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Dropout Tracking Report: An analysis of dropout problem schools in Ohio’s six Race to the Top regions
Taking a look at dropout rates in Ohio.
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The swiss-cheese state board of education (and other news)
January 8, 2014 roundup of Ohio education news stories
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Columbus City Schools: Is anybody listening?
The Columbus City Schools' Board of Education took some important steps forward yesterday. Hope everyone's on board.
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Ohio's teacher-prep programs: Not as rosy as they seem
There is near consensus that teacher-preparation programs need a facelift.
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Reducing Student Mobility: A Randomized Trial of a Relationship-Building Intervention
A look at one ambitious experiment to rein in the negative effects of excessive student mobility.
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Advanced Education
Status quo has got to go
The appointment of former educator and experienced administrator Carmen Fariña as the new chancellor of New York City’s one-million-student public school system has been met with cautious optimism from several fronts, spanning from those who hope she will
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Evaluation of the Tennessee Voluntary Prekindergarten Program: Kindergarten and First Grade Follow‐Up Results from the Randomized Control Design
From NYC Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio’s pledge to provide universal preschool to bipartisan legislation proposing federally funded preschool grants, we have witnessed in
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Advanced Education, Charter Schools
Losing out on big potential
Earlier this week, the New York Times featured an editorial on gifted education, noting that even our best students were in the middle of the pack in the recent PISA results.
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How ESEA Waivers Did—And Did Not—Transform School Accountability
The Education Department’s flurry of waivers from the No Child Left Behind accountability regime has changed the rules for states and profoundly altered how they identify schools for intervention. This report from the New America Foundation examines data from sixteen of the forty-two states that received waivers.
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Nation's Report Card indicates that Cleveland's students are falling further behind
The achievement of Cleveland’s public school students continues to be appalling low, and the city’s students are falling even further behind their peers from other urban areas.
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December 18, 2013 Ohio education news roundup
Vouchers, the third-grade reading guarantee, open enrollment, and big labor hit the news in Ohio in the last two weeks.
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Dayton stalwarts awarded competitive grants
An ambitious program to increase the number of people with post-secondary credentials will take root in Dayton thanks to a grant won by Learn to Earn.
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Education as a launching pad
“In the absence of this long-awaited home, there was only school….For children like Dasani, school is not just a place to cultivate a hungry mind.
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Training our future teachers: Classroom management
The National Council on Teacher Quality has a message for teacher-preparation programs: Your graduates need to know how to manage their classrooms effectively. Every classroom teacher knows that, in the words of the authors, “the most brilliantly crafted lesson can fall on deaf ears” if a productive classroom environment has not been established.
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Rethinking the Education Mess: A Systems Approach to Education Reform
Behavioral psychology tells us that to gain traction on our problems, we should separate and categorize their individual parts. We tend to do this in education reform, too, identifying and tackling discrete challenges, one at a time (think: teacher evaluations, funding formulas, governance).
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Big labor's principles: a recipe for more of the same
The nation’s two largest teacher labor unions (AFT and NEA), the largest public-sector employee labor union (SEIU), and other national organizations are rallying today on their “National Day of Action.” Unfortunately, this conglomerate of labor and liberal interest groups has put forward a slate of tired and worn-out “adequacy”
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The Waive of the Future? School Accountability in the Waiver Era
When the Department of Education began offering No Child Left Behind waivers in 2011, states beat down the doors of 400 Maryland Avenue to obtain one. But did allowing states flexibility steer them towards better accountability systems?
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Curriculum & Instruction
PISA and Occam’s Razor
Occam’s Razor is the well-known principle that “among competing hypotheses, the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions should be selected.” Keep that in mind as various pundits hypothesize about why the U.S.
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Speed dating, the state school board, and a perfect score
Some interesting education news from around Ohio
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How does Ohio finance the education of its highest-need students?
The view from Ohio on Fordham's recent brief which discusses ways to educate high-need students across the country.
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Learning from the Experts: Teacher Leaders on Solving America’s Education Challenges
It often seems that when wonks, researchers, and legislators get together to talk education reform, they exclude one group of stakeholders—a group for whom these reforms mean the most and upon whom their success depends: teachers.
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My End of the Bargain: Are There Cross-District Effects in Teacher Contract Provisions?
This study by Dan Goldhaber and colleagues examines whether the restrictiveness of a district’s bargaining contract is influenced by “spillover” from contracts in a nearby community.
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Testimony to the D.C. Board of Education
The following is the text of testimony on NGSS delivered by Kathleen Porter-Magee to the D.C. Board of Education on November 20, 2013.
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Can MOOCs really, really right-size the classroom?
Class size is an incessant policy issue—something like a leaky faucet. The din of the class-size debate drips in the background while the thunderclaps roar (Common Core! Charters!). Many parents and teachers drone on about class-size reductions; fiscal hawks want class-size increases.
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Philanthropy, Fall 2013
The Philanthropy Roundtable's generally praiseworthy magazine hits a number of topical education-policy issues in its Fall 2013 issue.
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Access to Effective Teaching for Disadvantaged Students
No matter what side of the ed-policy debate you fall into, getting effective teachers in front of disadvantaged students is a priority for almost everyone. Yet this new study from Mathematica and AIR highlights just how far we are from ensuring that lower-income kids have access to the same quality of teachers as their affluent peers.
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Inside the Common Core Math and English Classroom
The Cleveland Plain Dealer delves deep into on-the-ground implementation of the Common Core in Cuyahoga County.
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Access to Effective Teaching for Disadvantaged Students and Transfer Incentives for High-Performing Teachers
A brief look at recent reports on the Talent Transfer Initiative, an effort to kick start improvement in low-performing schools by inducing great teachers to transfer there.
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Ohio charters fall short on the Nation’s Report Card
Analysis of Ohio charter school performance on NAEP assessments.