By building the wine industry, Walla Walla Community College‘s Enology and Viticulture program may have saved a community, according to Learning Matters. Eighty percent of program graduates find jobs in the wine industry.
The college is one of 10 finalists for the Aspen Prize for community college excellence.
Yesterday, the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) released its first national ratings of teacher-preparation programs. Passing judgment on 1,200 undergraduate and graduate programs across the country—but not other routes to teacher certification, such as Teach For America—NCTQ painted a dismal picture. Only four institutions rated four out of four stars: Furman, Lipscomb, Ohio State [...]
The research is clear: Teacher quality affects student learning more than any other school-based variable (issues such as income and parental education levels are external). And the impact of student achievement on economic competitiveness is equally clear. That’s why it’s so disturbing that in 2010, the SAT scores of students intending to pursue undergraduate education [...]
California has been trying to reform how it educates teachers for more than a decade, and some of its ideas have become a model for the rest of the country. But the vast majority of teacher preparation programs in California are still failing to adequately prepare teachers, according to a controversial new report released Tuesday [...]
Recently I had the opportunity to interview Stephanee Stephens, an 8th grade Spanish teacher at a school in Fulton County, GA, which is piloting the new Amplify tablet computer from News Corp’s Amplify brand. Introduced this spring as a challenge to the Apple iPad, which is the most popular classroom tablet, Amplify is the first [...]
Sitting behind his desk at Fremont High School in Oakland, principal Daniel Hurst fiddled with a plastic cigar wrapper he had confiscated from a student. “They take the cigar paper and fill it with weed,” he said. Hurst knows Fremont’s problems well: he joined the school 28 years ago as a teacher. Two years ago, [...]
For many dropouts, especially those who are too old to return to the public K-12 system, the GED assessment has long been the main route to the high school credential that eluded them. But, come January, getting a General Educational Development credential won't be the same.
