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Gadfly Bites (the new Ohio Gadfly Daily News) - 7/31/14
Take away Common Core, data scrubbing, and charter school investigations from the equation and what you get is a far more interesting and thorough set of clips for the day.
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Taking Immediate Steps to Provide Teachers with a Secure Retirement
According to this brief from Third Way, our current teacher pension system is a “rip-off”; furthermore, “no private plan would be allowed to behave this way.” Under federal guidelines set by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, private-sector employees are partially vested in their pensions in three years and fully vested in six years.
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Shortchanged: The Hidden Costs of Lockstep Teacher Pay
A new report by TNTP outlines the main pitfalls of the current teacher-pay system and offers some insightful solutions. The authors explain that teachers’ starting salaries are 25 percent less than in other comparable fields and are stagnant during the first decade of a teacher’s career.
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Renewing Head Start’s Promise: Invest in What Works for Disadvantaged Preschoolers
The estimable Sara Mead is, as we’ve come to expect, perceptive about what ails today’s preschool options and advocacy campaigns, even as she strives to support (and repair) programs and policies that she knows are flawed.
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Vergara: Going bicoastal
Seven families in Albany, backed by former news anchor Campbell Brown’s advocacy group, the Partnership for Educational Justice, filed the nation’s second Vergara-inspired lawsuit.
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Gadfly Bites (the new Ohio Gadfly Daily News) - 7/30/14
Ohio Gadfly Daily news becomes Gadfly Bites. And does it ever!
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Ohio Gadfly Daily News 7-29-14
Charter authorizing, Common Core, and the Straight-A Fund fill up today's edition.
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Accountability & Testing, Standards
Ohio's New Learning Standards: Helping, not hampering
This piece was originally published the United States Chamber of Commerce’s website on Wednesday, July 23, 2014. Six days later, two legislators proposed a new legislative assault on Ohio’s New Learning Standards, which include the Common Core State Standards in math and English language arts.
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Ohio Gadfly Daily News 7-28-14
Some humor leavens our clips today - some of it intentional, the rest of it not so much.
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Ohio Gadfly Daily News 7-25-14
Heated rhetoric, strong opinions, and some snarky commentary in the clips today.
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Charter Schools
The Productivity of Public Charter Schools
This new report from the University of Arkansas compares the productivity of public charter schools and district schools, both in terms of cost effectiveness and return on investment (ROI).
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Teachers versus the Public: What Americans Think about Schools and How to Fix Them
When it comes to what constitutes a superb education in America, the general public and teachers have vastly different views, say Peterson, Henderson, and West in this book, a compilation of research reported originally in Education Next.
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Making School Choice Work
In this report, the Center for Reinventing Public Education surveys 4,000 parents and interviews civic leaders in eight choice-rich cities—Baltimore, Cleveland, Denver, Detroit, Indianapolis, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.—to help determine how to improve existing choice systems, regardless of whether parents choose a charter or district school.
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Upward mobility
In this weekend’s Wall Street Journal, Tamar Jacoby wrote about a recent high school graduate working at becoming a construction contractor—not as a last resort but as a deliberate career choice.
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ESEA does not give Arne Duncan ‘mandate authority’
Yesterday’s big news (regarding ObamaCare’s subsidies in states with federal exchanges) is that the judiciary actually expects the executive branch to pay attention to the clear language of laws passed by the legislature.
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Ohio Gadfly Daily News 7-23-14
Some good news in amongst the bad in today's Ohio Gadfly Daily News. Check it out.
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Accountability & Testing, Standards
Is alternative accountability real accountability?
Do Ohio's multiple accountability "systems" erode the very foundation of accountability?
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Changing demographics in Ohio require continued focus on early literacy
Taking a deeper look at demographic shifts in Ohio and what they mean for education.
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Curriculum & Instruction
Visual Environment, Attention Allocation, and Learning
A brief look at a study on visual clutter in the learning environment.
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Ohio Gadfly Daily News 7-17-14
Some charter schools get new scrutiny, some charter schools get potential new partners, and all charter schools could use a full review of the laws governing them. All this and more in the news today.
Commentary
The Case Against Exit Exams
Twenty-one states will continue administering exit exams in ELA and math while transitioning to the higher standards, we learn from this new policy brief from the New America Foundation’s Anne Hyslop. Ten of these states plan to replace their current exams with new PARCC or Smarter Balanced tests.
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Assessing and Evaluating Teacher Preparation Programs
An increasingly bright and pitiless spotlight is being shined on America’s schools of education.
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A Framework for Rethinking State Education Accountability and Support from Birth through High School
Broadly speaking, early-learning accountability systems tend to measure program inputs, while K–12 accountability more heavily weights student outcomes. Analysts at the Ounce of Prevention Fund argue that this divergence is harmful and call instead for a unified birth-to-high-school accountability system.
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Tony Bennett, exonerated
Last week, Indiana's Inspector General exonerated former state superintendent Tony Bennett of any wrongdoing for changing the grade of a high performing charter school.
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On school discipline, let’s not repeat all our old mistakes
Just as the education-reform movement is starting to figure out how to use test-score data in a more sophisticated way, the Obama administration and its allies in the civil-rights community want to take us back to the Stone Age on the use of school discipline data. This is an enormous mistake that repeats almost exactly the nuance-averse way we looked at test-score data in the early days of NCLB.
