Latest Edu-Reads

Beth Hawkins has your must-read of the week with the incredible true story of the Rosenwald schools. Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears, Roebuck and Company, partnered with Booker T. Washington to build more than 5,000 schools for black communities across the South. Researchers from the Federal Reserve “concluded that the Rosenwald schools significantly bolstered literacy, earnings and South-to-North migration among rural blacks.” Check out the full story here.

“Dallas ISD is in fact retaining its best teachers at rates above the state’s and the district’s retention rates before the implementation of TEI. Overall, the district has kept 93% of teachers rated “Proficient II” or above. The district has retained 100% of its master-level teachers.” That’s from an update on how Dallas is doing on retaining its best teachers.

Education Strategy Group has a new resource on how states can boost FAFSA completion rates.

InsideHigherEd reports on a new study finding that many programs at public and nonprofit colleges would also fail the “gainful employment” test.

A new brief by John V. Winters concludes, “Working in a locality where a greater share of the population has a college degree is correlated with higher wages and better employment outcomes even controlling for individuals’ own education and other characteristics. Studies based on various natural experiments suggest that this positive relationship is causal.” That is, education is not just a benefit to individuals, it also has wider societal benefits.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman 

Latest Edu-News

The Bellwether Policy and Evaluation team is starting the search for paid summer interns. Please send good candidates our way!

Robert Kelchen and Zhuoyao Liu find that the release of gainful employment data led some low-performing for-profit colleges and programs to close.

The new Denver School Board tilts the membership balance toward teachers’ union issues for the first time in years. Read Lynne Graziano on what that means for the city.

Anne Wicks on a new tool designed to help education leaders implement their vision and adopt research-based interventions.

I’m all for better reading instruction, and the declines in NAEP reading scores are certainly troubling. But is there any evidence that the recent NAEP declines were caused by some recent change in reading instruction? If so, what was it? As I’ve written in the past, we have a decent research base on how students learn to read, but we’ve been unsuccessful so far at translating that knowledge base into actual teaching.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman