What does "The Death of Expertise" mean for fact-checkers?, Alexios Mantzarlis
Teaching Against Trumpism
Teaching Against Trumpism
Saturday, February 18, 2017
Tuesday, February 14, 2017
Monday, February 13, 2017
Which States Pay Teachers the Most (and Least)?
Alaska and New York pay teachers nearly double the salaries of those working in Mississippi and Oklahoma, says a new study by GoBankingRates.
According to the finance website, teachers in Alaska and New York are paid each year on average $77,843 and $76,953, respectively. By contrast, the averages in Mississippi and Oklahoma are $42,043 and $42,647, respectively. To be fair, many of the states with higher teacher pay also have higher costs of living. (You can use this tool to compare costs of living in different cities and states across the country.)
And a salary on the high end doesn't necessarily mean easy living. The authors show, for instance, that the average salary in California of $72,050 "is just a tad under the amount of money needed to live comfortably in [the state]." What's more, a starting teacher's salary would be much less, closer to $40,000 per year, according to the California Department of Education.
Many of the states with the lowest salaries are working to increase teacher pay, often to combat teacher shortages. Lawmakers in Oklahoma say raising teacher pay is a top priority. Under a bill filed by state Senator David Holt, Oklahoma teachers would receive a $10,000 pay raise by 2021. Governor Doug Ducey of Arizona has also recently made a big push to boost teacher salaries across the state.
The average teacher salaries in 50 states (not including the District of Columbia) were calculated using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The authors averaged the mean salaries of elementary, middle, and high school teachers to get the average salary in each state. The calculations did not include the salaries of special education teachers. Here are the 10 states where teachers get paid the most and the 10 states where teachers earn the least.
The 10 states where teachers get paid the most:
1. Alaska: $77,843
2. New York: $76,593
3. Connecticut: $75,867
4. California: $72,050
5. Massachusetts: $71,587
6. New Jersey: $70,700
7. Rhode Island: $67,533
8. Maryland: $65,257
9. Illinois: $65,153
10. Virginia: $63,493
The 10 states where teachers get paid the least:
1. Mississippi: $42,043
2. Oklahoma: $42,647
3. South Dakota: $43,200
4. North Carolina: $43,587
5. Arizona: $43,800
6. West Virginia: $45,477
7. Arkansas: $47,053
8. Idaho: $47,063
9. Kansas: $47,127
10. Louisiana: $48,587
Map courtesy of GoBankingRates
Tuesday, February 7, 2017
Sunday, February 5, 2017
2017 SRI Winter Meeting Closing Keynote by Paul Gorski
2017 SRI Winter Meeting Closing Keynote by Paul Gorski
Wednesday, February 1, 2017
Corporal Punishment: A Reader
Spanking and Child Outcomes: Old Controversies and New Meta-Analyses, Gershoff, Elizabeth T.; Grogan-Kaylor, Andrew
Follow Dr. Stacey Patton on Twitter and Facebook; and see Spare the Kids.
Patton keynote Part I:
Patton keynote Part II:
DOES CAUSALLY RELEVANT RESEARCH SUPPORT A BLANKET INJUNCTION AGAINST DISCIPLINARY SPANKING BY PARENTS?
Diana Baumrind
Diana Baumrind
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Corporal punishment leads to more immediate compliant behavior in children, but is also associated with physical abuse. Should parents be counseled for or against spanking?
WASHINGTON — Corporal punishment remains a widely used discipline technique in most American families, but it has also been a subject of controversy within the child development and psychological communities. In a large-scale meta-analysis of 88 studies, psychologist Elizabeth Thompson Gershoff, PhD, of the National Center for Children in Poverty at Columbia University, looked at both positive and negative behaviors in children that were associated with corporal punishment. Her research and commentaries on her work are published in the July issue of Psychological Bulletin, published by the American Psychological Association.
While conducting the meta-analysis, which included 62 years of collected data, Gershoff looked for associations between parental use of corporal punishment and 11 child behaviors and experiences, including several in childhood (immediate compliance, moral internalization, quality of relationship with parent, and physical abuse from that parent), three in both childhood and adulthood (mental health, aggression, and criminal or antisocial behavior) and one in adulthood alone (abuse of own children or spouse).
Gershoff found “strong associations” between corporal punishment and all eleven child behaviors and experiences. Ten of the associations were negative such as with increased child aggression and antisocial behavior. The single desirable association was between corporal punishment and increased immediate compliance on the part of the child.
The two largest effect sizes (strongest associations) were immediate compliance by the child and physical abuse of the child by the parent. Gershoff believes that these two strongest associations model the complexity of the debate around corporal punishment.
“That these two disparate constructs should show the strongest links to corporal punishment underlines the controversy over this practice. There is general consensus that corporal punishment is effective in getting children to comply immediately while at the same time there is caution from child abuse researchers that corporal punishment by its nature can escalate into physical maltreatment,” Gershoff writes.
But, Gershoff also cautions that her findings do not imply that all children who experience corporal punishment turn out to be aggressive or delinquent. A variety of situational factors, such as the parent/child relationship, can moderate the effects of corporal punishment. Furthermore, studying the true effects of corporal punishment requires drawing a boundary line between punishment and abuse. This is a difficult thing to do, especially when relying on parents’ self-reports of their discipline tactics and interpretations of normative punishment.
“The act of corporal punishment itself is different across parents – parents vary in how frequently they use it, how forcefully they administer it, how emotionally aroused they are when they do it, and whether they combine it with other techniques. Each of these qualities of corporal punishment can determine which child-mediated processes are activated, and, in turn, which outcomes may be realized,” Gershoff concludes.
The meta-analysis also demonstrates that the frequency and severity of the corporal punishment matters. The more often or more harshly a child was hit, the more likely they are to be aggressive or to have mental health problems.
While the nature of the analyses prohibits causally linking corporal punishment with the child behaviors, Gershoff also summarizes a large body of literature on parenting that suggests why corporal punishment may actually cause negative outcomes for children. For one, corporal punishment on its own does not teach children right from wrong. Secondly, although it makes children afraid to disobey when parents are present, when parents are not present to administer the punishment those same children will misbehave.
In commentary published along with the Gershoff study, George W. Holden, PhD, of the University of Texas at Austin, writes that Gershoff’s findings “reflect the growing body of evidence indicating that corporal punishment does no good and may even cause harm.” Holden submits that the psychological community should not be advocating spanking as a discipline tool for parents.
In a reply to Gershoff, researchers Diana Baumrind, PhD (Univ. of CA at Berkeley), Robert E. Larzelere, PhD (Nebraska Medical Center), and Philip Cowan, PhD (Univ.of CA at Berkeley), write that because the original studies in Gershoff’s meta-analysis included episodes of extreme and excessive physical punishment, her finding is not an evaluation of normative corporal punishment.
“The evidence presented in the meta-analysis does not justify a blanket injunction against mild to moderate disciplinary spanking,” conclude Baumrind and her team. Baumrind et al. also conclude that “a high association between corporal punishment and physical abuse is not evidence that mild or moderate corporal punishment increases the risk of abuse.”
Baumrind et al. suggest that those parents whose emotional make-up may cause them to cross the line between appropriate corporal punishment and physical abuse should be counseled not to use corporal punishment as a technique to discipline their children. But, that other parents could use mild to moderate corporal punishment effectively. “The fact that some parents punish excessively and unwisely is not an argument, however, for counseling all parents not to punish at all.”
In her reply to Baumrind et al., Gershoff states that excessive corporal punishment is more likely to be underreported than overreported and that the possibility of negative effects on children caution against the use of corporal punishment.
“Until researchers, clinicians, and parents can definitively demonstrate the presence of positive effects of corporal punishment, including effectiveness in halting future misbehavior, not just the absence of negative effects, we as psychologists can not responsibly recommend its use,” Gershoff writes.
Lead authors can be reached at:
University office: (212) 304-7149
Home office: (212) 316-0387
The American Psychological Association (APA), in Washington, DC, is the largest scientific and professional organization representing psychology in the United States and is the world’s largest association of psychologists. APA’s membership includes more than 155,000 researchers, educators, clinicians, consultants and students. Through its divisions in 53 subfields of psychology and affiliations with 60 state, territorial and Canadian provincial associations, APA works to advance psychology as a science, as a profession and as a means of promoting human welfare.
Tuesday, January 31, 2017
Tuesday, January 24, 2017
Monday, January 23, 2017
Rethinking "Hillbilly Elegy"
Sunday, January 22, 2017
How Education Is Failing Rural America
COMMENTARY
How Education Is Failing Rural America
No, low educational attainment isn’t why Trump won
January 17, 2017
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In the months between the November election and the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump, it has become clear to many that something is happening in this country that the media and pollsters missed. The post-mortem media coverage of this election has been about lots of things: racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and political correctness. But this coverage has also delved into the key issues missed in the preceding months: the critical importance of education and rural America.
Demographic data from exit polls indicated the 2016 electorate was fundamentally different from those of the past two decades. Nationwide, rural voters make up less than 20 percent of the electorate. Yet in this election, unusually high numbers of white, working-class rural voters turned out in the Rust Belt and Midwest, upending Hillary Clinton's perceived "firewall" of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania in favor of Trump.
—Getty
Much has been made of the low educational attainment of rural Trump supporters. Many even view it as the source of support for Trump. Education, as a result, has been touted as the solution to perceptions of an uninformed citizenry by many who look to public schooling as the great hope of our democracy. From their perspective, education is an opportunity to invite young people to cherish the values and skills that will make a democracy thrive, including an appreciation of diversity, the ability to listen, the vocabulary to articulate one's own viewpoint, and the confidence to voice one's opinion.
However, we argue the exit polls from the election implicate education as part of a problem in our divided country. In short, the results demonstrate evidence of a country uninterested in addressing the fundamental co-optation of schooling in rural America in the service of the global economy, rather than in building local capacity and well-being.
When young people in rural places finish high school, their options are often simple: stay and work in whatever industry or business is locally available, or leave to pursue higher education or other types of work. For generations, when manufacturing supported entire communities, logging and fishing industries boomed, and family farming dominated the landscape, young people had multiple opportunities to stay in their thriving rural communities. Students who were able to go to college might return, if they chose, to open small businesses or work in upper management. However, as the economic vitality of these communities has slowly—or in some cases, quite abruptly—declined, the opportunities for educated young people to return to their communities has also declined.
"Rural public schools have simply become engines of exodus."
The result is that instead of providing a pathway for youths to go out of their communities and potentially return with a knowledge base of new experiences, rural public schools have simply become engines of exodus, educating students for labor markets and communities located elsewhere. Educated young people, for the most part, leave rural places and, even if they want to, cannot return. The phenomenon is so common that it has a name: rural brain drain.
Research suggests that many rural young people with the means to go experience great ambivalence about the decision to go to college. And it is the students who cannot pursue further education who remain to cobble together work in local economies where full-time, living-wage work is often difficult to find.
Therein lies the paradox. One might argue that if schools can provide college and career readiness for all—the rallying cry of contemporary educational reform—then the rural student can be prepared for whatever opportunities are available in our changing global economy. But fewer and fewer of those opportunities are located in rural places. And the opportunities that do exist in rural places may not require any education at all.
A college degree in rural America is now synonymous with leaving and having no way to sustainably come back. "We spend a lot of money to educate our kids, and then they move elsewhere," one rural leader told us. "The joke is, 'We dare you to make a living here.'"
And yet, there are solutions, beginning with greater attention to and investment in rural America.
MORE OPINION
Many researchers in rural education argue that rural schools themselves can be drivers of economic development. Entrepreneurial thinking by educational leaders at the state, school, and district levels can lead to greater opportunities for schools and communities to collaborate on attracting families, retooling local economies, and providing needed skills development to community members.
There is no doubt that citizenship education is important. But where will our newly trained citizens go, having gained an understanding of how to live in concert with others? It is critical that schools work with rural communities, rather than seeing themselves as separate from the cycle of economic decline. Therefore, citizenship education in rural places must teach rural youths to share their voices outside of the voting booth and speak back to policymakers too willing to overlook the ways in which rural communities have been short-changed for decades.
Educational policy continues to remain insensitive to the unique relationships between schooling and community well-being in different contexts. The geographic distribution of educational opportunity remains inequitable—and the great lesson of this election is that we cannot afford to ignore these realities anymore.
Vol. 36, Issue 18, Pages 22-23
Saturday, January 14, 2017
Thursday, January 12, 2017
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