Knocking the textbooks out of the park
Journalist and author Amanda Ripley has received well-deserved attention for her book The Smartest Kids in the World—but we’re not sold on he
Journalist and author Amanda Ripley has received well-deserved attention for her book The Smartest Kids in the World—but we’re not sold on he
New York State took a major step toward implementing the Common Core State Standards this spring with new assessments designed to better measure critical thinking and problem solving. While the new tests certainly leave room for improvement, the new assessments are an important milestone in the shift towards pushing teachers to assign more cognitively challenging and engaging work.
One of the few things that nearly all sides of the education policy debate can agree on is that student achievement in urban schools and districts across the nation is distressingly low.But that is where the agreement ends.
The conclusion seems so obvious: In a unanimous decision this week, Georgia’s Supreme Court said that the Atlanta school system cannot withhold funds from the charter schools it authorizes to help pay down an old pension debt that’s been building for decades.
Recent blogs by William Phillis of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding (posted on Diane Ravitch’s website) and Join the Future highlight the academic woes of some of Ohio’
I stared at the tweet, dumbfounded. Houston: 2013 Broad Prize finalist? That can’t be. I had recently dug through old city-level NAEP results. They were all terribly depressing. But Houston’s stopped me cold.
If you missed the Emmy’s (what’s up with Kevin Spacey NOT winning for his role in House of Cards?), here are the top takeaways from education’s own big awards ceremony—the Policy Innovators in Education Network’s Eddies—and rest of the PIE Network meeting.
Dear Attorney General Holder:
Dear Deborah,I’m glad you brought up the topic of democracy. In future posts, I plan to explore the habits and attributes we hope to inculcate in our youthful, budding citizens, including a commitment to self-sufficiency. But today let’s continue the conversation about democratic governance of our public schools.
Note: This post is part of our "Netflix Academy: The best educational videos available for streaming" series.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has just drawn a very confusing line in the sand over standardized testing.
This is not a good start for one of the newest states empowered to start up charter schools. The Associated Press has reported that the newly created Mississippi Charter School Authorizer Board lacks the money and the leadership to do its job.
On Tuesday night, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was a featured guest on The Colbert Report. While some of us were expecting a little more oomph from Duncan’s responses, Stephen Colbert luckily kept us laughing with these education-themed zingers:
Ohio's mediocre ACT, NAEP, and remediation rate data are reasons enough to support the Common Core
Many of today’s reform critics see standardized testing as education’s greatest evil, arguing that it forces a dull, routinized and stifling learning culture. However, in this new book by William J.
A study out of Britain’s Institute of Education (IOE) has found that children who read for pleasure made more progress in mathematics, vocabulary, and spelling between the ages of ten and sixteen than their peers who rarely read.
Among the many arguments raging—and more than a little mud-slinging—around the Common Core State Standards, perhaps the most arcane involves the blurry border between academic standards and classroom curricula.
It’s not exactly news that America’s education system is mediocre and expensive in international comparison. What’s less well known is that our schools’ ineffectiveness and inefficiency could have big implications for the country’s economic growth in decades to come.
Thanks to the tireless work of school-choice advocates and wise policymakers, millions of U.S. children and their parents now have education options that were not available to them a few short years ago. But the choice picture is sorely incomplete. Consider:
If you were surfing the web in mid-2004, you were almost certainly using Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser to do it. Despite frequent concerns over its security, stability, and speed, this single tool for viewing content online was then used by more than 95 percent of Americans using the internet.
Sending an e-mail to ed-reformers and asking for their two cents results in a many responses, as Michael Petrilli learned when he shared his article “The Problem with Proficiency” and asked, “Who’s with me?”
Note: This post is part of our Netflix Academy series. See background, and links to other educational videos worth streaming, here.
This study of Teach For America (TFA) and Teaching Fellows secondary math teachers explores how their students compare to peers taking the same course, in the same school, from teachers who entered the profession through traditional certification programs (or other programs not as rigorous as TFA or Teaching Fellows).
Among the provisions of Indiana’s so-called Common Core “pause” legislation was a requirement that the state’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) provide an estimate of the cost of implementing these standards and their assessments.
Don’t call me and my friends Chicken Littles or “boys (and girls) who cried wolf.” The sky was beginning to fall down—and the wolf was approaching the lamb—three decades ago when we joined the National Commission on Excellence in Education in warning that the country’s future and the career (and income and social-mobility) prospects of millions of its citizen
Harlem Day is one of the oldest charter schools in New York City—and, historically, one of its most troubled. It has had nine principals in the nine years since its founding in 2001, and fewer than 25 percent of its students could read and do math at grade level.
For the past year, much of the ed-reform world has been concerned about the (seemingly) growing opposition from the right to the Common Core standards. But the closer you look at these critiques of Common Core, the weaker their case appears. Can something as solid as CCSS really be stopped by such an intellectually flimsy attack?
Arne Duncan was right to call attention to 9/11 as an important opportunity for teaching children about the heinous events of that day twelve years ago, about honoring those who perished, and about the value of "coming together" as Americans.