Eleven of Michigan’s forty charter school authorizers are facing suspension due to deficient oversight of their schools’ accountability, transparency, fiscal governance, and academic improvement.
Gadfly Bites returns from vacation, catches up with some old news, and looks forward to new stories to follow.
The number of non-teaching staff in the United States (those employed by school systems but not serving as classroom teachers) has grown by 130 percent since 1970. Non-teachers, more than three million strong, now comprise half of the public school workforce. Their salaries and benefits absorb one-quarter of current education expenditures.
As another legislative assault on the Common Core in Ohio begins, here's a few things you might want to know.
In 2001, a North Carolina court granted unitary status to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district, which effectively ended a thirty-year policy of race-conscious school assignment.
Common Core–aligned testing will start this spring, and the majority of students will take the new exams on computers. But are younger children ready for this change? This study from NCES—two studies really—waded into the topic, but ended up staying in the shallow end of the pool.
Many students across the nation continue to perform poorly in mathematics. In response to this chronic underachievement, schools have tried numerous interventions, including “double doses” of math class for students who lag behind academically.
When private-school voucher programs first began, they generally relied on parental choice as the sole quality control mechanism. As these programs have grown in popularity and scope, scrutiny of their use of public funds has increased and test-based accountability measures are being added.
Courts have been the sites of much edu activity lately—and we don’t just mean Vergara and its
Ohio’s new teacher-evaluation system requires evaluators to conduct two, formal thirty-minute classroom observations. Yet these legally prescribed observations seem ripe for compliance and rote box-checking; in fact, they may not be quite the impetus for school-wide improvement that policymakers had hoped for.
Last issue before vacation. Until I return, you'll have to get your Ohio education news the boring old regular way.
We look for - and find - the public schools ranked in the top 10 percent on Ohio’s value-added measure for reading in each of the past four years.
Parents deserve to know what’s happening in their children's schools, and if they want to be involved, there should be opportunities to be productively engaged.
We take a look at the evidence for and against "double dosing" in middle school math.
Short review of a new report from the University of Arkansas, with an Ohio perspective.
A new subscription service for Ohio education news, views, and commentary.
Mostly opinion pieces from the weekend - including a news report on superintendents' opinions on Common Core.
Take away Common Core, data scrubbing, and charter school investigations from the equation and what you get is a far more interesting and thorough set of clips for the day.
According to this brief from Third Way, our current teacher pension system is a “rip-off”; furthermore, “no private plan would be allowed to behave this way.” Under federal guidelines set by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, private-sector employees are partially vested in their pensions in three years and fully vested in six years.
A new report by TNTP outlines the main pitfalls of the current teacher-pay system and offers some insightful solutions. The authors explain that teachers’ starting salaries are 25 percent less than in other comparable fields and are stagnant during the first decade of a teacher’s career.
The estimable Sara Mead is, as we’ve come to expect, perceptive about what ails today’s preschool options and advocacy campaigns, even as she strives to support (and repair) programs and policies that she knows are flawed.
Seven families in Albany, backed by former news anchor Campbell Brown’s advocacy group, the Partnership for Educational Justice, filed the nation’s second Vergara-inspired lawsuit.
Ohio Gadfly Daily news becomes Gadfly Bites. And does it ever!
Charter authorizing, Common Core, and the Straight-A Fund fill up today's edition.
This piece was originally published the United States Chamber of Commerce’s website on Wednesday, July 23, 2014. Six days later, two legislators proposed a new legislative assault on Ohio’s New Learning Standards, which include the Common Core State Standards in math and English language arts.
Some humor leavens our clips today - some of it intentional, the rest of it not so much.
Heated rhetoric, strong opinions, and some snarky commentary in the clips today.
This new report from the University of Arkansas compares the productivity of public charter schools and district schools, both in terms of cost effectiveness and return on investment (ROI).
