For Asians, School Tests Are Vital Steppingstones

ARTICLE: "For Asians, School Tests Are Vital Steppingstones"

By KYLE SPENCER

As Asian students succeed in the admissions test for New York City’s elite public high schools, they point to family motivation, but others say the test discriminates against some students.

What I liked about this article is that it highlighted the immigrant background and difficulties of the Asian students they interviewed in the article.  I think that often, articles that discuss the "overrepresentation" of Asians just highlight the "tiger mom/dad" attitude of the parents... without talking about the difficulties/sacrifices that those parents face/make in order to  help their children succeed.  

I guess it hit closer to home because just like most of the parents in this article, my students' parents are immigrant families working 12+ hours every single day in low-wage jobs.  

National Teacher of the Year: Give Us a Career Path

ARTICLE: "National Teacher of the Year: Give Us a Career Path"

by Liana Heitin

Rebecca Mieliwocki, the 2012 National Teacher of the Year, is on a mission to give her profession a facelift. When she received her award in April, the 7th grade science teacher from Burbank, Calif., said she planned to use her yearlong platform to help restore "dignity and admiration to teachers." She has also been outspoken about her support for tiered career ladders—coupled with differentiated pay—as a way to give teachers more career-advancement opportunities.

Florida Officials Defend Racial and Ethnic Learning Goals

ARTICLE: "Florida Officials Defend Racial and Ethnic Learning Goals"

Lizette Alvarez, NYTimes.com

"Setting different goals for student achievement in reading and math by race and ethnicity is just an interim step, calculated as part of a waiver granted by the federal government, officials say."

It's clear to see why this kind of "goal setting" would set off a lot of red flags in people's minds... That being said, the reality is that there is a huge achievement gap between different demographic groups and schools with a large number of low-income or ELL or immigrant students are often stigmatized/punished for not being able to get all of their students to reach the state learning goals.  Is this kind of differentiated goal setting (as an interim step) a positive or negative action?

Uploading PDF and Word Files

I know that we wanted to be able to upload PDF and Word files to share on this blog... It's not the easiest process in the world, but it can be done.

Essentially, it involves uploading the file onto Google Docs, then linking it to your post.
For example, here's a test document that I uploaded/created: TESTING!
*Remember to set the "Share" settings on your document as either "Public" or "Anyone with link can view"!!*

Here are two articles that explain how to do this:

• How to Show PDF, DOC, XLS files on Blogger Post using Google Drive
• BLOGGER: LINKING TO A PDF OR WORD DOCUMENT IN A POST

Hope this helps!

‘‘The. Polls. Have. Stopped. Making. Any. Sense.’’

Here's the article I referenced today about how even the experts see the polls as increasingly unreliable indicators of popular opinion.

ARTICLE: ‘‘The. Polls. Have. Stopped. Making. Any. Sense.’’ by Jason Zengerie (nymag.com)

P.S.: I attached the labels "Elections" and "Data" to this post... See?

Hello!

Hi everyone!

I decided to use blogger because I think it's more conducive to the type of link-sharing/online conversation format that we're hoping to use this site for.

Couple of notes:

• Please use "Labels" to... well, label your posts.  This will also allow us to see what direction our readings are generally taking.
• When sharing links to articles, please also write down the title of the article and the author in the body of your post.  This will hopefully help people track down articles even if the link is broken or inactive.

Thanks everyone!

Chikae