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Hearing tweets
Mad love for charteralliance and edreform for twittering during today's congressional hearing on chartering.
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Common cause
This week's news that 46 states plus the District of Columbia have signed up to pursue common education standards is a big deal but it's also potentially a big nothing. If this effort leads to rigorous national standards and tests in reading and math, historians will view this milestone as historically significant. But nobody has yet committed to anything of the sort.
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Declaring educational bankruptcy
Turning around bad schools is harder than turning around Chrysler, GM, or AIG--but our fearless, tireless, irrepressible new federal administration seems bent on doing this, too. Just listen to Education Secretary Arne Duncan on the topic of closing and "reconstituting" failed schools.
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How high-performing charter schools do 'merit pay'
With all the positive press surrounding high-achieving charter schools, it's not surprising that they've turned into the education reformer's go-to point of comparison.
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NYU vs. NYT
In last week's Recommended Reading "Leadership woes," Gadfly erroneously cited investigative reporting done by The New York Times as research from an as-yet-unreleased New York University study on New York City principals. The NYU study will be available later in June.
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Putting the 'ouch' in voucher accountability
The original voucher pioneer, Milwaukee, is now pioneering voucher regulation.
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Three strikes and you're in
Policymakers, what do you do when your state's newly adopted high school exit exams might result in a precipitous drop in graduation rates? Give failure a pass. Yes, that's right; if you're a Minnesota high school student, you have two options when it comes to the allegedly "extraordinarily challenging" eleventh grade math exit exam: pass once or fail three times.
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Flip-flop-flap
Politicians often get themselves into hot water for "flip-flopping" on an issue. Jefferson Township High School students learned this lesson the hard way--and literally. These Ohio high schoolers, days away from year's end, planned a daring defiance of authority: they would stand up to their school's no-flip flop rule by all wearing flip flops on the very same day!
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The Widget Effect: Out National Failure to Acknowledge and Act on Differences in Teacher Effectiveness
The New Teacher ProjectJune 2009
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Student Demographics, Teacher Sorting, and Teacher Quality: Evidence from the End of School Desegregation
C. Kirabo JacksonJournal of Labor EconomicsApril 2009
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Apt education aptonyms
Loyal Flypaper reader (and American Institutes of Research VP) Mark Schneider has suggested a great new contest idea: Name the education sector's best aptonym!
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I spoke too soon!
Just a day ago, I expressed encouragement that Secretary Duncan's ARRA threats may have started making a difference on state policy.
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Sliding to the wrong end of the school voucher scale
Back in March, Checker, Mike, Amber and I wrote a paper called When Private Schools Take Public Dollars: What's the Place of Accountability in School Voucher Programs? We proposed a sliding-scale mechanism: the more money a private school receives from voucher-bearing students, the more a
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Upcoming event: Schoolhouses and Courthouses
The American Enterprise Institute is holding an event next Tuesday entitled, "Schoolhouses and Courthouses: Does Court-Driven School Reform Deliver?"
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More on turnarounds
NYT's Dillon writes about Secretary Duncan's turnaround plans. This article makes it sound like Duncan is in favor of 10s.
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Checker: 'Declaring Educational Bankruptcy'
Checker has an op-ed up at The National Review's "The Corner" blog, in which he compares and contrasts the auto industry's bankruptcies with the education system's.
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UP
New York state's test scores in math were released yesterday, and not surprisingly they were up, up, up.
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1 down, 49 to go
It appears that Illinois is about to raise its charter cap. Secretary Duncan must be smiling. He has made clear that states wanting to compete for discretionary stimulus funds must show they are serious about reform, by, among other things, lifting charter caps.
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Dems push their school ideas, saying Senate proposals unacceptable
Ohio Senate Democrats today said Republicans want to step backward in education, that Gov. Ted Strickland and the Ohio House have identified what needs to be done in schools and how to do it, that the evidence is clear on the issues, and that more money for education -- when the economy revives -- will be there, too.
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Common standards on the way?
According to Ed Week, 46 states have agreed to work together to create common standards in math and ELA.
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Duncan at NPC
During his speech Friday at the National Press Club,????Secretary Duncan again talked passionately about the opportunity for reform and improvement.
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American Indian Public Charter
This LA Times piece tells the story of American Indian Public Charter (and its two sibling schools) in the "hardscrabble flats of Oakland;" schools that are--according to the story's provocative title--"spitting in the eye of mainstream education." At the "small, n
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Event: What top nations teach their students but we don't
Common Core is out with a new report that excerpts national curricula, standards, and assessments from nine nations that consistently outrank the United States on international comparison tests.
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