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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.
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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.
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Accountability & Testing, Standards
Standardized Tests: Correlation to Future Successes? (Part I of II)
First of a two-part analysis looking at early indicators to future success.
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Ohio Gadfly Daily News 7-14-14
Teacher evaluations; Dude, Who Moved My Alternative School?; and the IRS all feature in today's clips.
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Ohio Gadfly Daily News 7-11-14
There’s not a ton of stories today, but those few clips are pure gold:
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Ohio Gadfly Daily News 7-10-14
Common Core, homeschooling, and the downstream effects of legislative changes lead the news today.
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Vergara, Harris, and the fate of the teacher unions
The most interesting story coming out of the landmark Vergara and Harris decisions is the coming irresistible
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Examining Spillover Effects from Teach For America Corps Members in Miami-Dade County Public Schools
Teach For America (TFA) is growing. In 2013–14, some 11,000 corps members reached more than 750,000 students in high-need classrooms around the land. Yet TFA-ers remain a drop in the bucket of 3 million teachers.
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Time’s up for tenure?
Following the watershed Vergara case in California, last week an advocacy group filed the first “copycat” lawsuit, this one challenging teacher-tenure laws in New York City.
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Ohio Gadfly Daily News 7-8-14
The tone is a bit condescending, but we’ll take the media hit: StateImpact Ohio takes a look at Fordham’s Lacking Leaders report. (StateImpact Ohio)