- Students who complain their teacher doesn’t know what he’s talking about may have a point, according to a new study by the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ). Science teachers across the country are teaching subjects in which their knowledge is limited at best, the study claims, and many states are doing little to stop it. Also worth a look is the NCTQ’s new Teacher Quality Checklist.
- Rising college tuition got you down? School Choice Ohio (SCO) is here to help. SCO recently ran a special series of blog posts on Advanced Placement (AP), Early College High Schools, Post-Secondary Enrollment Options (PSEO), and College Tech Prep, all options that help students earn college credits, or even an associate’s degree, while still in high school. And parents will breathe a big sigh of relief: enrolling their kids in these programs won’t cost them a dime in extra fees. More information is available on SCO’s blog and in their latest Jumpstart brochure.
- School choice at all costs: Worth it? Not according to a new National Affairs article by Frederick M. Hess. Proponents of school choice, Hess says, have made fools of themselves—and the reforms they support—by insisting that choice, regardless of whether or not the choices available are actually good ones, is the cure-all our ailing schools have long been waiting for. It’s time for the choice movement to re-think, re-group, and re-focus, he says.
- “They don’t mean anything.” That, in a nutshell, is the common consensus on teacher evaluations today, but The New Teacher Project (TNTP) is seeking to change that, starting with its new report, Teacher Evaluation 2.0. The report details what precisely makes current evaluation practices problematic, as well as six principles TNTP sees as crucial to formulating a new, effective evaluation system.
- What do political ads, education policy, and the National Education Association (NEA) have in common? Much less than you might expect. This NEA ad, currently running in Ohio, is very clear in its political message, but somehow education policy and schools didn’t make the production cut.
