Blog Archive for August, 2012

I like to win. So does my alma mater—Louisiana State University (LSU)—where suffice it to say, our 90,000+ fans in Tiger Stadium expect the LSU Football Team to be Southeastern Conference champions ever year … and if we had our way, national champions every year as well. You can expect that we will absolutely demand to win when we play Alabama this November 3rd; both because we always plan to beat Alabama, and because of a recent national championship game for which we intend to be vindicated.

LSU football. Photo by JustDog (via WikiCommons).

How does LSU football win? The team recruits the best players, holds those players to the highest standards, and demands continued performance from them day in and day out. Everyone works together to build a team that can deliver against opposing teams—who are made up of the best athletes held to those same high standards from all across the country. In short, LSU football raises standards for performance daily.

During my sophomore year in high school, there was a period of three months where I genuinely wanted to be a trucker, much to the chagrin of my educator parents.  It may have been typical teenage angst, and it was certainly the fact that I had been reading a lot of Jack Kerouac, but I romanticized the idea of endless open roads and distant horizons and baseball games playing on half-working pit-stop television sets.

Now I cross the country for an entirely different reason. Over the past year, I’ve visited a dozen cities to talk to teachers in and outside our organization about improving our leadership framework.  And I always start these conversations with the same question: “What are your ultimate aspirations for our students?”  Invariably at some point a debate ignites about whether we should really be striving to ensure every single one of our students goes to and through a four-year college.

During a recent conversation with the teachers in Champaign, Illinois, someone made a statement that I’ve heard many times before:  “Not all kids want to go to college.  We should embrace free will.”

It isn’t that I disagree—my Teamster-aspirations fifteen years earlier are testament to that—but I’m always disturbed by this sentiment.  The night before, I had seen the graphc above on Andrew Sullivan’s blog depicting job losses in the recession, based on a new report by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce.

Aimée Eubanks Davis is executive vice president of people, community, and diversity at Teach For America. You can find her on Twitter at @EubanksDavis.

I’m immensely proud to call New Orleans a second home, and with every anniversary of Katrina’s destruction, I find myself right back in the eye of the storm. As I write this, I’m terrified that the Gulf Coast faces another tragedy in Hurricane Isaac, and I cannot imagine what will happen if this storm unleashes Katrina-level destruction. 

Credit: NASA/GSFC/GOES

My love for New Orleans runs deep. Whenever we can, my husband Marcus and I take our three children to his native city to feed our souls. We eat his mother’s 7th Ward red beans and rice; adapt our early-to-bed bodies to the New Orleans nightlife; and journey through the city to check the progress (or lack thereof) since Katrina’s devastation of friends’ and family members’ homes, churches, and po’boy shops. We miss seeing the people who never returned. Every trip, I visit former students and colleagues to hear about their lives and work. What makes New Orleans more special than any city I’ve ever encountered is the human connection; it’s a place steeped in relationships, culture, and tradition.

I’m also proud to have played a role in fueling New Orleans’ new, innovative educational system with outstanding leaders. I spent many years walking through local public schools that were abysmal. Seven years ago, the academic achievement of the city’s students was the worst in the state of Louisiana and pretty much all of America. More recently, I toured several local schools with my brother-in-law and niece, and they kept repeating that “these kinds of schools didn’t exist before.” Every time I visit a school, I look at student work, and the student work I see now is, on the whole, far superior to what I saw before.  The dramatic rise in the number of New Orleans public school students eligible for two- and four-year merit-based scholarships to Louisiana public colleges and universities has risen dramatically in the last seven years. More students are on a path to get to and through college and reach their career goals. 

Yet I’m haunted by the fact that only a small fraction of the people who led (and still lead) the transformation of New Orleans public education are among the city’s African American majority; they are not my former students, nor do they share their racial backgrounds. 

Many of my friends and family members own an iPhone or a smartphone or an iPad. We all know that there are apps available to help you with everything—whether it’s starting your car or checking your bank account. For teachers, there are apps that can help with all aspects of teaching, including connecting academic content to the real world, keeping in touch with parents and families, and grading papers and assignments.

Here's a roundup of five apps that I believe will benefit educators, families, and students.

Photo by Mono (Own work) GFDL 1.2, via Wikimedia Commons

1.  Dash4Teachers
(Price: $4.99, 5 stars – 13 ratings; iTunes link)
Several teachers in New Orleans, including Aliya Bhatia, created this app that focuses on parent contact and home visits. Dash4Teachers allows teachers to log student behaviors for 1 to 100-plus students, their initial contact with parents, and follow-up communication with families. Aliya emailed me about it: “This spring, I was really frustrated with my parent-contact systems and [ended] up building an iPhone app for teachers to connect more easily with students' families. I, along with teachers at the school where I intern, have been using Dash4Teachers for the past few weeks to coordinate home visits. It has been a godsend and keeps track of all the data I need to make informed calls to parents.”

2.  BrainPOP
(Price: $0 - $6.99, 4.5 stars – 4,445 ratings; iTunes link)
BrainPop is an amazing animated video tool that can be used in the classroom via a projector, SmartBoard, iPad, or mobile device for on-the-go learning with an accompanying quiz. This app features a learning video for the day and a daily quiz. The full version of the app, with more than 750 videos, is $6.99.  BrainPop Educators features lesson plans and other teaching tools for educators on a variety of subjects from grammar to physics. There is also BrainPop Jr for K-3 teachers. Their main site offers free materials and videos at http://www.brainpop.com/. After a free lesson on the Harlem Renaissance, my kids had enough background knowledge to fully participate on a trip to the Apollo Theater. Jahyra squealed, “I know that answer, we just had a lesson on it and that question was on the quiz!”