Commentary
Gadfly Bites - 8/19/14
Why yes there are Common Core repeal hearings in Ohio this week, why do you ask?
Commentary
A lesson in language
Three phrases whose use stands in the way of meaningful discussion on education reform.
Commentary
The Hidden Half: School Employees Who Don’t Teach
Checking out the Ohio connection in Fordham's latest national report.
Commentary
Charter Schools
Evaluation of the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program: Participation, Compliance and Test Scores in 2012-13
Do private schools taking "cherry pick" their voucher students?
Commentary
Charter Schools
The saga of - and the lessons from - VLT Academy
The closure of a charter school in Cincinnati shows that Ohio's accountability system can work, but needs some tweaks.
Commentary
Commentary
Gadfly Bites - 8/15/14
As if the protracted will-they-close-or-won’t-they hasn’t been bad enough for the families of approximately 600 students at the now-closed VLT Academy in Cincinnati, now these poor families have to endure the opportunism of a new charter school looking
Commentary
Gadfly Bites - 8/14/14
Looking back and looking forward as the first week of school begins in many districts across Ohio.
Commentary
Hail, hail to Michigan
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.
Commentary
Gadfly Bites - 8/13/14
Gadfly Bites returns from vacation, catches up with some old news, and looks forward to new stories to follow.
Commentary
New Fordham Report: The Hidden Half: School Employees Who Don’t Teach
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.
Commentary
Standards
Ten things Ohio Common Core opponents don’t want you to know
As another legislative assault on the Common Core in Ohio begins, here's a few things you might want to know.
Commentary
Does School Policy Affect Housing Choices? Evidence From the End of Desegregation in Charlotte-Mecklenburg
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.
Commentary
Lessons Learned from the 2012 Grade 4 Writing Computer-Based Assessment (WCBA) Study
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.
Commentary
Spending More of the School Day in Math Class: Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity in Middle School
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.
Commentary
High-Stakes Choice: Achievement and Accountability in the Nation’s Oldest Urban Voucher Program
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.
Commentary
Everybody’s lawyering up
Courts have been the sites of much edu activity lately—and we don’t just mean Vergara and its
Commentary
Charter Schools, Standards, Accountability & Testing
For higher performance, use informal channels of teacher feedback
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.
Commentary
Gadfly Bites (the new Ohio Gadfly Daily News) - 8/5/14
Last issue before vacation. Until I return, you'll have to get your Ohio education news the boring old regular way.
Commentary
Standards, Accountability & Testing
Ohio’s high-flying public schools, in reading
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.
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The place for parents in education
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.
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Accountability & Testing, Standards, Curriculum & Instruction
Spending More of the School Day in Math Class: Evidence From a Regression Discontinuity in Middle School
We take a look at the evidence for and against "double dosing" in middle school math.
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Charter Schools
The Productivity of Public Charter Schools
Short review of a new report from the University of Arkansas, with an Ohio perspective.
Commentary
Subscribe to Gadfly Bites
A new subscription service for Ohio education news, views, and commentary.
Commentary
Gadfly Bites (the new Ohio Gadfly Daily News) - 8/4/14
Mostly opinion pieces from the weekend - including a news report on superintendents' opinions on Common Core.
Commentary
Commentary
Gadfly Bites (the new Ohio Gadfly Daily News) - 7/31/14
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.
Commentary
Taking Immediate Steps to Provide Teachers with a Secure Retirement
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.
Commentary
Shortchanged: The Hidden Costs of Lockstep Teacher Pay
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.
Commentary
Renewing Head Start’s Promise: Invest in What Works for Disadvantaged Preschoolers
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.