Tag: Alex Spurrier

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Latest Edu-Reads

Kris Amundson on why you should never try a new hairstyle on your wedding day… and other thoughts from the Iowa caucus debacle.

Alex Spurrier on what to think about President’s Trump’s education proposals in his State of the Union.

Aaron Garth Smith takes a look at open enrollment policies. It strikes me that open enrollment might be the low-hanging fruit of the school choice debate.

Testing opt-ins? There’s been a 60 percent increase in Advanced Placement participation rates over the last decade, with especially strong growth for black and Hispanic students. Catherine Gewertz has 7 key takeways from the latest results.

“Students of all racial/ethnic groups learn more from teachers with high grading standards, and these standards tend to be higher in schools serving more advantaged students.” That’s the main conclusion from a new study by Seth Gershenson looking at the importance of teacher expectations.

Finally, Conor Williams has a balanced take about the recent RAND study on community schools in NYC:

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman 

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“…ignoring the stop arm of a school bus is incredibly dangerous because children often cross the street as they are entering or exiting the bus.” That’s Alex Spurrier on school bus safety.

Lisette Partelow on what to make of the decline in teacher preparation enrollment.

Doug Webber has a cool tool to compare lifetime earnings by college major.

This Kalyn Belsha article for Chalkbeat is a sobering reminder of the fecklessness in our education sector. The Trump Administration killed off a $12 million competitive grant program to support school integration efforts out of spite and instead spread that money to undefined state school improvement efforts. That does not sound like a good use of money.

But the districts also didn’t follow through! Belsha leads with the example of the Austin, TX school district, which outlined a detailed case for why they needed to integrate their school district and how they planned to do it. But when the program was canceled they let those plans dropt. They were in line to win $1.5 million, which is peanuts to a school district the size of Austin. The Austin schools budget was about $1.4 billion that same year, so we’re talking about 0.1 percent of their budget. Austin was by no means the only district to drop their integration efforts, but there’s a lesson here when even tiny sums of money would have changed district behavior, and it says something about the importance of competitive grants to spur action…

The latest PISA results are out and they are not good… for Finland! The OECD described their trajectory as “steadily negative” and found declines in reading, math, and science. Worse, they concluded that Finland’s decline in reading and science “was particularly noticeable amongst the lowest-achieving students.”

The trends here in the United States are nothing to brag about either–they’re mainly flat over time–but we’re holding steady in a middle pack alongside Australia, Germany, New Zealand, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

This is a lovely personal essay on overconfidence by Jason Zweig. Coming from a rural background in 1977, Advanced Placement tests played a role in teaching Zweig a helpful lesson in humility.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman

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Alex Spurrier’s op-ed on school choice in Louisville includes this zinger: “For too long, low-income families in Louisville have had to settle for what other people think is best for their children, while the affluent can vote with their feet and their pocketbooks.”

Jennifer Schiess on how school performance frameworks can be designed for system management and accountability.

Speaking of which, a new study by Sade Bonilla and Thomas Dee finds that NCLB waivers had a positive effect in “focus schools” in Kentucky.

Tyler Cowen and Ben Southwood find that the rate of scientific progress is slowing down. They write, “To sum up the basic conclusions of this paper, there is good and also wide-ranging evidence that the rate of scientific progress has indeed slowed down, In the disparate and partially independent areas of productivity growth, total factor productivity, GDP growth, patent measures, researcher productivity, crop yields, life expectancy, and Moore’s Law we have found support for this claim.”

This tool from the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce is fun to play around with. It lets you see return on investment at different points in time for 4,500 higher education institutions across the country. For example, I noticed that my alma mater, the University of Iowa, has a 10-year net present value of $132,000, good for 1,457th nationwide. Meanwhile, Iowa’s community colleges perform much better on this metric. Northwest Iowa Community College in tiny Sheldon, Iowa (with a total population of 5,188 residents) has a 10-year ROI of $209,000, good for 170th nationwide.

In contrast, four-year baccalaureate institutions like Iowa State University, the University of Iowa, and Drake University score much higher on the 40-year ROI calculations. This sort of stuff is fun to play around with, but it also has implications for how we evaluate programs and institutions to decide whether they’re “successful” or not.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman

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“…only a tiny minority of elementary and middle schools successfully support low-performing students to achieve gap-closing levels of growth.” Read Gwen Baker, Lauren Shwartze, and Bonnie O’Keefe on what to do about that. Their piece is part of Fordham’s annual “Wonkathon” contest. Read all those entries here, and don’t forget to vote!

Katrina Boone and Alex Spurrier predict what might be next for education in Kentucky.

We’ve long known that teacher qualifications don’t seem to matter that much in K-12 education, but a new study suggests they may not matter that much in higher ed either.

“Through focus groups, budget analyses and interviews with three dozen district and community leaders, the study’s authors found a growing frustration that increasing pension costs were crowding out school districts’ budgets, forcing cuts to programs that parents valued and competing with salary increases for teachers needed to keep pace with fast-rising housing expenses in the Bay Area.” That’s from an EdSource write-up of a new PACE report by Hannah Melnicoe, Cory Koedel and Arun Ramanathan.

Part of me is annoyed it took so long for Cory Booker to remember his education policy, but I guess I should be pleased it finally happened. He writes, “The treatment by many Democrats of high-performing public charter schools as boogeymen has undermined the fact that many of these schools are serving low-income urban children across the country in ways that are inclusive, equitable, publicly accountable and locally driven.”

This Washington Post deep dive on virtual medical care in rural areas is super interesting, with implications for the education sector.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman