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Diane Ravitch’s Charter Narrative Is Incomplete
Former Fordham Vice President Terry Ryan discusses the real story of the charter movement in Ohio and beyond.
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Systems vs. classrooms: And, not or
When he’s about to comment pointedly on some debate, the avuncularly pugnacious former U.S. Secretary of Education Bill Bennett occasionally prefaces his verbal fisticuffs by telling the old saw about the Irishman who sees two men fighting and interrupts to ask, “Is this a private fight or can anyone join?”
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Netflix Academy: The 10 best streaming videos on the Maya, Inca, and Aztec
Note: This post is part of our series, "Netflix Academy: The best educational videos available for streaming." Be sure to check out our previous Netflix Academy posts on
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Aiming to simply do better than failure is not an option
Our country’s urban school systems are broken, and they can’t be fixed: That’s where Andy Smarick begins his book The Urban School System of the Future, and it's the basis for his recent post urging that the
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Focusing on the How: Guidance for School and District Leaders on Supporting Teachers Through the Transition to the Common Core
Politics aside, the fate of the Common Core begins and ends with implementation. Particularly during this initial transition, it is critical that educators have sufficient support and guidance to successfully teach these standards.
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School Accountability, Postsecondary Attainment and Earnings
Does school accountability boost students’ long-term prospects? That’s the question this new study by David Deming, Sarah Cohodes, Jennifer Jennings, and Christopher Jencks seeks to answer by examining the impact of accountability pressure in the Texas public high schools in the 1990s.
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Curriculum & Instruction
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
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Next steps on accountability
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.
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Embracing the challenge of classroom-level reform
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.
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Charter Schools
School districts shouldn’t be the only charter authorizer in town
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.
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Charter school critics wallow in the dregs
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’
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Charter Schools
End. The Broad Prize. Now.
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.
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The top 7 takeaways from the PIE Network meeting
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.
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Charter Schools
Senator Lamar Alexander to Attorney General Eric Holder: Stop interfering in Louisiana's voucher program
Dear Attorney General Holder:
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What if self-interest doesn’t explain everything?
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.
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Netflix Academy: The 10 best streaming videos on aquatic life
Note: This post is part of our "Netflix Academy: The best educational videos available for streaming" series.
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Arne Duncan’s muddled line on testing
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has just drawn a very confusing line in the sand over standardized testing.
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Charter Schools
There’s a right way to authorize charter schools; Mississippi chose the wrong way
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.
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Arne Duncan on Colbert
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:
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Mediocrity, anyone?
Ohio's mediocre ACT, NAEP, and remediation rate data are reasons enough to support the Common Core
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Testing Wars in the Public Schools: A Forgotten History
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.
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Charter Schools
Going the extra mile
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.
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Curriculum & Instruction
Standards, reading lists, and censorship
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.
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Ed Next Book Club: Endangering Prosperity
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.
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Charter Schools
Why course-based enrollment is the next big thing in parental choice
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:
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Better education through badges?
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.
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The proficiency debate goes round and round
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?”
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Netflix Academy: Best videos on George Washington and other American founders available for streaming
Note: This post is part of our Netflix Academy series. See background, and links to other educational videos worth streaming, here.
