More than half of America’s 3.2 million teachers and principals are baby boomers nearing retirement. A source of excellent replacements is Teach for America, which Duncan says has “broken the monopoly” of education schools and departments over the supply of teachers. Although the latter still produce 60 percent of teachers, Duncan says “many if not most” of those schools and departments are “doing a mediocre job.”

Founded in 1990 by Princeton’s 22-year-old Wendy Kopp, Teach for America last year received applications from 12 percent of Ivy League seniors. When Duncan was Chicago’s school superintendent, one third of the principals hired at innovative new schools, charters, and others were Teach for America alumni. There are 95,000 schools in America, and, Duncan says, “if we had 95,000 good principals, we’d be done.” Done, that is, worrying about K-through-12 education.

Source: Susan Ohanian’s Web Site

Mediocre job? Who the heck is Arne Duncan? Where was he when we were trying to bring technology into schools but encountered all sorts of roadblocks from superintendents and principals following the political aspirations of legislators and governor? Implement this program so that you’ll be politically popular…that’s why we saw top-down implementations of integrated learning systems that cost MILLIONS per district but HAD NO EFFECT whatsoever except to waste YEARS.

In a review of 100 studies of ILSes, Henry Jay Becker found that they “provided little evidence of ILS impact on student achievement. Where differences were found between the achievement of ILS users and comparable non-users, Becker concluded they were too small to have any educational significance.(Becker, 1992).

• Most scientific studies of ILSs have failed to demonstrate their impact on student outcomes (Van Dusen, Worthen, 1994).

• Skinneran operant conditioning learning theory provided the basis for ILS development (Mazyck, 2002). Instructional technologies must be optimized to support the cognitive requirements at hand, rather than only focusing on the behavioral model of learning theory. (Hooper et al., 1991)

• Independent studies of integrated learning system technologies have subsequently confirmed that learning discrete skills in isolation does little to support students in transferring knowledge to other domains of experience. This lack of transferability of skills from integrated learning system performance to other tasks is well-documented in the research literature (NCREL, 2002).

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Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure