You, like me, may find something tiresome about the sudden recrudescence of the Japanese pocket monster after its deserved interval in pixelated purgatory. The arrival of the Pokémon Go app has sent an army of dead-eyed phone worshipers traipsing through Arlington National Cemetery and D.C.’s Holocaust Memorial Museum in search of imaginary cuddle beasts, and it’s hard for us grumps to find an upside. That’s why we should leave it to USA Today’s inimitable gaming correspondent, Greg Toppo, who has gone to bat for the social and educational benefits of the app. In interviews with tech-savvy educators, he detects great admiration for the way it disperses its users into public spaces—churches, parks, museums, and historic buildings—and pushes them to rediscover their communities. A whole array of “augmented reality” games could harness this level of engagement for educational ends, even if their participants just think they’re stalking the elusive Jigglypuff.
Veterans of the reform movement probably don’t need any reminders about the sorry state of K–12 education in Newark. From the thousands of pupils served in abominable schools to decades of state intervention and the squandered $100 million gift from Facebook tycoon Mark Zuckerberg, the city’s troubles are old news. But if you haven’t checked in for a while, you may have missed some green shoots popping up through the scorched earth. As Richard Lee Colvin writes in Education Next, Superintendent Chris Cerf is fighting for accountability and excellence in Newark while also working to lower the political temperature around the city’s schools. Following the sometimes unruly tenure of his predecessor, Cami Anderson, Cerf has worked to bring local stakeholders into the education discussion more than in years past. For anyone concerned about reformers’ penchant for technocracy, it’s a relief to hear the superintendent vow that “there is an essential value in listening and giving people an opportunity to seriously engage on important questions.”
The design of a school report card can be a tough balance to strike, since it needs to be user-friendly, informative, and accurate all at once. If you fetishize accessibility, you’ll struggle to convey the full picture of a school’s academic environment and culture. But if you try to pack too much data into one document, you’ll baffle parents who don’t spend their days poring over data sets and scatter plots. Now poised to deploy a new report card to comply with the Every Student Succeed Act, the state of California may have erred a bit on the side of complexity, unveiling a Fauvist farrago of categories and ratings. This kind of information overload probably isn’t going to win any awards for clarity. On the other hand, there’s something reductive about the Education Department’s emphasis on a single, summative rating for schools—a danger, perhaps, that the simple can become simplistic. Smart policy wonks answered our call for accountability system designs; maybe they should now address themselves to solving this problem.
