Principal speaker Jamie Vollmer has his own
website at which you can read his famous
Blueberry Story.
Tom Vilsack began an online discussion of education at his HeartlandPac. This resulted in a downloadable PDF of comments from a variety of people, as well as a list of some useful resources. That document is the Heartland Pac Education Discussion and is well worth reading.
Filmmaker George Lucas has established a foundation dedicated to education. Through this foundation it is possible to get free online subscriptions to a variety of foundation publications on aspects of education. The site offers a lot of other useful resources as well at Edutopia.
Sometime dailykos participant Marion Brady is a retired educator and current writer (Orlando Sentinel, Knight Ridder) on education. He views No Child Left Behind as simply one of a number of simplistic strategies that do not address the underlying issues in education. He argues forcefully for what he calls a seamless curriculum that is not divided up the way our current core curriculum is. He argues for the use of natural processes that he says are hardwired in the brain as the organizing principles for education and learning. You will find his work fascinating. Go to his webpage and see for yourself.
Fairtest, the National Center for Fair and Open Testing "works to end the misuses and flaws of standardized testing and to ensure that evaluation of students, teachers and schools is fair, open, valid and educationally beneficial." Based in Massachusetts, this non-profit provides a wealth of resources, including a list of SAT optional colleges and universities, fact sheets on testing issues, and their Assessment Reform Network (ARN), which includes a listserv of those actively seeking to prevent the misuse and abuse of testing.
The Public Education Network is produced by Howie Schaffer. Through it you can subscribe to a weekly newsletter (PEN Newsblast) providing coverage of and links to a number of items about education in the general news, as well as funding resources for educators.
The Forum for Education and Democracy " is committed to the public, democratic role of public education - the preparation of engaged and thoughtful democratic citizens. We work to promote a public education system worthy of a democracy, one characterized by strong public schools, equity of educational resources, and supported by an involved citizenry. " The Forum for Education and Democracy is devoted to supporting educational policies and practices that prepare the young for a life of active and engaged citizenship. It is convened by leaders in the fields of school reform and educational policy, including Ted Sizer, Deborah Meier, George Wood, and Larry Myatt, among others.
The National High School Alliance "is a partnership of nearly fifty organizations representing a diverse cross-section of perspectives and approaches, but sharing a common commitment to promoting the excellence, equity, and development of high school-age youth." At their site you will find A Call to Action: Transforming High School for All Youth, which is a "framework of six core principles and recommended strategies for preparing all of our nation's youth for college, careers, and active civic participation. A Call To Action provides leaders at the national, state, district, school, and community levels with a common framework for building public will, developing supportive policies, and actually implementing the practices needed to radically change the traditional, factory-model high school that tracks and sorts students. "
Reach Every Child is put together by Horace Mann and by teacher Alan Haskvitz. Intended primarily to provide support for teachers, it can serve as a good source of idea about methods of education not bound by the narrow confines of preparing for high stakes tests.
Gerald Bracey is a well-known author on education. He write regularly for Phi Delta Kappan and has authored many books. His Education Disinformation Detection and Reporting Agency (EDDRA) website provides much material, some published some note, derived from the work he has been doing since 1991. This is the older webpage, last updated at the beginning of this year. He is the process of migrating to a new website, at which you can create an account and get on the listserv that he runs.
The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation is a right-wing (politically and educationally) outfit that has some importance in educational circles, since it is run by Checker Finn, an Assistant Secretary of Education under GWH Bush. It puts out a weekly email entitled The Education Gadfly. I include information about this organization here because it is important to track opposition thinking. I view the organization as hostile to most of what I value about public education, so I want to know what I am likely to confront in the public square.
Center on Education and Policy " is a national, independent advocate for public education and for more effective public schools. The Center helps Americans better understand the role of public education in a democracy and the need to improve the academic quality of public schools. We do not represent any special interests. Instead, we try to help citizens make sense of the conflicting opinions and perceptions about public education and create the conditions that will lead to better public schools." Founded in 1995, it is headed by Jack Jennings, who has been an important figure in national education policy since he began working in 1967 with the House Committee on education and labor. You can subscribe to an email notification of events, publications, and the like.
Susan Ohanian is a must read for anyone concerned about education and teaching. Her site might be as good as any for information on NCLB and protests against it in easily understandable language.
The National PTA which tracks a lot of important K-12 educational issues.
DAILYKOS BLOGGERS ON EDUCATION
this will provide links to all the diaries by these participants in education whose postings are regularly about education (many of us post on other subjects as well).
teacherken. I periodically do a cumulative diary of my education diaries. It is an annotated list in pushdown format, the most recent diaries on top. It is entitled Another teacherken Cumulative diary on education.
Mi Corazon
folkbum
rserven does Teacher's Lounge on Sat.
sheba occasional drive-by blogger and commentor, especially on NCLB, assessment, bilingual ed, and literacy
Unitary Moonbat Writes about history and dabbles in teachers' union stuff
DeweyCounts
jmart, who president of a public education advocacy group in Kansas, Kansas Families United for Public Education
AaronBa tends to focus more on issues at the post secondary level, and is especially effective in countering the distortions of David Horowitz, but has the occasional diary on K-12 subjects as well. Be sure to also read his educational series at E Pluribus Media entitled Responding to Criticism: The state of Education in America
gabbardd is a university professor on education who is an active participant in several of the educational listservs to which I post, and some of whose work at dailykos is related to education
plf515 hasn't written a lot of diaries yet, but there are 3 good ones on education in the two pages of diaries done since January 16, 2006
NOTE - if more diarists are identified at the convention, I will add their user pages to this diary.
EDUCATIONAL BLOGS OF SOME IMPORTANCE OR INTEREST
School Matters carries posts by three active participants in a number of educational discussion groups, Peter Campbell, Jim Horn, and Judy Rabin. To quote from their statement of purpose, "This space will explore issues in public education policy; and it will advocate for a commitment to and a re-examination of the democratic purposes of schools. If there is some urgency in the message, it is due to the current reform efforts that are based on a radical re-invention of education, now spearheaded by a psychometric blitzkrieg of "metastasized testing" aimed at dismantling a public education system that took almost 200 years to build."
Angela Valenzuela is a professor of Education at University of Texas in Austin. She specializes in Texas education policy and politics, but her blog, Educational Equity, Politics & Policy in Texas is a good source of information on broader educational issues as well, and provides a wealth of links for anyone interested in educational policy as a whole.
Shut up and Teach is run by Joe Thomas, a special education teacher in Arizona. If you click on the picture on the home page it will take you into a well-designed blog. Joe has taken the initiative in putting together one list of bloggers active in support on public education. he was the other participant with me in the famous conference phone call with Tom Vilsack that led eventually to Tom's participation in the Yearlykos Education Panel.
folkbum's rambles and rants is the blog of Milwaukee teacher Jay Bullock, known as kossack folkbum. Like me (teacherken), he blogs on far more than education, and his insights on all topics are usually quite useful.
edwize is the blog of the United Federation of Teachers, NY City affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers. Run by Kombiz Lavasany, it is well organized by topic, and provides many links to other educational blogs, as well as to labor blogs, and to blogs in general.
PUBLICATIONS
Educational Policy Analysis Archives is one of a number of online peer-reviewed journals produced at Arizona State University (and in this case, also the U of South Florida). Currently edited by Sherman Dorn of the University of South Florida, who posts at dailykos as sdorn, it provides ready access to a number of interesting studies.
Currrent Issues in Education is another online peer-reviewed journal from ASU. This publication, for which teacherken has served as a peer reviewer, regularly has articles on topics of current interest in the news, as one might well expect from the title.
Rethinking Schools is a mandatory read for anyone interested in truly understanding education and/or with any concern about teaching for social justice (a subject conspicuously ignored by NCLB). Now more than 20 years old, the publication was started by teachers in Milwaukee, and has available special collections of articlesmon topics like vouchers, teaching about sex, bilingual education, and creationism in public schools. It is run as a non-profit, so I urge you to support them by subscribing and/or contributing funds.
Phi Delta Kappan is "a professional journal for education, addresses issues of policy and practice for educators at all levels. Advocating research-based school reform, the Kappan provides a forum for debate on controversial subjects. Published since 1915, the journal appears monthly September through June." One does NOT have to be a subscriber to read a great deal of useful material.
Eduwonk is the blog of Andy Rotherham, who has been the main voice of education policy for the Progressive Policy Institute, the thinktank of the Democratic Leadership Conference. Rotherham currently sits on the Virginia State Board of Education, so he is more than merely a writer about policy. You can through the site subscribe to The Education Sector, a bi-weekly email service of information about educational policy especially at a national level.
Again, if people want to make suggestions, I can update his with additional resources, but I didn't want to make this too massive.
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