Phi Delta Kappa International Research Articles

Walling, D. R.: Designing Learning for Tablet Classrooms: Innovations in Instruction

Donovan R. Walling has had a long career in the classroom and as a writer of practical guides for school policy reform and public education. His background includes past Director of Publications for Phi Delta Kappa International and Curriculum Administrator in public school districts in Wisconsin and Indiana. His practical knowledge of what it means to be a classroom teacher is based on his lengthy career as an educator in Wisconsin and for the US Department of Defense in Germany. Walling’s list of publications includes being the author or editor of 16 books and the AECT quarterly newsletter, iTECHDIGEST. He continues to be a keynote speaker and presenter at international, national, regional, and state education conferences in the United States, Canada, and Germany.

PDK Connection

News and information about the Phi Delta Kappa International family of associations. The PDK Educational Foundation awarded Innovation and Impact Grants to Jill Gonzalez-Bravo, Betty Hunt, and Isabel Morales. PDK Emerging Leader Danielle Dennis and George Sirrakos weigh in on teaching students how to become 21st century citizens.

Phi Delta Kappa International News and Upcoming Events

Phi Delta Kappa International News and Upcoming Events

Phi Delta Kappa International News and Upcoming Events

Phi Delta Kappa International News and Upcoming Events

Phi Delta Kappa International News and Upcoming Events

Phi Delta Kappa International News and Upcoming Events

Phi Delta Kappa International News and Upcoming Events

Phi Delta Kappa International News and Upcoming Events

Phi Delta Kappa International News and Upcoming Events

Phi Delta Kappa International News and Upcoming Events

How Well Has NCLB Worked? How Do We Get the Revisions We Want?

LOOK south from the corner of the Capitol Hilton in Washington, D.C., and the front door of the White House is squarely in the center of your view. Look north, and you can see a corner of the National Education Association building on 16th Street. Around the corner is the entrance to the offices of the Washington Post. Glance from side to side, and you see a stretch of the infamous K Street, the land of the lobbyists. One block west and one south is a stop for the Blue Line Metro, which can take you directly to the middle of the House of Representatives buildings. This hotel has always been a strategic and sometimes history-making place. In one of its ballrooms, the late Terry Sanford, then governor of and later senator from North Carolina, announced an unusual compact for education: the agreement to form the Education Commission of the States. Before other venues closer to the Capitol were built, this was a favorite site for the conferences of education groups, the release of major reports, and no doubt some deal making in the lobby bar. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] It was a fitting place for Phi Delta Kappa International to hold its 2006 Summit on Public Education, the formal culmination of a year of events celebrating the centennial of PDK, the professional association in education. In this cradle of policy making, politics, and media, PDK appropriately turned its attention to one of the most extraordinary happenings in education policy of the last century--the No Child Left Behind Act. The law was conceived by the White House and passed by Congress on a nonpartisan basis. Since it first took effect in 2002, it has been the focus of intense lobbying by many groups wanting to change it. Now, after more than four years, it stands accused of not doing very much, very fast, for the children attending schools just a few blocks from the hotel, the kind of struggling and often neglected students the law is intended to help the most. This juxtaposition of good intentions and stark realities characterized much of the discussion, both formal and informal, at the Summit. A panel of national policy experts, prodded and kept on track by questions from John Merrow, education correspondent for PBS' NewsHour, opened the conversations with a mixture of praise, some misgivings, and a few suggestions for changes in a law that is not going to go away. The panelists were a lot nicer than many in the audience wanted them to be. In breakout sessions focused on what the panelists had said, PDK members and others voiced frustration at how the law is playing out in their classrooms, school districts, and higher education institutions. The panelists, for example, counted the greater attention paid to children in special education as a plus in the law. That's true, participants said in the small-group discussions, but the law's accountability provisions work against the best interests of these children. Panel member Sandy Kress, an architect of the legislation for President Bush and former school board president in Dallas, said passionately that the law allows no excuses for the achievement gap. I think part of what gets No Child Left Behind into trouble is, it means [what it says]. There are teeth to it, more teeth to it than anywhere in any previous act of legislation. Those in the small-group discussions agreed but argued that the accountability provisions are in need of a good cleaning. The panelists welcomed the fact that ensuring good teachers for classrooms in high-poverty schools was on the table. But even the panelists did not equate the law's definition of highly qualified with real competence, and Summit participants, many of them teachers, decried the law's effect on excellent teachers who had been made to feel that they are failures because of NCLB's statistical definition of adequate yearly progress (AYP). The panelists and Summit participants certainly agreed that NCLB has provoked a national discussion about public education and has made public the significant achievement gap among the nation's students. …

The 38th Annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll of the Public's Attitudes toward the Public Schools

AS THIS poll appears for its 38th consecutive year, it serves as a memorial and a continuing tribute to the work of George Gallup, Sr. He was one of the poll's founders, considered it his poll, picked the panel to select the questions, oversaw the surveying, analyzed the results, and wrote the report. He drew great satisfaction from the poll and watched over it closely until his death in 1984. The close relationship between the Gallup Organization and Phi Delta Kappa International continues today with Alec Gallup, Chairman of the Gallup Poll, replacing his father. Since 1992, I have had the pleasure of directing the poll for PDK. Alec and I share the belief that being true to the poll's heritage requires keeping it free from bias while operating at the cutting edge of issues facing K-12 schools. Alec controls the wording of the questions and is responsible for making sure that the findings and conclusions are supported by the data. We present the results here in a user-friendly fashion intended to permit readers to delve into the data to verify our interpretations or draw their own conclusions.--LCR Major Findings and Conclusions The results of this poll are released at a press conference held in August in the Gallup Building in Washington, D.C. The first question a reporter asked at a recent conference was, What are the major story lines of this poll? Opening by answering that question has now become standard practice for the press conference, and we replicate it here by starting with the findings and conclusions that we believe have the greatest significance. Our aim is not to minimize or downplay the remaining findings and conclusions. However, we believe that the findings and conclusions presented here provide a context for interpreting the remaining results. The major findings center on how people want improvement to come about, on the way the public assesses the public schools, and on how it views some of the strategies used in current change efforts. (The tables pertaining to these questions are grouped at the end of this section.) Everything else in this poll builds to the final section, which deals with the change strategy dominating K-12 education today, the implementation of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. Source of School Improvement We begin with a brief story. A reporter at the 2001 press conference suggested asking the public whether improvement in public education should be sought by reforming the existing system or by finding an alternative system. This question would provide a benchmark to use in weighing the responses to questions dealing with proposals for change. The suggestion was accepted, a question was framed and asked in 2002, and the question has been repeated in each subsequent poll. (See Table 1.) Findings. The 2002 question found that 69% of the public expressed a preference for improvement through reforming the existing system. The number this year is 71%. By contrast, just 27% of respondents in 2002 preferred seeking an alternative system, and that figure is at 24% for 2006. Conclusion I. The public's strong preference is to seek improvement through the existing public schools. Policies shaped with this fact in mind are most likely to gain public approval. Rating of the Public Schools Each year we ask the public to assess its schools using the familiar A to F scale. This practice started in 1974 with a question asking respondents to grade the schools in the local community. Grading of the nation's schools was added in 1981, and, beginning in 1985, parents were asked to grade the school their oldest child attends. Each question has been repeated every year since it was first asked. (See Tables 2, 3, and 4.) Findings. In this year's poll, 49% give the schools in the community an A or a B. The percentage last year was 48%. The percentage of A's and B's climbs to 56% for public school parents and to 64% when parents grade the school their oldest child attends. …

100 Years of School Law

history of Phi Delta Kappa International in its first 100 years reflects changes that were taking place in schools and in society at large during that time. Mr. Zirkel looks at how events of this period shaped evolution of school law. It usually takes 100 years to make a law, and then, after it's done its work, it usually takes 100 years to be rid of it. --Henry Ward Beecher AS PART OF centennial celebration of Phi Delta Kappa International, in January 2006 Kappan, Donovan Walling traced history of organization from its founding as three education societies in 1906-09 to present. Here I delineate parallel developments in school law in United States, divided into three approximate periods as defined by landmark dates from PDK's history. I. FOUNDING PHASE initial phase of PDK's history included founding of three education societies in 1906-09, their amalgamation in 1910, and publication of first issue of Kappan in 1916. This period was also essentially founding phase of school law. first school law texts appeared just before and after turn of century, and they reflected relative recency of compulsory education laws and earlier world of institutionalizing common schools and their legal boundaries. While these texts tend to tout enormous amount of litigation in school matters, (1) content of this case law shows an era very different from today in both quantity and quality of litigation. For example, in 1892 Irwin Taylor's text ended with a synopsis of school statutes in each state, but bulk of book consisted of alphabetical entries describing nearly 5,000 cases in courts--a clearly inflated estimate. Consider this excerpt from entry Women Voters, which synthesizes court decisions in Kansas and Illinois: Art. 2, [sections] 23 of Kas. Constitution, which provides that The legislature in providing for formation and regulation of schools, shall make no distinction between rights of males and females, does not confer upon females right to vote for school officers. Ill. Act 1891, authorizing women to vote for superintendent of schools, is unconstitutional in that regard. (2) Next, C. W. Bardeen's 1897 manual ascribes great importance to a decision of New York Department of Public Instruction that interpreted state's education code as, among other things, reserving exclusive authority to teachers for the method of imparting instruction ..., assign[ing] seats to scholars, [and] regulat[ing] order in which recitations of classes, pursuing different studies taught in school, are to be held. (3) My personal favorite, though, is this excerpt from a 1907 compilation of school laws by Pennsylvania's state superintendent of public instruction, setting forth one of basic duties of school boards: [T]he boards of school directors ... of each school district of this Commonwealth ... are hereby required at least once during each full school term ... to have taken out, removed and hauled away all excrement and waste matter from every out-house or water closet connected with or standing upon premises of every public school-house in Commonwealth. (4) Harvey Vorhees' 1916 text reminds us that application of establishment clause of First Amendment to states, including their public schools, is quite a recent development. More specifically, at time of his text, Vorhees observed that prevailing weight of judicial authority was that reading of Bible, repeating of Lord's Prayer, and singing of religious songs are lawful. (5) Similarly, Harry Trusler's rather scholarly compendium in 1927 observed that separate but equal applies to public schools for colored children and that school boards may refuse to employ a married woman as a teacher. …

A Brief History of the Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll

Phi Delta Kappa and the Gallup Organization have been asking the public what it thinks of the public schools since the late 1960s. Mr. Rose describes the evolution of the PDK/Gallup poll itself and how educators and policy makers are influenced by its findings. THE 37th Annual Phi Delta Kappa/ Gallup Poll of the Public's Attitudes Toward the Public Schools was released in August 2005 at a press conference held at the Gallup Building in Washington, D.C. Members of the national media were in attendance; the president of Phi Delta Kappa International came from Denver to preside; and the poll's director, PDK's executive director, and a consultant to the poll responded to questions for over 40 minutes. The conference was carried on C-SPAN, and numerous media outlets reported the poll results. The poll was subsequently printed in a 16-page article in the September issue of the Phi Delta Kappan. Major publications, such as the Christian Science Monitor and Education Week, analyzed the results, and some reprinted the poll in part or even in its entirety. Those who started this poll in the late 1960s would be amazed at the way it has endured and grown in both content and purpose. Its annual release is widely anticipated. It is disliked by some, respected by others. A former secretary of education, having reviewed the approval ratings given the public schools, commented, We will never bring about the needed change if people continue to believe that they have good schools. Today's PDK/Gallup poll is a cooperative effort between PDK and the Gallup Organization, a tie established after the first poll had been published in 1969 in the IDEA/ Reporter. The poll was the brainchild of James Kettering and Edward Brainard, two members of the prestigious Kettering Foundation's board. Envisioning a poll that would provide educators with insights regarding the public's views on day-to-day issues, they enlisted the expertise and support of George Gallup, Sr., who was on the way to establishing public-opinion polling as a true science. Gallup, strongly committed to the public schools, liked the idea of an education poll and used his expertise to make it a reality. He was the poll's first director. In a 2004 conversation in Colorado, Brainard recalled that, while the first poll was judged a success, there was general agreement that it needed wider distribution. Stanley Elam, who had established the Phi Delta Kappan as a leading education journal since he took over as its editor in 1956, readily signed on with the understanding that the Kappan would be the poll's publisher. Thus began the partnership between the Gallup Organization and Phi Delta Kappa that has so far endured for nearly four decades. THE EARLY DAYS In the early days, Gallup convened a national panel of experts to discuss the issues the poll should explore. He chaired the meeting, asked questions, listened intently, and took copious notes. At some point, he would thank everyone and declare the meeting over. Then he would draft the questions, prepare the questionnaire, and direct the polling process. When the surveying was complete, Gallup analyzed the results, picked out the significant findings, and wrote the report. Elam edited it, checking frequently with its author, and the poll was published in the Kappan. From 1969 until his death in 1984, this was George Gallup's poll, and he delighted in it. Alec Gallup, co-chair of the Gallup Organization, became the point person for the poll after his father's death. He monitors the questions and co-authors the report. Stan Elam remained a co-author of the report until 1995, and I joined Stan and Alec in 1991 and became co-author, with Alec, in 1995. THE PROCESS TODAY The poll cycle starts in October, when potential questions are sought from and proposed by a variety of sources. Roughly half the questions are trend questions, whose meaning is enriched by the valuable data collected when they were asked in previous years. …

Curriculum Development and Instructional Design in the Effective Schools Process

Ms. March and Ms. Peters describe a three-year, six-district demonstration project that is proving to be one of the most exciting examples of curricular development in the long history of the Effective Schools movement. A SIGNIFICANT number of school districts that adopted the Effective Schools Process for school improvement successfully managed to reinvent their infrastructures, only to realize that they had changed little or nothing in their classroom instruction or assessment. Many districts assumed that if they purchased a highly touted curriculum process or a cutting-edge instructional delivery system, these areas would automatically improve. But, following the initial fanfare, the reforms were never actually implemented in every classroom. Rarely was a building administrator held accountable for involving every teacher in the reform initiative. Even worse, most districts made few provisions to conduct formative monitoring of the impact of their reform efforts on student performance. Instead, they passively allowed the results of the state test to indicate their level of success. As experienced Effective Schools researchers who have led the Center for Educational Leadership Services at Kent State University for more than a decade, we realized that this was the situation we were finding when we looked at the state of Effective Schools reform in Ohio. In response, we developed the Instructional Design process to help school districts actually restructure the delivery and assessment of classroom instruction and to monitor the impact of these changes on student performance. The three-year, six-district demonstration project that has grown from this work is proving to be one of the most exciting examples of curricular development in the long history of the Effective Schools movement. Based on the findings of the first- and second-wave school reform efforts and on best practices research, Instructional Design and its data management system (dubbed ADAM - Academic Data Analysis and Management) were specifically designed to be used in conjunction with the Effective Schools Process. In 1999, Instructional Design was published in book form by Phi Delta Kappa International as Developing High-Performance Schools: Instructional Redesign for Learner-Centered Classroom Reform. Between 1997 and 2000, Instructional Design was piloted in two urban, two suburban, and two rural Ohio school districts whose boards of education had passed resolutions adopting the Effective Schools Process. During this three-year demonstration project, teams of teachers and administrators in each of the six districts have taken a number of actions. * These teams have translated the national and state content standards into academic performance indicators, developmentally articulated from prekindergarten to grade 12, and these indicators were adopted by each local board of education as the official achievement targets for the district. Because they drive the entire instructional program, these indicators affect all decisions, from the purchase of materials and equipment to course scheduling to professional development. * They have developed yearlong curriculum maps for each subject and each grade level that sequence the topics, process, skills, and materials needed to help every student master the performance indicators by the end of each school year. Students who fail to master indicators in one year have an opportunity to do so in the following years. * They have devised unit plans to guide the delivery and assessment of classroom instruction, and these plans specify teaching and assessment techniques that are congruent with unit objectives (some of which are performance indicators). The plans also incorporate such best practices as constructivism, active student involvement, the use of multiple modalities, authentic instruction, and performance assessments. * In two of the districts, the teams have piloted ADAM, an electronic system for data management that enables teachers to monitor student mastery. …