Latest Edu-Reads

“…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

Weekend Edu-Reads

Caprice Young is a must-read on the new reality facing California charter schools.

Robin Lake bakes a bread metaphor into this piece on school districts and charter schools. It turns out that recipes involving living organisms can be hard to follow. She concludes, “let districts be districts, when they work. But when they don’t, try something else.”

Aaron Churchill has a new report on college readiness in Ohio. He looks at ACT scores, dual enrollment, AP, and industry credentials overall across the state, by county, and by race. While all of these indicators are trending upward across the state, the black-white gap remains large:

Dolly Parton is awesome. And so is this D.C. program she’s involved with that sends free books to kids under 5.

Phillip Burgoyne-Allen says, “Do the electric!” Bus, that is.

How tax policy gave us White Claw and other hard seltzers.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman 

Latest Edu-Reads

Texas is in the midst of redesigning remedial courses at the state’s colleges and universities. This Dallas Observer piece has a good overview of what they did and how it’s going. Here’s the key quote: “During the fall 2018 semester, the first after the new model went into effect, the state saw 10,000 more students pass their first college-level course than during the fall 2017 semester.”

This is a super cool data visualization tool on FAFSA completion rates from Ellie Bruecker. You can narrow in on certain geographic regions or search by school name and see how FAFSA completions are trending over time.

“UW-Milwaukee and UW-Madison lie just 80 miles apart, but they might as well be on different planets when it comes to access and outcomes.” That’s from James Murphy in a new brief for Education Reform Now.

Florida has been a leader on teacher retirement policy, but I suggest a couple ways they could do even better.

“The key argument against exit exams—that they depress graduation rates—does not hold for [end-of-course exams].” That and more in this Fordham report on end-of-course exams.

Speaking of Fordham, I’ve enjoyed Mike Petrilli’s summer blog series on big-picture trends in education over the last 25 years. The whole thing is worth reading, but this paragraph from his series finale provides a nice summary:

The achievement of low-performing kids and children of color rose dramatically from the late 1990s until the Great Recession. That was mostly because of improving social and economic conditions for these children, but accountability reforms and increased spending played a role, as well. Over the last decade, that progress has mostly petered out. And the gains we made were, of course, not nearly enough, as they mostly meant getting more kids to a basic level of literacy and numeracy and walking across the high school graduation stage—nowhere near the goal of readiness for college, career, and citizenship that is the proper objective of our K–12 system.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman