This week's foodie feature highlights some choice restaurants from recent travels:
Brasserie V - one of the most consistently excellent and unpretentious restaurants in town - Madison, Wisconsin Forbes Mill Steakhouse - power dinner spot if Manresa breaks the bank - Los Gatos, California New Heights - new chef is taking old restaurant to new heights - Washington, DC Phoenix - best dim sum in Chicago? - Chicago, Illinois Publican - taking the gastropub concept to an exalted level - Chicago, Illinois
The VIVA Project is a new initiative that gives teachers an opportunity to collaborate, share ideas, and inform education policy and reform conversations at the state and national levels. VIVA stands for Voices, Ideas, Vision, Action.
The Goal of the VIVA Project is to identify ideas and opinions straight from the classroom, work together to create actionable policies to improve public education for classroom teachers and their students, and deliver them directly to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.
Teachers are encouraged to share their ideas in both the national and New York idea mines. Register today! And check out its Facebook page, too. You have until October 10, 2010 to add your voice to the conversation.
The VIVA Project is a worthy addition to an education reform marketplace that too often ignores and discounts the thoughts and ideas of actual classroom teachers. Kudos to Secretary Duncan for being willing to listen.
Check out the embedded video to learn more about the VIVA Project:
In an effort to spice up this blog a bit, we'll tap into the Optimists' foodie inclinations by periodically featuring some choice restaurants and food-related businesses.
This week we feature some frozen favorites:
Capogiro Gelato - world-class gelato in the cradle of liberty - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Chocolate Shoppe - satisfies our craving in & around Mad-town - Madison, Wisconsin Michael's Frozen Custard - a twist on ice cream, with eggs + cream & sugar -- Madison, Wisconsin Sebastian Joe's - ice cream can't taste much better than this - Minneapolis, Minnesota Toscanini's - NY Times calls it "the best ice cream in the world" - Cambridge, Massachusetts
The Los Angeles Times editorial page gets it mostly right today on the value-added issue ("Good teachers, good students," September 3, 2010). It says a number of smart things that I agree with, such as:
"Test scores are indeed just one indicator of a teacher's performance."
"But it's revealing, and disturbing, to read the comments of some teachers who don't seem to care whether their students' scores slide. They argue that they're focused on more important things than the tests measure. That's unpersuasive."
"This page has never believed that test scores should count for all of a teacher's evaluation — or even be the most important factor. But they should be a part of it."
"Right now, the "value-added" scores The Times has been reporting are more useful for evaluating schools than teachers. Many factors can throw off the data at the classroom level."
"That's why we think the Obama administration has been too hasty to push states into linking test scores to teacher evaluations and to reward states that overemphasize the scores, making them count for half or more of a teacher's worth. The administration's first priorities should have been developing better tests, which it's working on now — if we're going to judge teachers in part by these scores, it's unacceptable to say that top-notch tests are too expensive — and statistical models that minimize random factors and make the scores a better evaluation tool."
"Current teacher evaluation practices are ripe for overhaul. Performance reviews should include, at minimum, classroom observations, portfolios of student work over the academic year and, yes, objective test data."
I just wish its news division had taken some of these points to heart, namely having patience until the methodology was ready to be joined by other measures of teacher effectiveness, such as classroom observations, and not publishing the value-added scores of individual teachers and definitively labeling some as most effective and least effective.
Heather Horn ofThe Atlantic magazine offers a nice summary of some of the related issues and links to relevant sources in this September 1, 2010 blog post.
And Dana Goldstein offers a smart retort (and a preview of her upcoming The Nation feature on value added?) to a vacuous and vitriolic Slate post by Jack Shafer on this topic.
In an effort to spice up this blog a bit, we'll tap into the Optimists' foodie inclinations by periodically featuring some choice restaurants and food-related businesses. This week we feature some favorite West Coast destinations:
Xanh Bistro - stellar Vietnamese in Orange County - Fountain Valley, California
Swan Oyster Depot - serving oysters for 97 years - San Francisco, California
Vij's - some say the best Indian cuisine in North America - Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Clyde Common - part of a bustling foodie scene in PDX - Portland, Oregon
Soif Wine Bar - my favorite place to eat in the land of Banana Slugs - Santa Cruz, California
Here is additional smart and pithy commentary on the current value-added conversation that I wasn't able to incorporate into yesterday's post or have only discovered since.
Predictions that Florida Governor Charlie Crist's veto of a monstrosity of a teacher effectiveness bill back in April 2010 would cause his state to lose the Race to the Top competition have proven false.
Charlie Barone (Democrats for Education Reform), Mike Thomas (Orlando Sentinel columnist), Clayton Christensen, and others wrote at the time that Crist's veto would cost Florida its Phase Two Race to the Top funding. Nope. Even former Florida governor Jeb Bush and Andy Smarick (a favorite to be next New Jersey education commissioner) intimated that Crist's move was the wrong step and could harm Florida. But, lo and behold, the sky did not fall and Republican Crist is still standing (as an independent running for U.S. Senate). And the feds are cutting a $700 million check to the Sunshine State any day now (Orlando Sentinel).
This week's foodie feature highlights some choice restaurants from recent travels:
