Information evaluation, competency-based ed, E-rate, school to prison, and textbook troubles: Required Readings, 7.15.14

As part of my role as a librarian, I teach varying levels of humanity how to evaluate the reliability of information with which they are presented, whether on the web or in print. Harriet Hall’s Science-Based Medicine article may not be related to education or teaching, strictly speaking, but the guidance she provides is applicable beyond medical settings for teaching how to evaluate information and promote critical thinking.

Competency-based education measures academic progress according to the learning that students demonstrate and alters the teaching role of faculty. Read about the debate over this increasingly popular model here. 

The Federal Communications Commission has approved changes to the E-rate program, which supports telecommunications services in the nation’s schools and libraries, giving priority to the most impoverished applicants.

Anna Deavere Smith hopes that her latest work, Field Notes: Doing Time In Education: The California Chapter, will foster discussions about what is known as the school-to-prison pipeline. 

Americans United for the Separation of Church and State has lodged a formal complaint with the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools asking that the taxpayer-funded Heritage Academy stop using textbooks that, in addition to endorsing specific religious views and ideologies, teach that “slave owners were the worst victims of the system” and teach that the world would be “happier, more peaceful, and more prosperous” had the United States not intervened in the Holocaust.

Required Readings are a list of links that you might find interesting! Look for them to appear every Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday. Have some links you’d like to share? Submit them on our contact form!