The Education Gadfly Show #766: The U.S. Department of Education’s puzzling take on testing in 2021
Things are getting messy in the world of assessment.
The Biden administration recently approved Colorado’s request to ease the burden of administering state assessments because of the pandemic.
District leaders may be celebrating the $122 billion in stimulus relief Congress approved for K–12 schools last month.
The Biden team has issued its first responses to state requests to waive federal testing requirements because of the pandemic. Dale Chu reads the tea leaves, and concludes that the new Administration is trying to eat its cake and have it too.
How can we do more to prevent teen suicides? —New York Times Pandemic pods are less sustainable and are harder to run than many parents thought.
In the last year, Congress has now invested nearly $200 billion to support K–12 education. It’s an unprecedented federal infusion of money, but will it lead to an unprecedented recovery effort? It’s worth taking a moment to pause and consider the range of possibilities. Best case
Earlier this month on her “Answer Sheet” blog in the Washington Post, Valerie Strauss ran a lengthy rebuttal written by Carol Burris about a study that we recently published. Robbers or Victims?
Editor’s note: This is the second post in a series that puts the themes of 2020’s Getting the Most Bang for the Education Buck into today’s context, with particular attention to the effects of the pandemic and federal relief dollars.
The CDC’s revised guidelines for pupil spacing in school—three feet under most circumstances rather than six—opened a floodgate of gratitude from superintendents and parents.
Editor’s note: This is the first post in a series that puts the themes of 2020’s Getting the Most Bang for the Education Buck into today’s context, with particular attention to the effects of the pandemic and federal relief dollars.
Despite last week’s announcement by the U.S. Department of Education that it won’t grant blanket testing waivers this year, a number of states have decided to push for one anyway.
Education funding is sticky. Once dollars are sent to a public school or school system, they tend to stay there.
With two big rounds of Covid-19 aid having been sent to schools and at least a third on the horizon, leaders must make difficult decisions, especially as more schools reopen and the pandemic rages on. How can they use this money to best mitigate risk, facilitate effective hybrid learning, and most importantly, get kids back on track after suffering substantial learning losses?
It’s not surprising that most of the arguments against widespread student loan forgiveness are coming from the political right, given that the idea itself gained prominence during the 2020 presidential campaigns of Senators Bernie Sander
Any discussion about “equity” in education that is not first and foremost a discussion about literacy is unserious.
Should President Biden follow through on his campaign promise to grant local school districts veto power over the creation of new charter schools within their borders, on the assumption that their expansion harms traditional public schools?
Opponents of charters contend that they drain district coffers, while proponents argue that it is charters that are denied essential funding. Yet too often, the claims made by both sides of this debate have been based on assumptions rather than hard evidence.
Thanks to the No Child Left Behind Act, annual testing in math and reading for students in grades three through eight became mandatory in every state beginning in 2005.
Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of posts about envelope-pushing strategies schools might embrace to address students’ learning loss in the wake of the pandemic.
With federal coronavirus relief, schools are wrestling with a host of thorny questions. Especially under the new Joe Biden administration, how much federal aid is coming? What rules will govern its use? Most importantly, how can schools spend the funds effectively when reopening schools, improving remote learning, and helping students get back on track?
The Covid-19 pandemic has run roughshod over so much of our education system, closing schools, sending students home to try to learn remotely, and obliterating last year’s summative state tests.
When the Covid-19 pandemic hit the U.S. last spring, schools nationwide shut their doors and states cancelled annual standardized tests. Now federal and state policymakers are debating whether to cancel testing again in 2021. One factor they should consider is whether a two-year gap in testing will make it impossible to measure student-level achievement growth during this historic period.
Like traditional public schools, charter schools are publicly funded according to student enrollment. But compared to their district counterparts, charters have long received far less per-pupil funding.
TIMSS is less well known to most American ed-watchers than NAEP and PISA, perhaps because it comes from a private group called the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), but it does a first-rate job of monitoring, comparing, and explaining the educational performance of fourth- and eighth-graders in dozens of countries in the crucial subjects of math and
The pandemic has now disrupted two consecutive school years, and its effects are certain to linger for years to come. Unfortunately, some students will be more impacted than others.