Distractions. Games. Texting. Surfing the web. How much time do students with smart phones spend using them during the school day? Does the use of cell phones detract from the educational experience? Does learning suffer? From an article at: https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/when-smartphones-go-school In the United States, 73 percent of teens own or have access to a smart phone. A mere 12 percent have no cell phone. Those numbers come from a 2015 survey by the Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C. Some 90 percent of teens with cell phones send texts. The typical number is 30 texts per day. That’s the median number from the Pew data. Additionally, the Pew report … [Read more...]
Does Spending More on K12 Education Produce Better Results?
As Washington State continues to argue about "fully funding" education there is a question that still remains unanswered...how much money is necessary to "fully fund" K-12 education? The 2nd question: Does more money make a difference? We went on a search odyssey trying to find the answer. After all there certainly must be scholarly studies and tons of data from the publishers, teachers unions and other groups dedicated to education....right? Hmmmm....that doesn't seem to be the case. We searched for quite some time. We found articles that teased the edges by looking only at low-income districts or some other niche data but what we were looking for was data that shows that more money = … [Read more...]
Battle Ground School District – Primary School Improvement Plans – 2015/2106
The BGSB will review the proposed primary school improvement plans at their Monday, November 9, 2015 meeting. I took the opportunity to download each schools plan (the board agenda went live on Friday). I then read each document, made notes which I put in a separate report and then added the WA State Achievement Index information. This took me nearly 5 hours of work to put together. I emailed it to each board member and asked them to consider my comments. I offer it here for those of you who want to open/download it. If it lead you to make comments to others and collectively you want to share your thoughts with the board members that would be great. If you want to comment back to me I … [Read more...]