Education News, Analysis, and Commentary
I don’t know if history repeats or rhymes but regardless it’s ridiculous that in 2019 Paul Hill has to write this. Education suffers from a real “everybody knows” problem where lots of bad information is taken as fact and often passed along by credulous media – charter school and school choice data, teacher pay, teacher credentialing, …
“Everybody knows” the small school experiment in NYC was a failure. You hear it all the time, so it must be true! Except an actual evaluation from MDRC shows a more complicated (and less convenient for critics) story. Bonus Flashback: Small schools eval from Chicago.
WaPo’s Bill Turque looks at the numbers on kids leaving the city’s charter schools. Different than the rhetoric… Update: Forgot to mention that Lisa Stone ( née Guido) and I wrote a squib for the WaPo on the challenges around this issue a few years ago.
Education is a field where there is an awful lot of “everybody knows…”, in other words various truths that “everybody knows” about issues, people, research, etc…regardless of whether there is much evidence to support them. Often some deeper digging is useful. For instance, “everybody knew” that the small schools initiative in New York was discriminatory toward children with …
Scroll down for some edujobs if your New Year’s resolution was to find a new one. Sara Mead on the tax bill and kids. Last week I wrote about the tax bill’s 529 changes. Max Marchitello goes all super hero in the ESSA debate. But, Julie Squire offers some good cautions on thinking about state ESSA plans. …
Kate Pennington remains unconvinced on CA’s teacher tax bill. Among the things “everybody knows” is that teacher pensions reduce teacher turnover. Actual evidence suggests a more complicated tale. Kirsten Schmitz with more via Bellwether’s Teacherpensions.org project. Here’s a great look at CTE and efforts to modernize it. But it’s a mistake to assume that all …
Chad Aldeman and Ashley Mitchel with a new Bellwether analysis of teacher preparation policy in two new papers you can read here. In RealClearEducation they write, Each year, new teachers collectively spend about $4.85 billion and 302 million hours on their preparation work. But there is no evidence that any of it really matters… A handful of …
New and solid MDRC evaluation of small schools in New York City. “Everybody knows” small schools were a debacle. Except the evidence keeps showing otherwise in places it was down well. The study and five questions with a key researcher via this link.
Everyone not chattering about the job numbers is chattering about this morning’s New York Times article on No Child Left Behind and the waivers that are increasingly freeing states from its requirements. In general some waivers were necessary – and some were issued during the Bush Administration, too – because the law was supposed to …
Continue reading “No Child Left Behind – The Problem Is Not The Policy, It’s Us”
WaPo’s Nick Anderson goes for the ‘Duncan is cozying up with the unions’ line about Race to the Top. It’s an easy line to sell because it confirms pre-existing biases about Democrats and teachers’ unions and plenty of people are happy to try to score partisan points by making the case. Only problem? It’s not …