Ohanian Comment: Matter such as this is proliferating faster than ragweed. But I found a few things of interest. 



A hotlink on "Primary Source survey funded by the Gates Foundation" takes one to an item titled "Gates Foundation Launches Effort to Reinvent the Toilet. 

The actual Primary Sources 2012 is a "project of Scholastic and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In 2009, they surveyed 40,000 teachers. In this stripped-down version, they surveyed 10,000. Here's how they did it: 



This national survey, conducted by Harrison Group, used an email-to-online survey method. The list of teachers was sourced from Market Data Retrieval’s (MDR) database of public school teachers. The survey was conducted from June 28 to July 13, 2011 among 10,212 preK–12 public school classroom teachers.1

The sponsors of the research were not revealed to respondents. Respondents were incented to participate with a gift certificate to an online education store, which was revealed to be the Scholastic Teacher Store Online on after teachers had completed the survey.


The most believable, i.e., truly universal, thing I found was in How Teachers Spend Their Time During the Required School Day (of 4 hours 49 minutes: 23 minutes for "free time/lunch/personal time." But the claim was also made that teachers spend 19 minutes during this time period each day "Grading student work/preparing student report cards."

Did you ever meet a teacher who found time to prepare student report cards during the school day?

Go to Appendix A of the survey and you can read the questions asked. For example, look at the bias here:

Below is a list of five possible reasons that some students don’t leave high school prepared to succeed in a 2- or 4-year college. Which one do you believe is the most likely reason that some of the students in your classes won’t leave high school prepared to succeed in a 2- or 4-year college?

• Lack of participation in college 
preparatory coursework
• Poor reading and communication skills
• Lack of critical thinking and 
problem-solving abilities
• Lack of encouragement from family 
and friends
• Lack of student motivation

Poverty is not mentioned. Inappropriate curriculum is not mentioned. And so on.

Here's a question aimed at Gates Foundation experimentation with teacher professional development:

How much of an impact do you believe the following effort would have on improving student academic achievement? Once again, by academic achievement, we mean students preparedness for the next level of education.

The ability for teachers to receive real-time, technology-based feedback while teaching (audio coaching, videotape review of lessons, etc.)

Bring on the earbuds and the galvanic bracelets.

This is how the survey described the Common Core Standards:

Common Core Standards were described as follows

The Common Core State Standards are new standards in mathematics and English language arts meant to be consistent from state to state for each grade level. They were completed in the summer of 2010 through a state-led effort and have been adopted by over 40 states.

There's even a footnote to this claim:

Developed collaboratively and adopted by 46 (45 at the time of this survey) states, these math and English language arts standards "provide teachers and parents with a common understanding of what students are expected to learn [and] will provide appropriate benchmarks for all students, regardless of where they live."

It is, of course, a critical part of the myth to insist that the states wanted the standards, NOT that they were paid for by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and forced on the states by the requirements for receiving Race to the Top federal dollars.

So one can ask if the survey was an attempt to obtain information from teachers or a determination to further propagandize them.

60% of the teachers surveyed report the "need professional development on how to teach parts of the standards that are new to them."

This brings us to the press release below, from a company eager to provide that professional development. You can read their bios here At least a number of key people come from education and not from the hedge fund community. But one has to dig for this information. If you follow the hot links in this press release, in addition to learning about the Gates Foundation strategy to help bring safe, clean sanitation services to millions of poor people in the developing world,you will discover that the primary purpose of the press release is to get contact information from people reading it.

Insight Education Group Launches the Insight Core Framework

By Insight Education Group

ENCINO, Calif., Aug. 1, 2012 -- /PRNewswire/ -- Insight Education Group takes another significant step in its work supporting standards-based learning with the launch of The Insight Core Framework. Addressing a significant need in the field to bring together work on teacher effectiveness and the Common Core State Standards, this new framework is built upon five core instructional practices that aim to effectively addresses the demands of the new standards.

The Insight Core Framework:

• Uses the language and logic of the Common Core
• Focuses on classroom instruction that promotes mastery of the Common Core
• Helps observers focus on the instructional practices that will improve student outcomes and teacher practice with the Standards 
• Was created from the ground-up by teachers and school leaders with deep knowledge of the Common Core and instruction

The Common Core Standards have the potential to significantly increase students' performance, but not without effective teachers. According to the recent Primary Source survey funded by the Gates Foundation, 64% of teachers believe that common standards across all states will have a strong impact on improving student achievement while only 22% of teachers felt that they were adequately prepared to teach the Common Core State Standards.

The federal Race to the Top competition accelerated State's efforts to improve teacher quality through the creation of policies and state-of-the-art evaluation systems that recognize and reward effective teaching. The goal is to ensure there's an effective teacher in every classroom. The Insight Core Framework was developed out of the extensive work that Insight has done with large urban school districts around the country to achieve this goal.

"As schools and districts are faced with implementing two high-stakes and vitally important initiatives simultaneously -- Teacher Effectiveness/Evaluation and the Common Core -- we knew it was important to bring both of these bodies of work together. To that end, we have built a framework that supported both initiatives while focusing on what matters most -- good teaching," said Michael Moody, founder and CEO of Insight Education Group.

The Insight Core Framework is available for download at http://www.InsightCoreFramework.com.

NOTE: Insight Education Group requires one to fill out a form with name and e-mail to gain access to this Insight Core Framework.

Insight Education Group is a small but mighty company of teachers and administrators focused on the teacher's perspective in professional learning and student achievement. Since 2002, Insight has partnered with districts and schools across the country to develop and implement instructional initiatives aimed at increasing teacher effectiveness. To learn more, go to http://www.insighteducationgroup

Contact: Ken Omath Office: 800.935.7022 x122 Mobile: 714.290.5507 omath@insighteducationgroup.com

R


— Press Release
PR Newswire
August 01, 2012
http://www.sacbee.com/2012/08/01/4681132/introducing-an-instructional-framework.html