Thanks to Checker Finn’s shop (where they’re not wild about this), we have this news:
Tuesday morning on the Diane Rehm Show … Obama staffer Melody Barnes expressed her candidate’s openness to using portfolios to assess student achievement under No Child Left Behind .
I don’t have time to blog more now ( I’m turning around my pre-service [...]
Category Archives: curriculum
Obama team’s support for portfolio assessment
October 23, 2008 – 5:56 pm
TX Ed Agency defense in evolution case
August 16, 2008 – 12:08 pm
The Texas Education Agency [TEA] has filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit brought by Chris Comer, who lost her job as the TEA’s top science education specialist after forwarding an email announcement of a talk by Barbara Forrest. ‘a professor of philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University, a co-author of “Inside Creationism’s Trojan Horse” and [...]
Momentous TX education hearing
July 16, 2008 – 3:59 pm
A truly momentous and impressive public hearing by the Texas House Public Education Committee has just wrapped up in Austin (July 16, 2008).
I did not hear all of it. I heard State Board chairman McLeroy’s presentation and some of the questioning. Hours later I heard the witness before Steven Schafersman (Texas Citizens for Science) through [...]
TX House Committe testimony by Texas Citizens for Science
July 15, 2008 – 11:19 am
Testimony by Steven D. Schafersman, president of Texas Citizens for Science, is now posted at the TCS website. Here’s an overview of their recoomendations:
I urge you to take even more powers away from the SBOE. Specifically, I urge you to revise the law so that textbooks in Texas are adopted by each [...]
TX GOP 2008 platform on Education
June 22, 2008 – 11:51 am
The Republican Party of Texas has now posted its State Party Platform for 2008.
I have also excerpted and posted here the four pages of that platform with the Preamble, Principles, and positions on Education.
As usual the Texas GOP takes interesting positions on many things, but in this post I’ll just quote their statement on “theories [...]
Bradley: Teachers “got spanked” by Texas Bd. of Ed.
June 3, 2008 – 1:05 pm
Added June 6, 2008:
NY Times: Opponents of Evolution Adopting a New Strategy
Steven Schafersman, President, Texas Citizens for Science: Critical Review that covers developments reported in the NY Times article and the article (linked below) by Gary Scharer, as well as reaction by Intelligent Design proponents.
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A story by Gary Scharrer for the San Antonio Express-News reports [...]
TX School Bd member seeks replacement of Bd chair
May 26, 2008 – 5:29 pm
The previous post on the “Texas English / Language Arts standards debacle” has raised questions about intentionality — whether this just shows incompetence, or whether the right-wing board leadership and majority are acting with nefarious intent.
A May 21 article by Gary Scharrer for the Houston Chronicle is suggestive, I think. It reports that in a [...]
Tom Chapin: “IT’S NOT ON THE TEST”
April 18, 2008 – 10:56 pm
Extra (Oct. 21, 2008): Breaking news on NCLB & assessment under President Obama
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You can play this video here, but be sure to visit Tom Chapin’s site for “It’s not on the test.”
Includes Lyrics, Statement, Fact Sheet, Press Info, Advocacy …
Fred Hess & AEI: What Students Don’t Know
February 26, 2008 – 7:24 pm
Another one of those reports. You know the drill. Half of students surveyed did not answer the correct half-century for the Civil War. Etc. See
http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.27576,filter.all/pub_detail.asp
Texas forebodings: textbooks and science standards
November 17, 2007 – 12:49 pm
Although the specific textbooks involved this time were in elementary mathematics, the broader concern here is that, if the Board is allowed to get away with rejecting textbooks without and explanation, they could use that practice to censor textbooks for ideological reasons in controversial areas such as teaching about evolution in biology.
