John Bailey – who I publish Education Insider with – turns in a provocative look at education and the private sector (pdf) via AEI. Private sector involvement in education is a seriously impoverished conversation in education, a lot of hysterical rhetoric, boosterism, and not a lot of thoughtful analysis. The private sector can’t fix what ails public education but it can play a useful role in helping to solve some problems. Two recent BW looks at this here and here.
Evaluations changing in Los Angeles but the most interesting parts of the LA Times account are in the second half of the story. Some background here. Also, while I was not and am not a fan of what the LAT did with value-added scores but it’s hard to argue that it didn’t change the terms of the conversation there.
In Indy The Mind Trust – an org whose board I serve on – has launched a charter school incubator there. Incubators were popular in the early days of the charter school movement but were not always successful. Now there are some version 2.0s springing up in different ways. By the way, Indy has a sleeper music scene and a sleeper ed reform scene.
On the edujob front:
Everfi is an interesting and fast-growing ed tech company – financial literacy but broader applications. They’re hiring for a host of roles.
And here’s a great role in D.C. – CEO of DC Prep, a successful and interesting public charter school network with good support behind it from parents, community and funders. My partner Monisha Lozier is leading the search. More info and how to apply here.
You claim that it will be difficult to get to a point where we use classroom observations as well as data driven measures to evaluate teachers, but isn’t this already being used as part of DC’s IMPACT system?