Educação em Portugal (XIV)

O blogue Consider the Evidence recomenda, em Links: March 2008, algumas ligações a artigos e notícias sobre a educação (e não só). Faço também referência, ao fim, a um artigo do Los Angeles Times. São referidas situações nos EUA, mas, que defendo, terem relevância para outros contextos culturais e educacionais - fornecem quadros de comparação, pistas de trabalho e de reflexão: em nenhum caso implicam a transposição de outros modelos para a nossa situação específica (isto seria desnecessário dizer, mas nunca se sabe quando é necessário frisar, à cautela, o óbvio).

Os excertos que se apresentam são para induzir a leitura da informação na totalidade (qualquer destas ligações é muito interessante):

• The teaching penalty, by Sylvia Allegretto, Sean Corcoran, and Lawrence Mishel. É um livro on-line: "Teacher quality is the most important input schools contribute to the academic success of their students (Hanushek and Rivkin 2006; Rice 2003). Yet for many school officials, recruiting and retaining talented and effective classroom teachers remains an uphill battle. For decades now, a small and declining fraction of the most cognitively skilled graduates choose to become teachers (Corcoran, Evans, and Schwab 2004), while rigorous national standards and school-based accountability for student performance have pushed the demand for talented teachers to an all-time high."

• Middle-class schools for all, by Richard Kahlenberg Artigo em Democracy -Journal of Ideas (obriga a registo, mas é grátis). É muito interessante e a sua reflexão levanta questões muito importantes ao sistema educativo português: "Most conventional education reforms concentrate on achieving equality between separate schools for rich and poor. From private-school vouchers and charter schools to class-size reduction and education testing, mainstream efforts ignore a central finding of education research: that schools that are majority poor tend to fail to produce high levels of academic achievement, no matter the level of funding or model of school governance employed.

  Forty years ago, legendary sociologist James Coleman found that, after the socioeconomic status of a child’s family, the biggest predictor of academic achievement is the socioeconomic status of the school he or she attends. While there are anecdotal stories of high poverty schools that work, University of Wisconsin researcher Douglas Harris found that middle-class schools are 22 times as likely to be consistently high performing as high-poverty schools. So in a majority—middle class country, why not allow more children to attend majority—middle class schools?"

  "Every school community has three sets of actors: children; teachers and administrators; and parents. Middle-class schools tend to provide positive, well-disciplined peer role models, good teachers, and an active parent volunteer community, which benefit all the students in a school." "So far, these efforts are producing substantial results. In Wake County, low-income and minority students are outperforming similar students in other large North Carolina districts that have not addressed concentrations of poverty. And the middle-class pupils in Wake County are in no way harmed academically by the presence of some low-income students in school; indeed, administrators have reported that students benefit from exposure to racial and economic diversity." "If the ultimate goal of a school system is to produce high-performing students, then economic integration is a clearly superior option. Rather than trying to make high-poverty schools work against all odds, we should eliminate high-poverty schools altogether and strike at the fountainhead of educational inequality."

• At charter school, higher teacher pay, New York Times: "The school, which will run from fifth to eighth grades, is promising to pay teachers $125,000, plus a potential bonus based on schoolwide performance. That is nearly twice as much as the average New York City public school teacher earns, roughly two and a half times the national average teacher salary and higher than the base salary of all but the most senior teachers in the most generous districts nationwide. The school’s creator and first principal, Zeke M. Vanderhoek, contends that high salaries will lure the best teachers. He says he wants to put into practice the conclusion reached by a growing body of research: that teacher quality — not star principals, laptop computers or abundant electives — is the crucial ingredient for success."

• What makes Finnish kids so smart?, Wall Street Journal (já referido neste blogue - ver notas sob a etiqueta educação)
  

• U.S. teachers lag in pay, report says : The Homeroom : Los Angeles Times: Não tive ainda a possibilidade de comprová-lo no relatório da OCDE sobre a educação, mas um amigo meu assegura que Portugal não segue o padrão dos sistemas de educação mais bem sucedidos, no que respeita ao perfil temporal da evolução do pagamento dos seus professores: "'The top-performing school systems consistently attract more able people into the teaching profession, leading to better student outcomes,' the report said. 'They do this by making entry to teacher training highly selective, developing effective processes for selecting the right applicants to become teachers and paying good (but not great) starting compensation.'