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Duncan Announces Think Outside the Book Incentive
Another in the list of news items you will see nowhere else.
U. S. Department of Education
For Immediate Release:
U. S. Secretary of Education today announced the "Think Outside the Book" incentive, freeing an additional $64 billion to states that pledge to eliminate books in elementary schools.
"The University of Oregon has produced a nifty sequel to DIBELS. DIBLELS was designed to assess 3 of the 5 Big Ideas of early literacy," said Secretary Duncan. "Now DIBLELS 2 puts nonsense paragraphs into the schools, covering the other two Big Ideas. And with all the ideas covered, every student will be a winner on the Race to the Top."
Duncan cited rigorous scientific studies from Oregon, Texas, Florida, and Tuvalu showing that the student who can read five nonsense paragraphs in three minutes has no need for books and will be competitive with all those people in India with engineering degrees.
Every teacher in Think Outside the Book schools will receive Benchmark data on DIBELS 2. This data includes: histograms, district norms, box plots, individual student profiles, class list reports, bar charts, biplots, control charts, forest plots, Q-Q plots, run charts, stem plots, scatter plots, Pearson product-moment correlations, Spearman's rho, Kendall's tau, confounding variables, regression analysis, and survival analysis.
"As corporate America has shown us, when schools are able to harness their data, their students become competitive in the Race to the Top of the Global Economy," said Secretary Duncan.
"When schools free themselves from the burden of books, they can use data as a powerful catalyst for change within a school," said Secretary Duncan. "And if they want the money, they�d better do it. This Department will not stand idle while teachers in India are working overtime."
The award of these contracts provides the Department with the capacity necessary to support efforts to ameliorate data equity issues and to ensure that states receive the assistance they need to transform their students into 21st Century learners.
Already this year the Department, through the authority granted the Secretary by Congress, has overseen a 38% percent increase in data. Once books are replaced by DIBELS 2, an 182% increase in data is predicted.
— Susan Ohanian
U. S. Department of Education
2009-06-30
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