Tag: Katrina Boone

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Latest Edu-Reads

I’m biased, but I enjoyed Greg Richmond’s interview with Andy Rotherham. It’s short, but there are lots of good nuggets in there, including this one:

My friends who are doctors and nurses, nobody is attacking them for indifference to housing or education policy. Only in education policy is focusing on a single issue as one lever for change considered a problem.

Kate Rabinowitz and Laura Meckler take a look at teacher diversity for The Washington Post. The article also includes interactive graphics that allow you to look up how teacher diversity compares to student diversity in your local school district.

“Instructions to suppress stereotypes often have the opposite effect, and prejudice reduction programs are much more effective when people are already open-minded, altruistic, and concerned about their prejudices to begin with.” That’s from Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic reviewing the academic literature on implicit bias training.

Katrina Boone on how and why, “Native parents and activists saw school choice as a way to pursue justice and cultural revitalization.”

Which states have the best (and worst) teacher retirement plans? I take a look at one simple way to answer that question.

Washington schools chief Chris Reykdal is trying to address disparities in access to college-level coursework by pushing for a bill that would require school districts, colleges, and universities to cover the cost of dual credit for high school students.

Gentrification is a growing problem in all of our urban cities, right? Well, no. Here’s Will Stancil correcting the record:

Research has also tended to show that no matter how you measure gentrification in the urban core, it’s almost always more common to find neighborhoods afflicted by intensifying poverty. Out of the fifty biggest American regions, forty-four have core cities where the population in poverty has grown faster than the overall population since 2000. The only exceptions are New York City, Los Angeles, D.C., New Orleans, Atlanta, and Providence.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman

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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

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Latest Edu-News

Juvenile justice schools are intended to be places of rehabilitation, but we lack even basic data about how many students are enrolled there, let alone how those students are doing. Plus, as Hailly Korman, Max Marchitello, and Alexander Brand show in this new deck, the data we do have suggests those students lack access to courses they would need to graduate.

A new CREDO study finds that Denver students, especially black and Hispanic students, are making much faster gains than their peers throughout the rest of the state of Colorado.

Similarly, schools in New Orleans improved much faster than the rest of Louisiana from about 2006 through 2013, and a new study from the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans finds that essentially all of the improvements were, “due to the state regularly closing or taking over low-performing schools and opening new higher performing charters.”

Katrina Boone on the power of culture-based education for Native students.

The latest Education Next survey results are out. It’s a well-done longitudinal survey with lots of findings to unpack, on things as varied as school spending, teacher pay, different forms of school choice, etc.

Only 6 schools districts have applied for the Student-Centered Funding Pilot created under ESSA, and only one, Puerto Rico, has been approved to implement it this school year.

Finland update.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman