A few smart Danish kids

yes Daniela Fairchild / April 12, 2011

Yesterday afternoon my colleague Chris Irvine and I sat down with three of Denmark's most promising. They're elected leaders of the Association of Danish Pupils, the nation's student-run education-policy organization. (Think: a national student council, or a stellar group of model Congress participants, only the model Congress actually gets to influence policy.)

A few highlights stood out to me as we explained the American education system and federal and state policy, and heard a bit about the issues facing Denmark's schools:

• The Danes are struggling with how to incorporate virtual learning into the classroom in much the same way that the United States is. For these intrepid youth, intent on discovering means of diversifying instruction and providing targeted, individualized instruction, digital learning wasn't really on their radar. According to the youth, Denmark is behind when it comes to virtual schooling. We commiserated over that fact?and I wondered silently how long it would be before each of our nations were so far behind in this domain that it is noticeably and negatively affecting our global competitiveness. Hopefully we push the throttle forward on digital learning and don't see that reality come to

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  Category: Digital Learning / Standards, Testing, & Accountability

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  A few smart Danish kids

Education news nuggets

Guest Blogger / April 9, 2011

After an agonizing wait, we can finally say sayonara to Cathie Black. Now we can get back to griping about e-books, wondering whether an iPad 2 belongs in the hands of kindergartners, and running our race to nowhere.

-Marena Perkins, Fordham Intern

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Education news nuggets

Quit while you're ahead, Trip

yes Daniela Fairchild / April 6, 2011

Peter has already covered Trip Gabriel's NYT piece on digital learning this morning (and done, as always, a mighty fine job). And his post, which draws attention to our collective?and long-standing?deprioritization of robust, challenging curricular content and how that has created a knowledge deficit, is interesting stuff. But, he gives Gabriel's portrayal of the digital-learning landscape far too much credit.

As Peter points out, Gabriel falls into the weeds?and never gets out.

See, there are variations in online learning, each with its own positives and pitfalls. And to conflate them all?from otherwise unavailable AP courses offered in rural areas to supplemental afterschool math-tutoring programs to remedial credit-recovery courses?is to seriously undermine one of the most promising new innovations in education.

And Gabriel should have known better.

His piece starts (and to its credit, ends) on the topic of online credit-recovery programs. He draws the reader in early with an anecdote, showing how easily Daterrius Hamilton is skating through English 3, a course he had failed twice before. Daterrius reads snippets of Jack London instead of opening any of the author's full volumes. To complete his written assignment, the high schooler copy-pastes text from London's Wikipedia page onto his screen, formats some, and submits.

Through this tale, Gabriel has me hooked. Credit-recovery programs, online or otherwise?though the numbers are mushrooming in the online arena, are too-often of dubious quality. And to question the legitimacy of an online course that teaches

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Quit while you're ahead, Trip

Education news nuggets

The Education Gadfly / April 6, 2011

?The prevailing sentiment that anyone can do the job of a teacher, or that anyone can direct teachers how to do their job, is ill-considered: Many have tried, and many have failed.'' *

-Christine Emmons, Associate research scientist and scholar at The Yale University School of Medicine's Child Study Center

"No Teacher Is an Island," Education Week

1.03 million

The amount of students at the K-12 level who took an online course in 2007-8

"More Pupils Are Learning Online, Fueling Debate on Quality," The New York Times

* This quote does not necessarily represent the views of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute

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Education news nuggets