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A Chance to Make History: What Works and What Doesn???t in Providing an Excellent Education for All
Clear big picture, but fuzzy on the details
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Inside Charter Schools: Unlocking Doors to Student Success
The five W?s of the charter-school instructional model
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Briefly Noted: The Chinese are coming! The Chinese are coming!
Teachers? colleges don?t want to be graded, pre-schoolers do
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In the thick of Ohio's collective bargaining debate
Yesterday Nick and I attended the Ohio Senate Insurance, Commerce, and Labor Committee hearing on SB 5, which would eliminate collective bargaining for state employees and greatly scale back union rights for local public sector employees.?
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Celebrating - not denigrating - commitment to educational equity
Alex Russo at This Week in Education is calling Teach For America's 20th summit celebration ?premature,? ?unwarranted,? and an ?expensive-seeming birthday part/slick celebration,? among other things.
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On school turnarounds, Cleveland ahead of the Capital City
As a Steelers fan I don't often go searching for reasons to praise Cleveland, but when it comes to education reforms they've got most other Ohio cities beat, especially Columbus.
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Putting the debate about a possible Teach For America Ohio site in context
Last night lawmakers in the Ohio House Education Committee heard testimony regarding House Bill 21 ?legislation that would, among other things, grant a professional educator license to Teach For America alums teaching in Ohio.
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Tightening the reins of teacher unions in Ohio
Yesterday, Ohio State Senator Shannon Jones (R- Clearcreek Twp.) introduced Senate Bill 5, which would dramatically overhaul public collective bargaining in Ohio (which has been in place for roughly 28 years).?
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The 2010 Brown Center Report on American Education: How Well Are American Students Learning?
America has never topped the international charts
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Value-Added Measures in Education: What Every Educator Needs to Know
A balanced VAM primer?and some recs to boot
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The State of Charter School Authorizing: A Report on NACSA???s Authorizer Survey
When it comes to authorizers, bigger is better
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Evolution and urban Catholic schools
One about science curriculum, the other about donor accountability
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Charter Schools
What's missing from the "Akron mom" conversation
In today's Ohio Education Gadfly, Jamie, Bianca, and I explore what's missing from the debate around Kelley Williams-Bolar, the Akron mom who was jailed for nine days and convicted of tampering with documents in order to send her two children to a school outside their home district.
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Failed Ohio school turnaround in the New York Times
In a New York Times article this week, Sam Dillon examined the Obama administration's $4 billion attempt to turn around the country's worst schools and highlighted Ohio's capital city's $20 million effort to remake seven of the city's most troubled schools.
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What's not being said in the Williams-Bolar case
There’s been vast media coverage of the Akron mom who went to jail for nine days after being convicted of sending her two children to a school outside their atten
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Nobody deserves tenure
Nobody deserves tenure, with the possible exception of federal judges. University professors don’t deserve tenure; civil servants don’t deserve tenure; police and firefighters don’t deserve tenure; school teachers don’t deserve tenure.
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The State of Charter School Authorizing 2010
The National Association for Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) just released its third annual survey of charter school authorizers (a.k.a. “sponsors” in Ohio).
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When the Stakes Are High, Can We Rely on Value-Added? Exploring the Use of Value-Added Models to Inform Teacher Workforce Decisions
In this report, Dan Goldhaber of the Center for American Progress analyzes various teacher evaluation processes nationwide and provides recommendations for improving them, since current evaluation systems--to the surprise of no one-- fail to effectively measure the differences in teacher effectiveness.
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House Ed Committee hears from Fordham and teachers
Last Wednesday, the Ohio House Education Committee held hearings related to several education bills currently on the table, among them HB 21, which aims to lift the ironclad moratorium on virtual e-schools, grant a professional educator license to graduates of Teach For America wishing to teach in the
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Despite cost and negative academic impact, additional snow days coasting to legislative approval
Ohio has long awarded districts five calamity days – school days that can be missed and not made up due to inclement weather, power outages, or other catastrophic incidents. In 2009, Governor Strickland argued – as one of the stronger components of his education reform package – that Ohio in fact needed to add days to the school year to catch up with our better-
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New NAEP data tell familiar story
The recently released 2009 NAEP science results provide an in-depth look at how knowledgeable students across the country are in various science-related academic areas. The framework for 2009 sought to align the assessment with new developments in science standards, content, and curricula.
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The social status of bullies and other miscellany
With the initial buzz over virtual schooling on its way out, questions about quality and effectiveness are on their way in.
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Return on Educational Investment: A district-by-district evaluation of educational productivity.
Add this report by the Center For American Progress (CAP) to the mountain of evidence disproving the notion in American public education that more money is incontrovertibly better (or even necessary to achieve greater productivity). And add it to the slowly growing pile of work that attempts to measure educational productivity, or “return on investment” – a concept CAP w