HGSE in the Media

January 2009

'Global Competency' Is Imperative for Global Success
Schools and colleges around the world are not adequately preparing their students and other citizens to understand the nature of shared planetary challenges like international terrorism, regional and global conflicts, and global warming." - Professor Fernando Reimers (The Chronicle of Higher Education, 1/30/09. Registration required.)

Grad Students Think Twice About Jobs in Academe
"With research, you're at the mercy of the outside world. You've got to bring in money. You've got to write grants, and maybe you've never done that before. And then finding the time to write is a challenge." - Research Associate Cathy Trower, Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (The Chronicle of Higher Education, 1/23/09. Registration required.)

Study Evaluates Boston's Charter Schools
"The study, released last month by researchers from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, generally found "large positive effects" for charter middle and high schools on student achievement, based on a review of state test scores." (Education Week, 1/21/09. Registration required.)

Charter Schools, or Some of Their Methods, Offer Hope
"Why don't we face the reality that a large percentage of our youth neither want nor need a college education in the traditional sense. All of our children should receive an excellent, without frills, primary education in the three Rs plus physical education, with no child left behind." - Senior Lecturer Katherine Merseth (Wall Street Journal, 1/20/09)

Ethical Minds
"Even though many young people may not be ready to participate in the wider communities that digital media open up to them, there is no controlling information about yourself or others that gets posted. It’s a situation that’s foisted upon young persons who are not ready for it." - Professor Howard Gardner (Education Week, 1/16/09. Registration required.)

How We Got to Sesame Street; Art on Screen
"One particularly influential thinker was Gerald S. Lesser, an unassuming, sneaker-clad professor of education (now emeritus) at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who was an expert on how children consume television." (The Chronicle of Higher Education, 1/16/09. Registration required.)

Do Schools Test Too Much?
"We need accountability in education, and standardized tests give comparable information from different schools. But tests don’t measure things like complex problem-solving ability, creativity, and persistence. High-stakes testing puts pressure on teachers to take shortcuts to raise scores and can give an illusion of progress." - Professor Dan Koretz (Parade, 1/11/09)

Community Colleges: Cheaper but Not Necessarily Better
"In a 2008 paper, Harvard professor Bridget Terry Long found that, among similar students, those who chose two-year colleges were less likely to get a bachelor's degree than those who went straight to a four-year college." (U.S. News and World Report, 1/9/09)

State of Education: Boston's Pilot and Charter Schools
"As they move from 4th grade through middle school, 6th 7th 8th grade, those differences dramatically expand. People who won the lottery to attend the charter schools have outcomes on the 8th grade MCAS (state standardized tests) that are only slightly lower than the average test score of the kids from the Brookline public schools -- not the Boston public schools.'' - Professor Thomas Kane (NECN, 1/8/09)

City Grads Falter in Public Colleges
"Whatever you make of the disparity between publics and privates, we can all do better." - Senior Lecturer Paul Reville (Boston Globe, 1/8/09)

A Strong Case for More Charter Schools
"By eighth grade, though, the lottery winners on average were scoring very close to the Brookline public school average performance in math, but the lottery losers, who mostly went back to the traditional public schools in Boston, were still only slightly above the Boston public school average." - Professor Thomas Kane (Boston Globe, 1/7/09)

Study Offers Progress Report on Alternative Education
Professor Tom Kane is interviewed about his research on charter schools. (NECN, 1/6/09)

Charter Schools Grade Highest
"The thing that was most surprising given other studies that have been done was the large magnitude of the charter effect in middle school math." - Professor Tom Kane (Boston Globe, 1/6/09)

Later-life Lessons
"Sociologist Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, professor of education at Harvard and former chairwoman of the board of the MacArthur Foundation, names a new life stage in her ninth book, The Third Chapter: Passion, Risk, and Adventure in the 25 Years After 50." (Boston Globe, 1/5/09)

Immersive Interfaces for Engagement and Learning
"Studies have shown that immersion in a digital environment can enhance education in at least three ways: by allowing multiple perspectives, situated learning, and transfer." - Professor Chris Dede (Science, 1/09)

Studying Schooling
"In 2006, Thomas Kane went to Joel Klein, chancellor of New York City’s public schools, with some unsettling news: teachers from the New York City Teaching Fellows program (which supplied nearly 30 percent of Klein’s new hires between 2003 and 2005) were on average no more effective than traditionally certified teachers." (Harvard Magazine, 1/09)

Using Virtual Worlds and Video Games to Teach the Lessons of Reality
"‘Many academically low-performing students do as well as their high-performing peers in River City,’ Chris Dede, a professor of learning technologies at Harvard Graduate School of Education, writes in Science. The key to this, he says, is the ability of students to become immersed in a digital world where they can build confidence ‘by stepping out of their real-world identity of poor performer academically, which shifts their frame of self reference to successful scientist in the virtual context.’" - Professor Chris Dede (Scientific American, 1/09)

You Don't Need More Willpower…
"The behavior you're trying to extinguish or diminish, let's say, the way you're eating or overeating—you're only looking at it as bad. And until you can get below the waterline, you can't see why this behavior is brilliant." - Professor Robert Kegan (O, The Oprah Magazine, 1/09)

The Evolution of Education: Empowering Learners To Think, Create, Share, and Do
"I am more excited about educational technology right now than at any other time in my career." - Professor Chris Dede (The Journal, 1/09)