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.
Roughly 30,000 kids in Ohio take advantage of a publicly funded voucher (or “scholarship”).
Ohio ranked 28th out of 43 states and the District of Columbia on NAPCS' most recent ranking of charter school laws in the U.S. Ohio's kids and parents deserve better and now is the time.
Does the poverty level of a school impact how much a teacher improves (or not) over time? Analysts at CALDER sought the answer by studying elementary-school math teachers (at the fourth- and fifth-grade levels) in self-contained classrooms in North Carolina and Florida over time (eleven years for North Carolina and eight for Florida).
While presenting his 2014–15 budget for New York State, Governor Andrew Cuomo outlined his education priorities, proposing (among other things) a $1.5 billion pre-Kindergarten expansion to be funded—without a tax increase (as per his repeated pledges to reduce taxe
Triple double-dips, data scrubbing, parental choice info, and OTES take us from Cleveland to Newark to Columbus and back to Cleveland again.
The results are in from the Talent Transfer Initiative, a high-profile intervention that started in 2009. This randomized-experiment study, conducted by Mathematica, tracks the impact of moving effective teachers to disadvantaged elementary and middle schools. The intervention was implemented in ten school districts in seven states.
In the last hundred years, the base of the United States economy has shifted from industry to knowledge—but the average American classroom operates in much the same way it always has: one teacher, up to thirty same-age students, four walls.
For the first time since 1989, all twelve of Congress’s annual spending bills have been rolled into one 1,600-page, $1.012 trillion “omnibus” package—and it’s tearing across Capitol Hill “like a greased pig,” going from
