Latest Edu-Reads

My Bellwether colleagues are launching an early childhood newsletter. You should sign up!

Here’s Nisha Smales on the complex pathways early childhood educators take into the classroom.

Rising teacher pension costs are eating into expenditures on teacher salaries. Primarily, this seems to be about reductions in staffing rather than outright cuts to individual salaries.

The 13th annual CALDER conference has some interesting new research papers. I’m especially partial to this Charles Clotfelter, Helen Ladd, and Mavzuna Turaeva study on between- and within-school segregation in North Carolina.

EdSource on dual enrollment gaps in California.

I’m (very!) late to it, but this Nat Malkus report on the evolution of career and technical education is fascinating. For example, check out Table 6 on the changes in CTE concentrators by gender.

“In Mississippi, nearly 33,000 students — almost all of them African American — attend a school district rated as failing, like Holmes. White students account for less than 5 percent of enrollment in these districts, according to a Hechinger Report analysis of state data.” That’s Bracey Harris taking a deep dive on academic segregation in Mississippi.

USA Today takes a look at private placements for public school students with a disability. They find, “In California, Massachusetts and New York, for instance, the share of white students in private placement exceeds the share in public special education by about 10 percentage points. And in both California and Massachusetts, low-income students with disabilities were only half as likely to receive a private placement as their wealthier special education peers.”

John Arnold has a reminder on the long-term trends in childhood poverty rates:

“Hand-washing is one of the most important tools in public health. It can keep kids from getting the flu, prevent the spread of disease and keep infections at bay.” That’s from this old NPR story about a doctor who championed hand-washing before his time.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman 

The Rush Back Toward Career Pathways

I missed this Liz Bowie story on Maryland’s effort to scale up career and technical education. Bowie does a nice job balancing the tensions and trade-offs, and lots of people I respect are behind the Maryland plan, but this still makes me nervous:

At the end of the 10th grade, students would have to qualify for the career or academic paths by passing a test or some other measure that showed they were prepared for basic, entry-level college classes. The Kirwan plan estimates about 65% of students in the state would meet that bar by 2030, boosted by other parts of the education package, such as more pre-kindergarten and intensive support for students at schools with high poverty rates.

Is this just another form of tracking? Even assuming everything goes as planned, what happens to the 35 percent who don’t meet the bar for either pathway?

I’m working on a paper on this very topic right now, and we’re finding that states aren’t paying close enough attention to determine whether their college and career pathways are equally rigorous and accessible for all students. We’ll have more to say on this soon!

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman