…I’m starting to see a pattern. Merit pay. Performance pay. Value-added. What is so bothersome to teachers (and unions) about these terms is not the words themselves but that they measure merit, performance, and value according to something they don’t like: student test scores.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) –also known as the “nation’s report card”—released district-level results last week for 18 urban districts including Cleveland.
Congratulations to our good friend Tom Lasley on his retirement from the University of Dayton’s School of Education and Allied Professions. Tom not only spent more than 30-years of distinguished service as an education professor but was also an unrelenting champion for students and schools in the Dayton area.
The Department released the list of states that have submitted letters indicating their intention to apply in the first RTT round. ??I'm less surprised that there are 36 states (more than some expected) than by some of the names not on the list. Those who haven't sent in letters include:
The WSJ penned an interesting editorial yesterday on Secretary Duncan and Michelle Rhee, noting that while the secretary supports important reforms, he hasn't helped the chancellor in her donnybrook with the union.
Quotable: "If you say the next person who talks in class will be set on fire and rolled down the hallway, you're in trouble if someone talks and you don't set them on fire and roll them down the hallway."
I'll admit that it's a little off-topic (OK, a lot off-topic) but I have a piece by that name in today's Wall Street Journal. -Mike Petrilli
In his recent blog post, Mike rightly noted that in the tracking debate, "to track or not to track" is NOT the question.
Eduwonk uncovers how FL is getting tough and specific about collective bargaining agreements in its push for RTT funds.
Student data to be 50% of teacher evaluations under LA's RTT application Big merit pay component of FL's RTT application
Fordham's??new report (about tracking/detracking in middle school) is causing some buzz.
Quotable: "They could have took this test in French and done just as bad...No other city in the history of [NAEP] has done this bad." -Tonya Allen, Founding Member of the Detroit Parent Network
With 2010 fast approaching, I've been hearing from several reporters asking about the best or worst education ideas of this decade. (A decade that never really had a name, did it?) No Child Left Behind will no doubt be on both lists, depending on who you ask, and it surely qualifies as A Big Deal. But was it really the most significant education idea, for good or ill?
Yesterday, I called Maryland the nation's greatest Race to the Top disappointment. But the state superintendent appears to be trying to do something about that.
The role of teachers unions in education reform has been on my mind a great deal lately. The issue was front and center when I talked to school board members in California.
Anybody who thinks charter schools are plateauing or reaching some sort of natural limit had better think again.??The Texas Public Policy Foundation has just released the number of young Texans who were on waiting lists for charter schools in that state during the last scho
Brookings scholar Tom Loveless examines tracking and detracking in Massachusetts middle schools, focusing on changes that have occurred and the implications for high-achieving students. Among the findings: detracked schools have fewer advanced students in math than tracked schools and detracking is more popular in schools serving disadvantaged populations.
Maryland may be the biggest disappointment in the nation when it comes to the Race to the Top. It hasn't lifted a finger to change laws or policies, as perfectly noted in this scathing editorial.
When Emmy returned from a Midwest REL conference on educator compensation in October, she brought with her a Center on Education Reform report on "alternative compensation terminology." Not the most scintillating title, but the paper had some persuasive takeaways.
Our latest report, "Tracking and Detracking: High Achievers in Massachusetts Middle Schools ," analyzes the implications of tracking, or grouping students i
Just when you thought reality-TV had sucked the life out of your every brain cell, the creators of the TV show “Lost” figure out a way to wring out the last drop. They think of it as a way to keep the show’s cult following intellectually engaged.
In what the New York Times generously described as “baby steps,” the Empire State’s appalling legislature last week passed several spending reforms designed to close the state’s $3.2 billion budget deficit.
By 2011, if the states stick to their policy guns, all eighth graders in California and Minnesota will be required to take algebra. Other states are sure to follow. In recent years, the conventional wisdom of American K-12 education has declared algebra to be a “gatekeeper” to future educational and career success.
To the editor:Should a thousand flowers bloom in the charter school world? Gadfly thinks not (“No oaks needed,” December 3, 2009), and I agree. But would you extend the reasoning, as I think you should, to the nonprofit world generally?
Miriam Kutzig FreedmanSchool Law Pro and Park Place Publications2009
The Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) has some powerful supporters, including the NEA, Cisco, Intel, and Microsoft. Fourteen states have also climbed aboard its effort to refocus American K-12 education on global awareness, media literacy and the like--and to defocus it on grammar, multiplication tables and the causes of the Civil War.
It’s no secret that schools of education teach all manner of nonsense. So when the University of Minnesota’s College of Education and Human Development launched its Race, Culture, Class, and Gender Task Group, we might well have expected trouble. But the reality is worse than that.
Is success genetic or environmental? For educators trying to change the prospects of disadvantaged youth, new research on this timeless question might have wide-ranging implications.
