For too long, educators have let others define and shape their profession, often to the detriment of children and themselves. By telling their stories in a variety of ways and across multiple platforms, educators can make their voices heard.

By examining the top-performing countries in the TIMSS study, Schmidt and his team were able to identify what defines world-class standards.

The Common Core State Standards in mathematics have the potential to enhance students’ academic performance if properly implemented, but most states have a long way to go, according to research from William Schmidt, a University Distinguished Professor and co-director of the Education Policy Center at Michigan State University.

At an event co-sponsored by Achieve, Chiefs for Change, and the Foundation for Excellence in Education, Schmidt presented a briefing on his work, titled “Common Core State Standards Math: The Relationship Between High Standards, Systemic Implementation, and Student Achievement.”

Schmidt’s research took existing data from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) to determine how the Common Core State Standards in math compared to math standards in countries whose eighth graders performed the best on math assessments.

“I think the time has come to really look more seriously at some of the issues surrounding these standards, especially as several states are [questioning their implementation],” Schmidt said.

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Schmidt was involved in the TIMSS, which laid the groundwork that prompted groups to move toward developing the common standards.

“These standards are world-class,” he said, noting that the definition of “world-class” has been somewhat fuzzy. But by examining the top-performing countries in the TIMSS study, Schmidt and his team were able to identify exactly what defines world-class standards.

Using TIMSS as the basis and concentrating on eighth grade performance, Schmidt’s team coded results and concluded that the top-achieving countries—those whose eighth graders performed the best—shared three distinguishing characteristics.

This list of six resources aims to help special-education stakeholders.

According to some education stakeholders, it’s not always easy finding information on special education, especially when it comes to technology tools. That’s why we’ve compiled this list of six special-education resources that provide vetted tools and technology that can help in many aspects of a child’s learning.

From video reviews of the best special-education apps to advice on professional development in a special-ed classroom, and from Universal Design for Learning (UDL) tools to an index of instructional technology for varying special needs, we hope these resources (listed in alphabetical order) give you a good starting point for your questions and interest.

1. AbilityHub Assistive Technology Solutions

An index, and description, of assistive technology for people with a disability who find operating a computer difficult, maybe even impossible. This website will direct you to adaptive equipment and alternative methods available for accessing computers.

2. Apps for Children with Special Needs

Gary James at A4CWSN.com maintains a large list of educational apps for children with special needs. James reviews the apps and posts demonstration videos so that users can see what each one is all about before spending money to purchase them. By producing these videos, James demonstrates how products designed to educate children and build their life skills really work from a user perspective.

3. CAST (Center for Applied Special Technology) Learning Tools

CAST is a nonprofit research and development organization that works to expand learning opportunities for all individuals, especially those with disabilities, through Universal Design for Learning. UDL free multimedia learning tools are designed for students, teachers, and parents.

Only a few states have passed laws creating evaluations or contracts that put helping with homework or attending teacher conferences into writing.

Educators exasperated by the need for greater parent involvement have persuaded Tennessee lawmakers to sign off on a novel bit of arm-twisting: Asking parents to grade themselves on report cards.

Another Tennessee measure signed into law recently will create parent contracts that give them step-by-step guidelines for pitching in. The report card bill—which initially would apply to two struggling schools—passed the state Legislature, and the governor has said he is likely to sign it. Participation in the programs is voluntary.

Only a few states have passed laws creating evaluations or contracts that put helping with homework or attending teacher conferences into writing. Tennessee is the only one so far to do report cards, though Utah has parents fill out an online survey and Louisiana is also considering parent report cards.

The measures are meant to address a complaint long voiced by teachers and principals: Schools can’t do it alone.

“It’s a proven fact that family engagement equals students’ success,” said James Martinez, spokesman for the National Parent Teacher Association.

“It’s one of the key ingredients to education reform, to turning around schools, to improving our country’s children’s knowledge base compared to the rest of the world.”

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Under Tennessee’s contract legislation, parents in each school district are asked to sign a document agreeing to review homework and attend school functions or teacher conferences, among other things. Because it’s voluntary, there’s no penalty for failing to uphold the contract—but advocates say simply providing a roadmap for involvement is an important step.

Michigan is the only state that has enacted a similar measure, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL).

In the case of Tennessee’s report card proposal, a four-year pilot program will be set up involving two of Tennessee’s struggling schools. Parents of students in kindergarten through third grade will be given a blank report card at the same time as the students, and the parents will do a self-evaluation of their involvement in activities similar to those in the parental contract. Parents will give themselves a grade of excellent, satisfactory, needs improvement, or unsatisfactory

Tennessee Rep. Antonio Parkinson, a Memphis Democrat and the House sponsor of the measures, said the program might be expanded depending on how many parents participate.

Just 31 percent of students were considered proficient or better on the test.

Eighth-graders in the U.S. are doing slightly better in science than they were two years ago, but seven out of 10 still are not considered proficient, the federal government said May 10. What’s more, just 2 percent have the advanced skills that could lead to careers in the field.

The information comes from the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the Nation’s Report Card, released by the U.S. Department of Education (ED). The average score was 152, up from 150 in 2009.

Gerry Wheeler, interim head of the National Science Teachers Association, said the results showed “minuscule gains” in student achievement in science.

“When you consider the importance of being scientifically literate in today’s global economy, these scores are simply unacceptable,” Wheeler said.

Just 31 percent of students were considered proficient or better on the test, the data show.

The gap between minority and white students narrowed for both blacks and Hispanics, but both groups still lag far behind their white classmates. Hispanic students scored 137, up from 132 two years earlier, while black students scored 129, compared with 126 two years earlier.

White students scored an average of 163.

For more on science education, see:

Tennessee bill on teaching evolution, climate change to become law

Inquiry-based approach to science a hit with students

New framework aims to shape K-12 science

Federal and state officials have been working to improve student achievement in science by bolstering the number of top-notch science teachers in schools. ED has a goal of preparing 100,000 new science teachers over the next decade through incentive programs and bonuses for teachers that get certified in the subject.

Some states, like Georgia, pay science teachers more than their colleagues in other subjects in hopes of encouraging more college students to go into the field.

“This tells me that we need to work harder and faster to build capacity in schools and in districts across the country,” said Education Secretary Arne Duncan, pointing to the stagnation in the numbers of top-scoring science students on the NAEP. “We have to do things differently—that’s why education reform is so critical.”

A new report suggests that principals must be more involved in school reform discussions.

Principal evaluation systems should not be based solely on student achievement gains, but rather on the quality of a principal’s school-level leadership and performance, according to a new report released by the American Institutes for Research (AIR).

The report, titled, “The Ripple Effect,” found that principals and other school-based leaders are being left out of education reform discussions. “Principals’ voices, at times, have been lost in efforts to define effective school leadership and rapidly improve educational quality,” it states.

For evaluation systems to accurately reflect a principal’s effectiveness, evaluations should focus on principals’ work and school-level leadership. The report said that many professional principal organizations and researchers have defined principal effectiveness by a principal’s knowledge, skills, attitudes and behavior that overall produces a certain quality of leadership style.

The report identified key qualities found in successful principals, including time management, modeling ethical and professional behaviors, showing initiative and persistence, engaging in ongoing reflection and learning, using data to inform strategy, judiciously allocating human and financial resources, and censuring compliance with district, state, and federal policy.

“Our research review makes it clear that principals have a strong influence on student learning, but that they do so indirectly, through the work of many other educators,” said Matt Clifford, a senior research scientist at AIR and author of the report.

“The review suggests that principals’ work focuses on establishing school conditions that are conducive to better teaching and learning. If we accept that performance feedback is most effective when it is actionable, then it makes sense that principal evaluation systems emphasize measures of school quality and leadership performance, along with measures of student learning.”

The report provides a research-based approach to principal performance evaluation design. In many ways, the report says, policy efforts have outpaced research on principal effectiveness and evaluation design.

The FCC says it will teach companies about the preferential pricing rule.

After 15 years of neglect, federal regulators are finally planning to tell phone companies selling services to schools and libraries how to comply with a rule requiring them to charge bargain prices.

Last week, ProPublica revealed that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had failed to provide guidance for the low pricing rule case since the 1997 launch of the school program, called eRate. Lawsuits and other legal actions in four states turned up evidence that AT&T and Verizon charged local school districts much higher rates than it gave to similar customers or more than what the program allowed.

The preferential pricing rule, called lowest corresponding price, was designed to give schools a leg up in the complicated world of voice and data pricing, and to make sure school children had access to the Internet. But despite evidence of inflated pricing, the FCC never brought an enforcement case against a service provider for violating the rule.

While the main victims of this failure are the nation’s schoolchildren who receive suboptimal broadband access, there’s another set of victims: the vast majority of people with a cellular or landline phone contract. That’s because the program provides a subsidy to schools to help them pay for the telecom services. Telephone consumers pay for this subsidy, usually through a “Universal Service Fund” charge on individual phone bills. The subsidy fund is capped at about $2.25 billion a year.

Brenden Sewell, Quest Atlantis Remixed's executive producer, said that support has grown for using games as legitimate education tools.

Instead of pulling out books and paper at Nature Hill Intermediate School in Oconomowoc, Wis., on a recent morning, sixth-grader A.J. Remus and his peers practiced language arts and social studies in a mythical, virtual world.

Known as Quest Atlantis, the multi-user, 3-D interactive space allows students to direct avatars on screen through different environments to solve missions based on academic concepts and social skills. Chat windows allow them to engage with classmates’ digital personas, and with the avatars representing students working simultaneously in different states or different countries.

“You have to read a lot, and the stuff you submit to the Council has to be good or you can’t move on,” explained Remus, as he took a break to engineer a digital house.

In keeping with Quest Atlantis’ role-playing theme, the deciding “Council” is really technology teacher Sue Bolle (just don’t tell the kids).

Video games have long been associated with the entertainment industry, but the notion of using them for play and academic learning is starting to gain traction as a way to reshape education in powerful new ways.

The Oconomowoc Area School District, with about 5,200 students west of Milwaukee, has become a leader in trying out game-based learning models, which has included new classes for students to design games. At the same time, it’s pushing teachers to adopt new instructional techniques that rely on new media and position students to take more ownership of their learning.

At a time when rapid changes in technology, greater expectations for student achievement, and tighter fiscal environments are challenging schools, the district is one example of how to rethink traditional models of education, the focus of a new series, “The Changing Classroom.”

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The work has been under way for at least five years, and it’s helped lay the foundation for a recent and controversial announcement: The district intends to restaff the high school next year with 15 fewer teachers, and to pay $14,000 annual bonuses to those who can pick up the extra work and “transform their teaching,” as Superintendent Pat Neudecker puts it.

Even with the new stipends, the district estimates it will save $500,000 a year annually under the plan.

Models for incorporating games in education, and the proposed restaffing plan at the high school, aren’t the only big steps taken by Oconomowoc to stay current with the digital revolution.

It’s completing an $800,000 high-speed fiber-optic network upgrade to expand wireless access. A bring-your-own-technology initiative is being piloted at the middle and high schools, to allow students to use their own handheld devices in the classroom.

Critics argue that the council doesn't do enough to judge the success or abilities of graduates who become teachers.

An effort to rate the nation’s teacher preparation programs isn’t making many friends.

The National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), a nonprofit advocacy group based in Washington, D.C., is putting together a review of some 1,100 public and private universities to show which are most effective at turning out new teachers.

But across the nation, administrators are lashing out at the council, accusing it of shoddy research practices and arguing that its study results will be fatally flawed. And when asked to provide the volumes of data needed for the study, those administrators’ responses have ranged from grudging cooperation to cool indifference to outright hostility.

The council “has nothing to do with anything that matters,” said Timothy Wall, an assistant professor at Missouri Western State University and past president of the Missouri Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. “It simply isn’t a national council or an arbiter of teacher quality.”

The nonprofit council characterizes itself as a nonpartisan group pushing for better teacher training. In recent years, it has published ratings of schools in several states, including Illinois and Texas.

“Our goal is to make sure that teacher preparation is very strong,” said Arthur McKee, the council’s project manager. “We don’t believe that anyone was born to be a teacher.”

The review, in cooperation with U.S. News & World Report, will assign each of the schools—those chosen are the ones that produce at least 20 teachers a year—an A through F letter grade. The ratings will be based on a range of factors, including admission standards, required reading, course descriptions, and syllabi—the general outline of topics covered in classes.

This isn’t the first foray into the world of judging higher education for U.S. News, which already publishes an annual ranking of the nation’s colleges and universities. But where those rankings have been known to generate some discontented grumblings (along with quite a few bragging press releases), the new initiative is drawing venom from educators who say previous NCTQ reports show that the group can’t be trusted.

Last year, for example, the group published a state-by-state report on teaching policies. More than half of the states received a grade of D or worse, with most of others getting a C.