In a recent presentation, entrepreneur, angel, and Googler Joe Kraus provided a good overview of the costs of our "culture of distraction" and how smartphones are ratcheting those costs up. Early in the talk he shows, in stark graphical terms, how people's patterns of internet use change when they get a smartphone. Essentially, a tool becomes an environment.

Today, Mitt Romney announced the members of his Education Policy Advisory Group. The group is composed of individuals with deep and diverse experience in a variety of roles across K-12 education, postsecondary education, and workforce training in both the public and private sectors.

This report presents selected findings from a congressionally mandated study on arts education in public K–12 schools. The data were collected through seven Fast Response Survey System (FRSS) surveys during the 2009-10 school year. This report provides national data about arts education for public elementary and secondary schools, elementary classroom teachers, and elementary and secondary music and visual arts specialists. Comparisons with data from the 1999–2000 FRSS arts education study are included where applicable.

The good news is that there is a powerful way to overcome fragmentation: integration. But don’t be deceived—it’s more difficult than it appears.

Up to 15 percent of American children are chronically absent from school, missing at least one day in 10 and doing long-term harm to their academic progress, according to a new study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University.

Country View Market is a unique and special kind of place!  Located in beautiful and historic Charlotte Tennesse, (in the heart of Dickson County).  We're just minutes from Nashville, Franklin, Bellevue, Kingston Springs, Burns, Dickson, Clarksville and Kentucky.  Our beautiful store is full of bulk item foods, baked goods, gift items, Amish/Mennonite made furniture, natural skin products, Amish Jellies, jams, canned goods and more!  ?log=out

The researchers found, to their surprise, that frequency of Facebook use, whether it was for personal status updates or to connect with friends, was not associated with narcissism. Narcissism per se was associated with only one type of Facebook user — those who amassed unrealistically large numbers of Facebook friends.

There's a lot of bad information out there online. This guide can help you avoid the crap and become a savvier citizen of our digital age.

Kimberly Bess, assistant professor of human and organizational development, is the recipient of a 2012 Harold Love Outstanding Community Involvement Award.

Some students want to read books that validate things relevant in their lives, such as sex, violence, abuse and bullying, said Melanie Hundley, assistant professor in teaching and learning at Vanderbilt University.

“I do think that young adult authors are writing about issues that are affecting young adults,” Hundley said. “I think parents absolutely have the right to have the final say on what their children read.

“Where I hesitate and get concerned is when one parent is making the decision for every student in the class.”

Three students graduated from Next Steps at Vanderbilt, a two-year certificate program for young adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities, April 25. The Vanderbilt Kennedy Center created Next Steps in 2009 as the first of only two college programs in Tennessee for adults with disabilities.

“This is a pivotal time for school districts and education leaders to clearly define the role of magnet schools,” said Claire Smrekar, an associate professor of education at Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, Tenn., who has researched magnet schools for decades. “The future of magnet schools will depend upon which policy values and priorities school leaders embrace and whether the federal role will emphasize racial diversity as an educational goal or place the highest value instead on accountability and innovation exclusively, at the expense of diversity.”

We hear many questions these days about whether teacher preparation programs are doing an effective job of graduating teachers who can help students achieve. Even U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has accused schools of education of doing a mediocre job.

Millennials were less likely than Boomers and even GenXers to say they thought about social problems, to be interested in politics and government, to contact public officials, or to work for a political campaign. They were less likely to say they trusted the government to do what's right, and less likely to say they were interested in government and current events. It was a far cry from Howe and Strauss' prediction of Millennials as "The Next Great Generation" in civic involvement.

Millennials were also less likely to say they did things in their daily lives to conserve energy and help the environment, and less likely to agree that government should take action on environmental issues. With all of the talk about Millennials being "green," I expected these items to be the exception. Instead, they showed some of the largest declines. Three times as many Millennials as Boomers said they made no personal effort to help the environment.

Universal public education needs a new wall, paralleling the wall of separation between church and state: a wall between education and government and corporate America. Power over funding and broad performance benchmarks can remain vested in political leaders. But granular operational details should be left to educators and local administrators, the people best suited to achieve these goals in their schools and classrooms. Education should be treated no differently than a civil engineering project: government provides funding and ensures the goals of the civil function, and then expert builders and engineers fill in the details, taking into account realities on the ground and utilizing a wealth of experience and training that is completely unavailable to most elected officials. Governors and presidents are no better suited to run schools than they are to run construction sites, and it's time our education system reflected that fact.

In my previous column, I alluded to the negative effects that being a “helicopter parent” can have on a child. When parents constantly intervene to prevent a child from dealing with difficulties and setbacks, they deny that child the opportunity to learn important lessons about personal effort and persistence.

Vanderbilt University’s Programs for Talented Youth at Peabody College will offer accelerated academic opportunities for up to 60 low-income gifted students through a $232,000 grant from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, renewable for up to three years.

A recent study looked at brain scans while adults were being taught new words. Greater activity was shown with average readers when the words were taught in isolation, not in a full sentence.

Lead author Laurie Cutting Ph.D., Patricia and Rodes Hart Associate Professor of Special Education, associate professor of psychology, radiology and pediatrics and Vanderbilt Kennedy Center investigator, began a study by analyzing two different teaching methods. One method is called ‘implicit teaching’, which is where teachers teach by using words in a sentence.

When Otha Thornton, president-elect of the National PTA, signed up to help lead the PTA at Maryland's Meade Senior High School in 2005, the chapter had about 25 members. Within two years, membership soared to 400 as the school community mobilized to boost morale and academic performance. Now he's trying to rekindle that spirit on a larger scale as the PTA strives to reverse a steady decrease in its national membership.

The American Educational Research Association has selected four Peabody College faculty members to be fellows in its 2012 class. Lynn Fuchs, a professor and Nicholas Hobbs Chair in Special Education and Human Development, focuses her research on instructional practice and assessment of student progress for students with reading and other disabilities. Steve Graham is a professor and Currey Ingram Chair in Special Education and Literacy with research interests in learning disabilities, writing instruction and writing development. Richard Lehrer, a professor of science education, researches children’s mathematical and scientific reasoning in the context of schooling with a special emphasis on tools and notations for developing thought. And Joseph Murphy, the Frank W. Mayborn Chair of Education and associate dean of Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of education and human development, has worked in the area of school improvement with special emphasis on leadership and policy.?log=out

We know that teachers, schools and principals create climates for students’ academic success, but what about parents?

"The reality is, humans are not very good at doing this," said Steve Graham, a Vanderbilt University professor who has researched essay grading techniques. "It's inevitable," he said, that robo-graders will soon take over.

The billions of dollars that the federal government is pouring into turning around some of the nation's lowest-performing schools appear to be showing preliminary promise, according to student-achievement data unveiled by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan last week.

CV for Deborah Speece

announcement of speece to serve as director

Vanderbilt University education professor Dale Farran reports in her recent study of preschool classrooms that math was intentionally taught by teachers only 2.5 percent of the day. Increasing the amount of time children spend engaged in instruction involving math conversation from 2 percent to only 4 percent led to significant math gains.

A recent study by researchers at Vanderbilt University finds that formative assessment—that is, ongoing, classroom-based assessment done by the teacher—can help improve students' writing.

Co-author Donna Ford of Vanderbilt University says the test is actually more valid and reliable for minority students. "Let's stop the excuses. Why isn't every school using this instrument?" she asks.

Dale Ballou, an associate professor of public policy and education at Vanderbilt University, said he checked similar data during a study of whether incentive pay leads to students making higher test scores.

From 2007-09, the university tracked individual students in classrooms were teachers could earn bonuses. It compared that group to randomly selected classrooms where teachers did not get incentive pay, but the report kept up with the same students from year to year for accuracy, Ballou said.

“If anybody had incentive to cheat, it was these teachers that had bonuses, we just did not find that,” Ballou said. “We didn’t find much gain at all.”

“In her case, the question has to be asked, How much was she helped [by cheating teachers]?” said Doug Fuchs, a professor of special education at Vanderbilt University, specializing in remediation and reading and math disabilities.

Three studies of merit-pay programs did not show they consistently produce higher test scores, either legitimately or through cheating, said Matthew Springer, director of the National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt University.

Watch video of the most recent presentation in the Berry Lectures in Public Philosophy that took place on March 15 with Jeffrey Tlumak, associate professor of philosophy. He discussed “Do We Have Free Will? Why Does It Matter?”

How can we reconcile the idea that our choices have scientific explanations with the idea that we are free? Determinism does not relieve us of the need to make decisions. And when we make decisions, we need some conception of the alternatives available to us. If we define an alternative as an action that is physically possible, then determinism implies that we never have more than one alternative. But since we cannot know in advance what we will choose, if we define "alternative" this way, we will never know what our alternatives are. For the purposes of deciding what to do, we need to define our alternatives more broadly: as those actions that we would perform if we chose them.

Neuroscience reveals that the concept of free will is without meaning, just as John Locke suggested in the 17th century. Do robots have free will? Do ants have free will? Do chimps have free will? Is there really something in all of these machines that needs to be free, and if so, from what? Alas, just as we have learned that the world is not flat, neuroscience, with its ever-increasing mechanistic understanding of how the brain enables mind, suggests that there is no one thing in us pulling the levers and in charge. It's time to get over the idea of free will and move on.

Is free will an illusion? Recent scientific arguments for an affirmative answer have a simple structure. First, data are offered in support of some striking empirical proposition—for example, that conscious intentions never play any role in producing corresponding actions. Then this proposition is linked to a statement about what free will means to yield the conclusion that it does not exist.

The term "free will" has so many diverse connotations that I'm obliged to define it before I explain why we don't have it. I construe free will the way I think most people do: At the moment when you have to decide among alternatives, you have free will if you could have chosen otherwise. To put it more technically, if you could rerun the tape of your life up to the moment you make a choice, with every aspect of the universe configured identically, free will means that your choice could have been different.

English learners who complete language-acquisition courses—whether through an English-as-a-second-language program or bilingual education—within three years go on to have much more academic success than their peers who remain in such courses for five or more years.

A new study from researchers at the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute and Vanderbilt University in Nashville came to that conclusion after examining student data from Texas. The data set tracks all students from 1st grade through high school graduation and beyond.

The Charter for Compassion is a document that transcends religious, ideological, and national differences. Supported by leading thinkers from many traditions, the Charter activates the Golden Rule around the world.

Girl Scouts are living up to their promise to shape the female leaders of tomorrow, new research from Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College finds.

He earned a bachelor's degree from Washington University in St. Louis and a graduate degree in education from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. He began teaching high school in 1989 in St. Louis.

The Misunderstood Consequences of the Student Debt Crisis - Jordan Weissmann - Business - The Atlantic

Education: In the education program rankings, Vanderbilt University reclaimed the top spot. Notable changes in the top 10 include Johns Hopkins University—which leapt from a two-way tie for 18th to a two-way tie for 6th with University of California—Los Angeles—and University of Pennsylvania, which climbed from a two-way tie for 12th to a three-way tie for 9th with Northwestern University and University of Wisconsin—Madison. Within the top 50, two schools, University of Florida and University of Nebraska—Lincoln, rose more than 15 slots to a three-way tie for 34th.

Girl Scouts surveyed by Vanderbilt University students said they not only feel the group helps them develop personal and leadership skills for life but it also fills their time with fun activities and learning new things.

A big change is coming soon for graduate students who use federal student loans to fund their education. 

Currently, grad students with demonstrated financial need can take out subsidized Stafford loans, which don't accrue interest until after graduation. Through school and six months after graduation, the government pays for the interest that accrues on subsidized loans. 

But starting July 1, graduate students will no longer be eligible for the federal subsidy.

Vanderbilt Peabody College of education and human development maintained its No. 1 national ranking in U.S. News & World Report for the fourth consecutive year.

The American Educational Research Association has selected four Peabody College faculty members to be AERA Fellows. Lynn Fuchs, Steve Graham, Richard Lehrer and Joseph Murphy are among 36 scholars nationwide named to the 2012 class in recognition of their exceptional scientific or scholarly contributions to education research or significant contributions to the field through the development of research opportunities and settings.

The job review scores of thousands of Tennessee teachers will be made available to the public, starting this summer.

Here’s where the four Republican presidential candidates competing on Super Tuesday stand when it comes to education:

This is what we know. It’s a good idea to rethink and re-do the way teachers are evaluated. Many good things can happen as a consequence of Race to the Top and TN’s new teacher evaluation system – related to fairness, efficiency, excellence, and accountability. But we should also keep our keen eyes on ways teachers are innovative, not necessarily uniform, in the ways they reach, teach, encourage and engage students. Indeed, Emily Barton, assistant commissioner for curriculum and instruction at the Tennessee Department of Education, observed that TN’s untested and still-evolving system “is leading to rich conversations about instruction and that teacher performance is improving.” Good thing. In the meantime…

So-called value-added rankings—which rank teachers according to the recorded growth in their students' test scores—are an important indicator of teacher effectiveness, but making them public is counterproductive to helping teachers improve.

It turns out that when it comes down to it, some charters perform exceptionally well, some perform exceptionally poorly, and some—many—don't actually look that different than traditional public schools or neighborhood Catholic schools. You can take a look at the article or at my colleague Christina Samuels' piece on Roland Fryers' work in Houston for some more detail on the types of reform that seem to be working.

After a year that brought budget cuts, booming class sizes, radical hiring changes and governors who curtailed collective-bargaining rights, teachers' job satisfaction is at a two-decade low, according to a new survey released Wednesday.

According to the "MetLife Survey of the American Teacher," a long-running survey of educators, parents and students, teachers' job satisfaction has decreased by 15 points since the survey assessed the issue in 2009. Forty-four percent of teachers reported they were very satisfied, the lowest rate MetLife has seen in 20 years.

In my first column, I shared a little about how parents can recognize whether or not their child’s teacher is a good teacher. Now let’s step back and ask how you can know whether your child is attending a good school.

Starting this summer, Tennessee parents will be able to see at a glance where teachers rank on a scale of 1 to 5, a rating mostly based on learning gains their classes made and spot-checks recorded by principals.

Ask most social critics what ails America, and "low-performing public schools" will be high on the list. Pundits offer little supporting data (as if the pronouncement were self-evident), but when they do, they usually refer to test scores, not higher-level thinking skills, creativity, and resourcefulness—the tangible abilities that best serve a democratic society and market economy. K-12 schools, in effect, have become a scapegoat for a society incapable of or unwilling to face deeper problems associated with our education system.

While I was attending a few teacher professional-development seminars recently, a long-fermenting thought of mine came more clearly into focus: Educators may be overinvesting in data and data collection. Many propose that we base most, if not all, of our classroom decisions on the corroboration of data. This, in and of itself, is a seemingly common-sense thing to do, but if implemented to the extreme and without proper forethought, such thinking may do as much harm as good.

Twenty-one years after Minnesota passed the nation's first charter school law, researchers still disagree on whether such independent public schools are any more effective than regular public schools.

In fact, at the so-called “Oberlin 80,” the nation’s most selective liberal arts colleges, a higher percentage of students go on to graduate and professional degrees in STEM fields than is the case at the nation’s major research universities. Integrated liberal arts knowledge, where STEM is a vital component of a larger curriculum that includes a range of literacies, creative expression, and the arts, seems to be ideal for developing future STEM teachers, practitioners, and researchers.

Dale Ballou, associate professor of public policy and education at Vanderbilt University, who reviewed the study for the National Center on Education Policy, said it's important not to give too much weight to any one piece of research.

The next step is for the study to be replicated in other districts, Ballou said, with consistent results for multiple locations. He also wants to see more of the original study's evidence.

"The issue is whether we can confirm that the same teachers who seem to be raising test scores in the short term also have these positive long term impacts," Ballou said. "If if you can measure the teachers who are having success raising test scores, and in the long term they are having these positive effects, that validates the use of test scores as a way of evaluating teachers."

One major reason why charters do so poorly is in fact because they don’t have to follow laws and standards of public schools. Charters often hire teachers who are uncertified, inexperienced and unqualified to teach. A 2010 Vanderbilt study found that these inexperienced charter teachers leave quickly, creating high turnover that is dysfunctional. They lack classroom management skills and knowledge of learning styles.

2. Both Republican candidates and President Obama are enamored of merit pay for teachers based on test scores. Are you aware that merit pay has been tried in the schools again and again since the 1920s and it has never worked? Are you aware of the exhaustive study of merit pay in the Nashville schools, conducted by the National Center for Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt, which found that a bonus of $15,000 per teacher for higher test scores made no difference?

While she was still an undergraduate at Vanderbilt University in the early 2000s, Zakiya Smith told one of her professors that she was interested in working for the U.S. Department of Education someday. The professor, a staunch conservative, told her to forget about it; Republicans were going to abolish the department soon.

In 1927 Eleanor Onderdonk became curator of art at the Witte Museum in San Antonio, a position she held until her retirement in 1958. As curator she had little time to devote to her own work, but in her position she promoted art in Texas. She presented exhibitions in a variety of media-photography, ceramics, textiles, prints, painting, and sculpture-from a wide range of periods. In an effort to expose the community to contemporary art she presented exhibitions including such painters as Diego Rivera, Carlos Mérida, and Pablo Picasso, although their work was not popular with the San Antonio public at that time. Onderdonk supplemented the educational value of these exhibitions with lectures by artists and critics such as Thomas Hart Benton, Alexander Archipenko, Walter Pach, and John Ward Lockwood. During her tenure as curator she organized three exhibitions of early Texas artists. Her efforts stimulated interest in Texas art and prompted the San Antonio Museum Association to develop its

With all the attention being given to Tennessee’s new teacher evaluation system, parents may wonder how they can determine for themselves whether their child’s teacher is a good one.

In 2010, a report commissioned by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education made the case for more immersive teacher education programs. It was a call for radical changes that would revamp curriculums with constant feedback and interaction between teacher education programs and school districts.

Momarama: What's the enduring power of Dr. Seuss?

Neely: Dr. Seuss wrote with the joy, concern and passion a child carries. His books, often filled with strange names and "political" messages, demonstrate his heart in a way that allows the reader to read, repeat and even sing his words! I think of the 3-year-old whose first attempt at "reading" is "There's a Wocket in my Pocket!" His confidence at knowing the pattern (anapestic tetrameter) and having memorized the words is exciting and confidence-building. ... Readability is a key part of the enduring power of Dr. Seuss ... Children can read Dr. Seuss books many times without tiring of the rhythms, the plots or the art.

Gilman Whiting, associate professor of African American and Diaspora Studiesand Human

Gilman Whiting (Vanderbilt University)
and Organization Development at Vanderbilt, says that the “reverse discrimination” argument at the heart of the Texas case is a “specious argument.”

“One need only conduct a passing review of the 14,000-plus school districts in the United States to see that the unequal schooling and segregation of minority students is as great today as it was 40 years ago,” Whiting said. “Less than 50 percent of African American males graduating from high school is but one example of the long march we still have ahead of us to get to equality.”