Duplication is not always a good thing. Think about it, most of us don’t carry two cell phones. In a world with limited pants-pocket space, two phones would be senseless, right? Ohio’s school report cards have two essentially-the-same achievement components, both of which receive an A-F letter grade. It’s time to toss one of them for parsimony’s sake.
Common core, cost savings, and AP vs. dual enrollment are top topics in Ohio
“Shoot for the Moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars”: this clichéd adage, often found on motivational posters, actually has something worthwhile to say. Sometimes where we set goals determines where we end up, even if the goal is seldom met.
Last week, in response to a tumultuous debate over the Common Core State Standards, the Indiana Department of Education released the first public draft of its new K–12 expectations for English language arts and math.
Convention says that low-performing schools are mainly an inner-city problem. To a degree that is the case—urban public-school systems have long struggled to educate their students well. Cleveland’s public schools are something of a poster-child in this respect, and other urban schools systems in Ohio struggle just as mightily.
Ohio is deeply mired in a dropout crisis, with more than 20,000 of its high-school students leaving school each year. A recent analysis found that 112,610 dropouts occurred between 2006 and 2010 in Ohio’s public-school system.
Are you passionate about improving academic outcomes for children? Do you have a keen interest in education reform, both here in the Buckeye State and across the country?
With teacher-tenure laws under scrutiny in California and contentious in plenty of other places, three human-resources experts make the case for avoiding hiring bad teachers in the first place rather than struggling to fire them after they prove to be ineff
When it comes to education in America, we’re more alike than different, according to The Education Roadtrip: A Survey of 6,400 Americans Across 8 Regions, a new poll from our friends at 50CAN.
Does the lure of a college scholarship alter student behavior and academic performance? That’s what economists Timothy J. Bartik and Marta Lachowska seek to answer in studying the Kalamazoo Promise, which awards scholarships from anonymous donors to all Kalamazoo Public School graduates who gain entry into a Michigan college or university and maintain a 2.0 GPA while there.
Gadfly’s grandfather had a saying: shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations. This means that hardworking parents of low socioeconomic status raise children of higher socioeconomic status, who then raise children of privilege who slip back down the income ladder.
On Wednesday, Michigan superintendent Mike Flanagan dumped the Education Achievement Authority, saying it will no longer be exclusively responsible for Michigan’s failing schools.
Repeated failures of charter schools around Ohio seem endless; some hope may be around the corner.
Can a union leader be a catalyst for true reform in city that desperately needs it?
Our advice to Gov. Kasich and Supt. Ross as they further discuss "deregulation" in K-12 education in Ohio.
Ohio Gadfly looks at upcoming PARCC field tests in Ohio, a profile of home-schooling families, and Cleveland's new school choice website.
The Oklahoma City Ed Reform Collaborative, whose mission is to drive a cohesive and collaborative agenda of education-reform initiatives in Oklahoma City, is seeking an individual who wants to convene and engage a team of committed organizations and philanth
As the number of chronically underperforming school districts continues to climb, some states are beginning to take control through Extraordinary Authority Districts (EADs).
The seventh installment of the National Council on Teacher Quality’s State Teacher Policy Yearbook, which analyzes and grades state policies bearing on teacher quality, struck a guardedly optimistic tone. Between 2011 and 2013, thirty-one states strengthened their policies on teacher-quality standards.
Into the messy and political world of teacher-effectiveness research enter Susanna Loeb and colleagues, who examine whether math and English-language-arts (ELA) teachers differ in how they impact students’ long-term knowledge.
Like any relic of the industrial revolution, it’s time we took a wrench to the American education system. Or a bulldozer, argues Glenn Reynolds, distinguished professor of law at the University of Tennessee and InstaPundit blogger. In this book, he contends that the system will soon break down and reform will be unavoidable.
A new analysis by Mike Podgursky, Cory Koedel, and colleagues offers a handy tutorial of three major student growth measures and an argument for which one is best.
“Of all human powers operating on the affairs of mankind, none is greater than that of competition,” said Senator Henry Clay in 1832. We’ve all bitten from the competition apple, and it tastes pretty good.
Ohio Gadfly lauds MC2STEM school, welcomes Dr. Michael Drake to the head of Ohio State University, tries to make sense of a new report discouraging replication of great urban schools (like MC2STEM), and celebrates National School Choice Week.
Last week, State Auditor Dave Yost released the findings of his investigation into data scrubbing in Columbus City Schools. Fordham's Ohio policy minds give their take on the report and what it means for the district going forward.
The State of the Union was unusually light on education, though President Obama did touch on early-childhood education, ed tech, college access, and (of course) Race to the Top. However, the real action came the next morning, when the U.S.
