Odds & Ends

Go ask a teacher! One of the great non-responses in education debates. But, OK, does this one count?

Elsewhere, RiShawn Biddle previews the Medicaid/education funding debate.

Jay Greene argues for efficiency in teacher evaluations (and goes after Gates MET).  He’s right that the predictive leverage of value-added is more powerful than is generally acknowledged or many people take the time to understand but there are compelling arguments that to move the profession you need to create buy-in and that there is a role for professional judgement in evaluation as well.  And there is the thorny issue of valid measures for non-tested subjects and grades, the work environment of the majority of teachers and a place where MET can really make a contribution.

Kevin Carey makes an out of the box case for solving the higher ed cost problem.

3 Replies to “Odds & Ends”

  1. Andrew,

    I can’t seem to find your contact information anywhere so I think a comment is my best option. Please don’t publish this comment it is meant more for email. So when you get a chance email me back.

    My name is Matt Smith and I work for Dell within their K12 education marketing department. I have been following your blog for a few months and have enjoyed reading your posts. As a team, we at Dell have been identifying new ways to support the education community on the web. One of the ways we want to present to you is a WordPress plugin that will help connect education blogs to more readers and each other. Let me first explain how it works.

    We have created a widget that can live on any WordPress blog with the intent of keeping the education community up to date on best-in-class information being posted on the web. The widget has a special crawler that goes to a pre-set list of education blogs that are selected based on content quality. It then takes the title of the latest articles written by that blog and populates the widget sitting on the installer’s website.

    We would like to include your blog in our list of trusted education websites to populate the widget. Therefore anyone who installs the widget on their blog will auto pull in the title of your most recent article. This will allow visitors of the installer’s website to explore new education ideas and better share with the community.

    Before we include your blog in our widget feed, please send me a response in the affirmative. The spots are limited on blog inclusion so please let me know your response as soon as possible.

  2. Thanks for the link, Andy. You may well be right that there are benefits to classroom observations for teacher evaluations. It’s just that the Gates study didn’t provide much evidence in support of that despite the news spin that it did. My interest in this is mostly about the claims attributed to Gates research, not the best way to evaluate teachers.

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