Sunday, March 20, 2011

March 22nd - Midday Interview with Frederick Hess on "How School Reformers Get Stuck in Yesterday's Ideas"

Join me Tuesday, March 22nd, for a live and interactive FutureofEducation.com webinar with Frederick M. Hess, Resident Scholar and Director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, and author of The Same Thing Over and Over: How School Reformers Get Stuck in Yesterday's Ideas.

Date: Tuesday, March 21st, 2011
Time: 11am Pacific / 2pm Eastern / 6pm GMT (next day--international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Elluminate. Log in at http://tr.im/futureofed. The Elluminate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Elluminate, please visit http://www.elluminate.com/support. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event at the event page.
Event and Recording Pagehttp://www.learncentral.org/event/142207

An educator, political scientist, and author, Frederick M. Hess studies a range of K-12 and higher education issues. He is the author of influential books on education including The Same Thing Over and Over, Education Unbound, Common Sense School Reform, Revolution at the Margins, and Spinning Wheels, and co-editor of the new volume Stretching the School Dollar, as well as author of the Education Week blog "Rick Hess Straight Up."  His work has appeared in scholarly and popular outlets such as Teachers College Record, Harvard Education Review, Social Science Quarterly, Urban Affairs Review, American Politics Quarterly, Chronicle of Higher Education, Phi Delta Kappan, Educational Leadership, U.S. News & World Report, The Washington Post, and National Review. He has edited widely-cited volumes on education philanthropy, urban school reform, the impact of education research, and No Child Left Behind.  He serves as executive editor of Education Next, as lead faculty member for the Rice Education Entrepreneurship Program, on the Review Board for the Broad Prize in Urban Education, and on the Boards of Directors of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, 4.0 Schools, and the American Board for the Certification of Teaching Excellence. A former high school social studies teacher, he has taught at the University of Virginia, the University of Pennsylvania, Georgetown University, Rice University, and Harvard University. He holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University as well as an M.Ed. in Teaching and Curriculum.

The Same Thing Over and Over: How School Reformers Get Stuck in Yesterday's IdeasAmazon's Product Description of The Same Thing Over and Over:  In this genial and challenging overview of endless debates over school reform, Rick Hess shows that even bitter opponents in debates about how to improve schools agree on much more than they realize—and that much of it must change radically. Cutting through the tangled thickets of right- and left-wing dogma, he clears the ground for transformation of the American school system.

Whatever they think of school vouchers or charter schools, teacher merit pay or bilingual education, most educators and advocates take many other things for granted. The one-teacher–one-classroom model. The professional full-time teacher. Students grouped in age-defined grades. The nine-month calendar. Top-down local district control. All were innovative and exciting—in the nineteenth century. As Hess shows, the system hasn’t changed since most Americans lived on farms and in villages, since school taught you to read, write, and do arithmetic, and since only an elite went to high school, let alone college.

Arguing that a fundamentally nineteenth century system can’t be right for a twenty-first century world, Hess suggests that uniformity gets in the way of quality, and urges us to create a much wider variety of schools, to meet a greater range of needs for different kinds of talents, needed by a vastly more complex and demanding society.

1 comment:

  1. Dear Steve,
    Just we’ve discussed with Lucy Gray your interactive FutureofEducation.com webinar with Frederick M. Hess, yesterday and with more than 45 participants!! It was very interesting, so meaningful and moderation was effective
    I am at the mailing list for the Future of Education series (which the Fred Hess interview was a part of) thank You for all your notices! We are here in Central Asia really deprived of many relevant edu events.
    Dear Steve,
    Today I am often attending classes at WiZiQ, what is Your opinion on that Indian Brain child?
    People seems to like it…..but it is so horrible to promote Edu products/services only in Hinglish!
    Maybe they think that their biggest market is with English speakers in the whole world?
    hinglish is good only for Indian market also for a local –may be regional too, considering some countries with the same Ringua flanca linguistic phenomenon?!)
    We don't speak Hinglish in Central Asia!
    India's a big country... big market there, too, I suppose that WiZiQ technology seems to be an easy one to handle, but Edu products/services are of Low quality.
    May be You, Lucy Gray ,Nellie Deutsch can organize a webinar on the Quality of Edu Products/services?!
    I know that you are tending to focus on people who write books etc in Your Future of Education series.
    Books Writers need NEW ideas! We can prompt them with some actual hints!
    I can participate in discussion too ,some people say that I am not Bad in spoken English.
    Dear Steve,
    By the way, very recently I was involved into BaW2011 5 weeks activities
    I’ve got a very bad Experience there..
    I don’t know what was a cause of Bullying participants there..
    May be some Books writers can use my experience for avoiding negative impacts in the future?
    We’ve discussed these issues here:
    Why are Westerners so Different?!
    http://www.couchsurfing.org/group_read.html?gid=2164&post=8011714
    Are you my teacher?...Are you my English teacher?...
    http://www.couchsurfing.org/group_read.html?gid=2164&post=7803131
    Also, I can discuss my bad experience of participation in Eduwebinars which were overwhelmed by Indian and Spanglish providers/promoters demonstrating an ineffective Managing style.
    With regards from Tashkent, Uzbekistan Halima

    ReplyDelete

I hate having to moderate comments, but have to do so because of spam... :(