Federal K-12 Policy Reform In The News - July

• Soho Forum Debate on School Choice (Podcast) (Video) (July 11, 2017)

"Parents should have the choice to opt out of public schools and redirect the taxpayer tuition money for their children to other approved schools or educational options."
Bob Bowdon of ChoiceMedia.TV vs. Samuel Abrams of Columbia University

• A's on the rise in U.S. report cards, but SAT scores founder  (USA Today, July 17, 2017)

The good news on America's report cards: More high school teachers are handing out A's. But the bad news is that students aren't necessarily learning more.
Recent findings show that the proportion of high school seniors graduating with an A average — that includes an A-minus or A-plus — has grown sharply over the past generation, even as average SAT scores have fallen.

• Why school choice should be about possibility — not partisanship (PBS Newshour, July 14, 2017)

Journalist Gayle Tzemach Lemmon’s mother — a union Democrat who worked at the phone company during the day and sold Tupperware at night — lied about her address so Lemmon could attend a better elementary school. Lemmon talks about her own experience with school choice and why she now sees it not as an "issue,” but as a matter of life and death.

• Teachers With Student Debt: The Struggle, The Causes And What Comes Next, (nprED, July 16, 2017)

Public school teachers traditionally have had undergraduate degrees in education. But over the past decade, K-12 teachers have had a growing economic incentive to earn master's degrees. In some cases, they're actually required to do so.

• EdBuild is a nonprofit organization focused on bringing common sense and fairness to the way states fund public schools. 

School district secessions are inefficient and entrench community inequities—but they continue to happen in states across the country. What is driving this behavior and what can states do to curtail...

• Why Students Hate School Lunches, (New York Times, September 26, 2015)

Food and nutrition directors at school districts nationwide say that their trash cans are overflowing while their cash register receipts are diminishing as children either toss out the healthier meals or opt to brown-bag it.

 • Healthier School Lunch Rules Are Working, Study Finds, (Time, January 4, 2016)

Now a new study published Monday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics reveals that school lunches have indeed gotten healthier, and close to the same number of students are still participating in the school lunch program.

• School Inc. Episode 1: The Price of Excellence  Andrew Coulson

The documentary flashes forward to East Los Angeles, and a modern story of what happened when Jaime Escalante, a gifted math teacher at Garfield High, and the educational excellence he created in the classroom became the basis of the Hollywood movie, Stand and Deliver.  Finally, Coulson travels to Seoul, South Korea, where college-bound students eagerly enroll in after school tutoring programs called “Hagwons.” Students and administrators tell us how well it works, and one professor declares he makes more than a million dollars in salary every year.

• Student-Centered Learning: Building Agency and Engagement (edutopia: Schools That Work)

Peek inside a high school where teachers act as facilitators and students are directors of their own learning. 

• This New MIT Master's Program Doesn't Require A College Or High School Degree, (Ed Edify, July 11, 2017)

Students take five online courses for free. They pay only to take the final exam for each class, from $100 to $1,000 depending on their income. Once they've completed the online courses, students can apply to the on-campus master's program. Students are admitted based on their performance in the online courses. If accepted, students would spend about six months on campus: a spring semester and a summer semester. They would be required to complete a capstone project involving a field experiment with randomized evaluation, which could be with their current employer. They would also write a master's thesis.

Notes and Posts on Effective Debating

Here are recent posts on good debating from the Ethos Debate website.

• How to Improve Fluency and Clarity in Speaking, (Ethos Debate, May 30, 2017)
... I’ve developed a list of 5 ways you can improve your speaking. This post will focus on both impromptu skills and general ways to improve your eloquence and rhetoric. For those of you who are still debating... It’s a great time to work on your speaking, something that you will take with you far beyond the time you will spend debating in high school or college.

• Manners Maketh the Man (Ethos Debate, July 7, 2017)
Aristotle proposed that there are three components of effective persuasion: Ethos, Pathos, and Logos. Ethos is arguably the most essential, emphasizing the importance of persuasion through character. According to Aristotle, “We believe fair minded people to a greater extent and more quickly than we do others.” There are, in turn, three elements that make up Ethos: good sense, good character, and goodwill. Many debaters get hung up on the first one—they want to appear credible and confident—but they shortchange the character part. According to Aristotle’s idea of ‘good character’ (arete), you need to cultivate virtues in yourself that will then be manifested in your interactions with other people. 

• Start with Why (Ethos Debate, June 16, 2017)
You may be wondering why it’s so important to establish true positions on seemingly trivial arguments. And yes, these arguments might not matter after you end your last debate round in high school or college. However, for current debaters, learning the foundational truths behind these arguments make you a more logical and therefore more persuasive debater. 

• Why You Should Debate in the NSDA [addressed to homeschool debaters] (Ethos Debate, June 9, 2017)
As a four-year competitor in the NSDA, I’d like to inform you about the league, highlight what I feel are its high and low points, and encourage those who’d like to compete in another league that doing so will greatly benefit their public speaking and prepare them for the “real-world.”

• Hearts Over Minds #2: The Fairness Debate, (Ethos Debate, May 6, 2017)
In my last post, we covered that in order to be effective communicators, not only must we cater to the audience’s mind, but to the audience’s heart. Let’s apply this to a specific example: fairness. In short, not only must you win the flow, you must win on “fairness.”