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
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.
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.
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.
Vouchers, the third-grade reading guarantee, open enrollment, and big labor hit the news in Ohio in the last two weeks.
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.
“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.
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.
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).
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”
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?
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.
Some interesting education news from around Ohio
The view from Ohio on Fordham's recent brief which discusses ways to educate high-need students across the country.
Fordham's 2012-13 sponsorship annual report addresses our schools’ perspective regarding persistent challenges and how the schools address those 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.
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.
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.
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.
The Philanthropy Roundtable's generally praiseworthy magazine hits a number of topical education-policy issues in its Fall 2013 issue.
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.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer delves deep into on-the-ground implementation of the Common Core in Cuyahoga County.
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.
Analysis of Ohio charter school performance on NAEP assessments.
State's charter school program, as a whole, needs a major repair.
This report by Kalman “Buzzy” Hettleman reviews the One Year Plus policy currently being implemented in Baltimore City schools—a program built on the premise that high expectations will lead to strong outcomes in special education, just as they would in traditional education.
This fascinating new study published by NBER examines whether early-retirement incentives impact student achievement. Researchers analyzed an early-retirement policy in Illinois that allowed teachers to retire early in 1992–93 and 1993–94.
Does slow and steady win the race? That’s what education analysts are hoping after digging through the newly released math- and reading-achievement scores on the bi-yearly National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
