Election mania
With the polls closed and votes counted, the most interesting school district in America will remain interesting:
With the polls closed and votes counted, the most interesting school district in America will remain interesting:
We’re scanning the horizon for resourceful, intelligent, detail-oriented, hard-working individuals capable of excelling in an intellectually stimulating and often intense work environment. In other words, we seek a new cohort of research interns. Research experience is desired, strong writing skills are a must, and a passion for education reform is greatly welcome.
Who I am and why I decided to work on the Common Core State Standards
The latest study by IES attempts to document how American eighth graders compare to their peers around the globe. Using NAEP scores to predict performance on TIMSS, an international test that examines what students know about math and science, analysts included thirty-eight countries and nine other educational systems in their inquiry. And the results? Not terrible.
The “fifty-state review” of educational policies has proliferated into a literary genre of its own.
Senators and Representatives: It’s an honor to be with you today. My name is Mike Petrilli; I’m the executive vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a right-of-center education-policy think tank in Washington, D.C., that also does on-the-ground work in the great state of Ohio. I was honored to serve in the George W.
Short review of new report of international test scores from the National Center for Education Statistics.
Open enrollment options abound across Ohio - in cities, suburbs, and rural areas. It is often the school choice option of first resort. But is it bane or benefit for students?
I’ve been in Asia for other reasons (looking into the education of gifted students), but while on the ground in Tokyo, I learned of a fascinating policy dispute that, in the U.S., would be even more controversial.
With Common Core implementation in full swing, states are, for the most part, reaching for the same academic achievement goals. Yet according to this new report from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS), the accountability structures being developed in state and local jurisdictions continue to be disparate in scope and quality. Must this be the case?
IMPACT—the District of Columbia’s controversial teacher-evaluation system, ushered in by former D.C.
College isn’t likely to be in the cards for students from poor, rural communities. Furthermore, for rural kids who go to college, they are the least likely to persist, in comparison to their peers from more affluent and/or urban areas.
It’s well known that graduating from high school is generally insufficient preparation to be competitive in today’s economy. Reformers hope, however, that higher standards through the Common Core might, in time, improve the value of the diploma. But what about those who don’t even graduate?
In this study, researchers from Teachers College at Columbia University analyzed data from a cohort of 77,501 New York City public school students who entered ninth grade in 2005, seeking connections between students’ high school outcomes and college persistence and their achievement, background characteristics, and school environments.
The OECD, much loved by education-data wonks for its yearly Education at a Glance report, has launched its
Reviews a research brief attempting to identify "brain hubs" in Ohio.
Fordham's new Vice President for Ohio Policy and Advocacy pens his inaugural address
EDITOR'S EXTRAS
As part of the AEI Teacher Quality 2.0 series, the authors of this paper take on the delicate issue of school-staffing design.
We all know the story: the team that's always way back in the standings employs a brilliant new strategy to try to close the gap between itself and the wealthy powerhouses.
The following is the text from Mike Petrilli's testimony to the Tennessee Senate Education Committee on the Common Core, delivered on September 20, 2013.
Marc Sternberg—a senior deputy chancellor in the New York City school system since 2010, a stalwart s
This collection of case studies from the Center for Reform of School Systems’s Donald McAdams and the Broad Foundation’s Dan Katzir, intended for use in school-board-training institutes, explores the strategies used by twelve governance teams to implement major, district-wide reforms in nine of the nation’s largest school districts (four of which won the Broad Prize for Urban
This study reports on the first large-scale, randomized-control trial measuring the educational value of field trips. In 2011, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opened in Arkansas and, because of the high demand for tours, the authors were able to randomly select student groups to go. They matched participating groups with control groups based on similar grade level and demographics.
ACT recently released individual state reports that reviewed student performance on the 2012-2013 ACT college readiness assessment.
Schools can and do help disadvantaged students learn.
Ohio's A-F school report cards can help parents discern quality.
This valuable paper from the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings sounds an important alarm: “The danger is that grade inflation, the often discussed phenomenon of students receiving higher and higher grades for mediocre academic achievement, has been joined by course inflation.
Unfunded liabilities accrued from teacher retirement costs have burdened states and districts to the tune of at least $390 billion (and perhaps as high as one trillion dollars). That amount is projected to swell in the next decade if states do not implement reforms.
This August, Ohio issued for the first time conventional A through F school grades along nine indicators of school performance.