three reasons:

-   It’s an indication of how much early literacy instruction students have had.

-   It tells the teacher where literacy instruction should begin.

-   It indicates how much support a student will need with beginning phonics instruction.

Getting this information early in the year is especially important since Common Core standards expect students to recognize all uppercase and lowercase letters and associate letters with sounds by the end of kindergarten. The time-honored “letter of the week” approach “will be too repetitive for some students and not supportive enough for others,” say the authors.

            But how are teachers supposed to do an individual inventory of all students’ knowledge of 52 uppercase and lowercase letters? The DIBELS timed letter name fluency test is quick, but it measures speed rather than accuracy. Other early literacy assessments like the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test focus on a wider range of skills but take up to 30 minutes per student. “Most important,” say the authors, “none of these assessments account for what research has said about how letters differ from one another in their difficulty.” Some letters are easier (those that are at the beginning of the alphabet, appear more frequently in print, include sounds from students’ own names, and uppercase letters), and others are more difficult (letters at the end of the alphabet, those that appear less frequently in print, lowercase letters, especially those that don’t look like their uppercase letters, letters that look like others, and letters that don’t include the sounds in their names). Finally, all these assessments require that the teacher repeat every item each time the student is tested.

Good news! Tortorelli, Bowles, and Skibbe have developed the Quick Letter Name Knowledge (Q-LNK) assessment that takes less than a minute per student and can be used throughout the school year. “We found that by using a contemporary statistical method called item response theory,” they say, “we could provide a very accurate and precise assessment of a student’s letter name knowledge using only eight strategically chosen letters, and that we could create six separate forms with a different set of letters on each form.” Each form has a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters with a comparable mix of different difficulty levels, and is designed to track progress through the school year. The authors say the reliability of the forms (comparing students’ scores on the forms to a full letter name knowledge assessment) ranges from .89 to .92, which is robust.

The six forms are available free at the Early Language and Literacy Investigations Lab:

http://www.ellilab.com/uploads/1/0/6/8/106830283/letter_name_scoring_revised.pdf. Here are the letters in each assessment:

-   Form 1:   o   s   w   F   e   m   u  V

-   Form 2:   B   E   P   Y   I   U   v   d

-   Form 3:   X   k   D   J   N   p   a   t

-   Form 4:   A   c   H   G   z   r   j   q

-   Form 5:   S   M   W   L   i   f   n   g

-   Form 6:   R   K   T   Z   Q   y   h   b

Students are shown a card for each of the eight letters in one of these forms and asked, “What letter is this?” (They may be re-prompted with, “What is the name of this letter?”) The teacher records responses on a score sheet, giving one point for each letter named correctly, no points for those not named correctly. Here’s how a student’s score on one form is extrapolated to the expected total letters known (out of the 52 possible):

8 points on a single form means the student probably knows 48-49 of the letters

7 points – 42-46 letters

6 points – 36-40 letters

5 points – 30-34 letters

4 points – 24-28 letters

3 points – 18-21 letters

2 points – 12-14 letters

1 point – 6-7 letters

0 points – 1 letter

It’s possible for a preschool or kindergarten teacher to get students involved in a variety of activities around the classroom, call students up one at a time, and conduct this inventory for each student within a single class period. One piece of advice from the authors: teachers should choose a form that doesn’t begin with the first letter of the child’s first name, which would be more familiar and therefore make the assessment a less accurate assessment of the child’s alphabet letter knowledge.

 “Easy as AcHGzrjq: The Quick Letter Name Knowledge Assessment” by Laura Tortorelli, Ryan Bowles, and Lori Skibbe in The Reading Teacher, September/October 2017 (Vol. 71, #2, p 145-156), http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/trtr.1608/abstract; the authors can be reached at [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected].

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5. The Value of Teaching About Conspiracy Theories

            “It’s indisputable: disinformation, hoaxes, propaganda, and hyper-partisanship are increasingly global phenomena,” says Renee Hobbs (University of Rhode Island) in this Knowledge Quest article. “Educators, librarians, policymakers, and community leaders are wondering about the implications of the changing information landscape. Anyone can publish and promote anything, and increasing political polarization is being combined with feelings of powerlessness, disillusionment, apathy, and indifference to truth in a way that may compromise the future of our democracy.”

            One result of all this is the increased prominence of conspiracy theories, some of them old chestnuts (the Kennedy assassination, UFOs at Roswell, New Mexico), some more recent (drug companies and the FDA intentionally suppressing natural cures for cancer), and some that turned out to be true (the Tuskegee Institute/U.S. Public Health Service experiment on African-American men beginning in 1932). Hobbs believes a well-planned high-school curriculum unit on conspiracy theories is a worthwhile use of academic time. She suggests these Enduring Understandings for such a unit:

-   Conspiracy theories are constructed by people, and they have an author, purpose, and a point of view.

-   Conspiracy theories are entertaining because they embody the timeless allure of the mystery of the unknown.

-   Conspiracy theories resonate in an age of anxiety by simplifying complex and ambiguous realities and may contribute to destabilizing society and promoting feelings of helplessness, disillusionment, mistrust, suspicion, and fear.

-   Even brief exposure to a conspiracy theory can increase its believability.

-   Whistleblowers, journalists, and government officials investigate conspiracy theories in an attempt to uncover the truth.

-   Composing critical commentary about conspiracy theories helps advance the development of critical-thinking skills.

-   Conspiracy theories can inspire people to seek out and analyze information and then take action in search of the truth.

And here are some Essential Questions for a unit on conspiracy theories developed by Dave Fosco and Rebecca Russo in their semester-long course at Arthur L. Johnson High School in New Jersey:

-   Why do conspiracy theories exist?

-   Why do people believe in conspiracy theories and what attracts people to them?

-   What trends and commonalities can be seen in conspiracy theories throughout history?

-   What do conspiracy theories tell us about society, culture, and ourselves?

-   What positive and negative effects do conspiracy theories have on society?

-   How can you tell if something is a conspiracy theory and evaluate it? What types of arguments are used?

 

“Teach the Conspiracies” by Renee Hobbs in Knowledge Quest, September/October 2017 (Vol. 46, #1, p. 26-31), no free e-link available; Hobbs can be reached at [email protected].

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6. More Evidence on the Impact of Later High-School Start Times

            In this New York Times article, Aaron Carroll reports on two cost-benefit analyses of later high-school opening times. According to a 2011 Brookings Institution study, the additional cost of starting at 8:30 a.m. or later is about $150 per student for transportation, but the benefit in improved academic achievement is the equivalent of two additional months of schooling, which the researchers calculated would add about $17,500 to each graduate’s lifetime earnings.

            A more recent RAND Corporation study calculated the impact of revised start times (no earlier than 8:30) for middle and high schools, looking state by state and year by year at a variety of factors, including car accidents, lifetime productivity, and the multiplier effect of one person’s benefits on others. The study found that pushing start times forward would have a negative financial impact at first - $150 more per student for transportation and $110,000 per school for upfront infrastructure upgrades. But by the second year, benefits would begin to outweigh costs, and over the first decade, later start times would contribute $83 billion to the U.S. economy.

            Of course there are other factors, says Carroll – for example, parents having to make adjustments in their personal and work schedules to accommodate later start times – but even with these additional costs, the benefits of later start times outweigh the costs. And the RAND study may have underestimated some factors: they weren’t able to put a dollar estimate on the impact of inadequate sleep on teens’ depression, obesity, overall health, and suicide.

            “Some schools are beginning to take this seriously,” Carroll concludes, “but not enough. When it comes to start times, the growing evidence shows that forcing adolescents to get up so early isn’t just a bad health decision; it’s a bad economic one, too.”

 

“The Case for a Later Start to the School Day: Teenagers Need Their Sleep” by Aaron Carroll in The New York Times, September 14, 2017, http://nyti.ms/2eWLjLV

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7. The Annual PDK Poll on Attitudes About U.S. Public Schools

            This year’s Phi Delta Kappan poll of U.S. opinions about the public schools reveals the following:

-   U.S. adults say that academic achievement isn’t the only mission for schools; career and personal skills also are important in preparing for life after high school.

-   People overwhelmingly want schools to do more than educate students academically.

-   There is significant public opposition to school vouchers.

-   Most Americans say schools should provide wraparound services for students and seek additional public money to pay for them.

-   Parents say standardized tests don’t measure what’s important to them, and they put test scores at the bottom of school quality indicators.

-   Public schools get the highest grades from those who know them best –parents of students currently enrolled in public schools.

-   Most public school parents expect their children to attend college full time, but not necessarily a four-year college.

 

“The 49^th Annual PDK Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools” in Phi Delta Kappan, September 2017 (Vol. 99, #1, p. K1-K32); the full poll results, along with commentary and opportunities to comment, are available at www.pdkpoll.org.

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8. Ten “Must Have” Young Adult Books

            In this School Library Journal article, April Witteveen shares the YA books that librarians named the top ten in a 2015 survey:

-   The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling (Scholastic/Arthur A. Levine Books)

-   The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins (Scholastic)

-   Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson (Farrar)

-   The Fault in Our Stars by John Green (Dutton)

-   Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell (St. Martins)

-   The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (Knopf)

-   The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie (Little, Brown)

-   The Divergent series by Veronica Roth (HarperCollins)

-   The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky (MTV Books)

-   Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher (Penguin/Razorbill)

 

“Librarians Pick ‘Must-Have’ YA” by April Witteveen in School Library Journal, September 2017 (Vol. 63, #9, p. 8-9). For Shelley Diaz’s picks of the top 42 diverse YA titles, please click here: www.ow.ly/svLt30eEuZP.

 

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9. A Consumer Reports-Type Analysis of High-School Literature Textbooks

            In this Education Week article, Stephen Sawchuk reports on an EdReports.org review of the six major textbook series used in U.S. high schools. According to the analysis, only three have good alignment with Common Core standards:

-   MyPerspectives from Pearson;

-   Developing Core Literacy Proficiencies from Odell Education;

-   SpringBoard from College Board.

Three that did not have good alignment were Pearson Literature, Holt McDougal Literature, and Collections (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

 

“Watchdog Group Gives Passing Grade to 3 Literature Series” by Stephen Sawchuk in Education Week, September 13, 2017 (Vol. 37, #4, p. 1, 10); the full EdRports.org report is available at http://www.edreports.org/ela/reports/compare-hs.html

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10. Short Item:

            A timeline of the earth’s average temperature since the last ice glaciation – This cartoon depiction from Vox maps events on our planet against average temperature over the last 22,000 years: https://www.vox.com/2016/9/12/12891814/climate-change-xkcd-graphic

 

“Yes, the Climate Has Always Changed. This Comic Shows Why That’s No Comfort” by Randall Munroe, updated by Brad Plumer in Vox, January 3, 2017

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