Commentary
Elementary special ed students see improvement while their high school peers languish
Is Ohio’s special education spending spree warranted? If special education students are achieving, then yes.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction
Set high goals for all of our students
There is a saying among high performing schools that there is no 100 percent solution to helping students learn. Instead, there are a hundred 1 percent solutions that add up to big results. The same is true in the world of education policy.
Commentary
Charter Schools
Corporate support for school choice doesn’t come without tension
Chris Christie and Cory Booker may have been the headliners at a school choice policy summit last week, but it was a largely unknown corporate representative who provided some sobering perspective.
Commentary
Parental choice: Why I favor less government
Guest blogger Jay P. Greene argues parental choice and control offer a better approach to governing education than state or national control.
Commentary
Miles to go, but pointed in the right direction
What the Schmidt and Whitehurst studies tell us—and don't tell us—about the Common Core State Standards.
Commentary
Commentary
Advanced Education
Taking care of Florida’s high flyers
Fast-tracking the future in the Sunshine State
Commentary
Smarter Budgets, Smarter Schools: How to Survive and Thrive in Tight Times
As close to a win-win as budget cuts get
Commentary
Investing in America’s Future: A Blueprint for Transforming Career and Technical Education
Putting “career” back in “college and career”
Commentary
Commentary
Commentary
Billboards don’t make good policy
Designer Kenneth Cole dipped his toe into the education reform fray recently with a New York City billboard that framed “teachers’ rights vs. students’ rights” as an issue in his foundation’s “Where Do You Stand?” campaign.
Commentary
Charter Schools
Taking care of Florida's high flyers
There is a student whose needs often go unmet by the schoolhouse and the statehouse—high-achieving, but not quite gifted, one who receives less attention from principals and policymakers focused on bringing the bottom up to proficiency.
Commentary
Straight from the classroom...
Fordham's Terry Ryan explains how educators in Ohio see the Common Core and the challenges of implementation.
Commentary
Early reports from the heartland show support for the Common Core
Common sense, increasingly scarce in the public debate around the Common Core among talking heads and the chattering class, still prevails in the heartland.
Commentary
Charter Schools
School choice skirmishes in Democratic primaries
It’s primary season in statehouses nationwide, and that means that teachers unions will pit Democrat against Democrat by using the support of school vouchers as a wedge.
Commentary
Ohio’s “value-added” metric not sufficient to count for half of a school’s rating
There is little dispute that information about the academic gains students make (or don’t) is a valuable addition to pure student proficiency data. But there is little agreement about how best to calculate growth and how to use it to inform things like teacher evaluations and school rating systems.
Commentary
Obama and Romney both wrong on student loan interest rates
Guest blogger Matt Chingos of the Brookings Institution writes that it's disconcerting to see both presidential frontrunners present proposals on this issue that may be good politics but are bad policy.
Commentary
Ohio policymakers hear Sunshine State education reform lessons
Not until Florida passed a law requiring schools to hold back third graders who read poorly did districts get serious about helping those students catch up, the director of an ed reform group said on Thursday.
Commentary
Common Core and the specter of “implementation lite”
How to prove Tom Loveless's argument that Common Core standards don’t matter is wrong.
Commentary
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction
Off the Clock: Moving Education from Time to Competency
Anytime, anyplace, anyhow, any pace
Commentary
Charter Schools
Housing Costs, Zoning, and Access to High-Scoring Schools
Housing policy is education policy
Commentary
Funding a Better Education: Conclusions From the First Three Years of Student-Based Budgeting in Hartford
Into the weighted-student-funding looking glass
Commentary
Commentary
Meet Mickey Mouse and R2D2, ed reformers
A recent Hewlett Foundation study made the surprising discovery that computers are "capable of producing scores similar to human scores" when grading student essays.
Commentary
Charter Schools
Philadelphia Catholic schools pledge to pull back the curtain
The Philadelphia school district’s plan to lift itself out of financial and academic distress may have overshadowed a profound development this week for Catholic education in the City of Brotherly Love.
Commentary
Truth in numbers: Student proficiency in Ohio now and under the Common Core
Another change in the works, one not included in the governor’s bill, is equally important when it comes to helping all players in the K-12 arena prepare for the higher expectations and rigor of the Common Core standards.
Commentary
America’s addiction to grade inflation
Grade inflation is a way of life in American education, and campaigns to combat it face political pushback and a long, uphill battle to succeed.
Commentary
State Auditor clamps down, but not quite far enough, on the misuse of public dollars
The Fiscal Integrity Act waits until a school or district is declared unauditable before the treasurer faces suspension. But in fact, a district can be misspending public money and still be “auditable.”