Teachers, Homelessness, Science Projects, DC, More!

Phillip Burgyone-Allen on how charters and traditional schools are not as different as you might think…. if you are in Boston next week Bonnie O’Keefe will be talking schools.

Bellwether’s annual report for 2018 is out this week.

Kate Walsh on teacher knowledge and licensing tests.

Yesterday we talked about paying teachers more, this new Rick Hanushek has an international lens on that.

Homelessness is a substantial problem, and an acute problem for some children. At Bellwether we do a variety of work on challenges affecting disconnected youth and homeless students are an important part of that population. That said, I am skeptical homelessness is up 70 percent among students over the past decade, this seems likely to be an outgrowth of districts doing a better job identifying homeless students.

Mark Simon thinks we should listen more to teachers and parents in DC. Yes! OK, so here’s what teachers say about why they are leaving DCPS and it’s not what you might have heard on Twitter (and here’s one of several evals of the IMPACT program) and about 50 percent of DC parents say they want school choice – because they’re using choice options (and a whole lot more use residential choice to get the schools they want).

Here’s a bad idea.

Science projects include how plants grow and doing nuclear fusion in  your bedroom:

Jackson’s father, Chris Oswalt, had no real understanding of what his son was working on. To make sure Jackson was safe he had experts speak to him about the dangers involved with working on a potentially deadly fusion reactor, like being exposed to high levels of radiation or being electrocuted by the 50,000 volts of electricity he uses to warm the fusion reactor’s plasma core.

Patti LaBelle.