Tag: Max Marchitello

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Latest Edu-Reads

Phillip Burgoyne-Allen on the intersection of public school choice and public transportation.

Yesterday I wrote about how states set their college attainment goals without looking at historical data on their recent progress. That’s not unique to higher ed. Andrew Ujifusa follows up on a few states starting to realize they are not close to achieving the “ambitious” goals they set under ESSA.

“Many juvenile-justice schools do not even offer the courses that a student needs to complete his or her freshman year of high school, and Native American youth are among the most poorly served in these facilities.” That’s Max Marchitello and Diana Cournoyer in a Hechinger Report op-ed.

This Kate Walsh essay is worth your time. It looks at the noticeable drop in attention to teacher quality issues–indeed, she found a search on the terms “teacher quality” and “teacher evaluation” revealed about a 75 percent drop in press coverage in the last five years. Still, Walsh ends with an optimistic tone, noting, “No matter how daunting change can be, when something’s founded on unassailable evidence and speaks to shared values of justice, fairness, and equity, it generally finds a way.”

Kevin Carey sees a lot of smoke but no fire from Elizabeth Warren’s education plan, at least on accountability. I think he’s right on the policy specifics–although I might be more alarmed than Carey is about the smoke Warren is creating, and why exactly she’s sounding the alarm. (And, unlike Warren’s words on accountability, her charter school proposals could do real harm if enacted.)

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman  

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Latest Edu-Reads

Max Marchitello finds that pension spending in Maryland is regressive. Accounting for pension spending amplifies the total spending gap between high- and low-poverty school districts by 34 percent.

“Chicago has the most pension debt of any major U.S. city, a shrinking population and an $838 million budget gap—and the city’s teachers have been striking since Thursday.” That sentence pretty well sums up this WSJ article on the many challenges facing Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot.

Here’s a longer deep dive into the structural issues and the tough trade-offs pensions are forcing on state and local budgets.

In her 2003 book, Elizabeth Warren proposed an open enrollment system for schools. After reading her recent education platform, Andrew Ujifusa is asking, “why didn’t Warren propose open enrollment for public schools in her platform? Does she no longer support such a system? If not, why?”

Why do we assign new teachers to the hardest jobs? Although they can’t answer that question, a new study by Paul Bruno, Sarah Rabovsky, and Katharine Strunk documents the extent of the problem.

Speaking of new teachers, this is a great new ECS resource on what states are doing to support teacher recruitment and retention.

This is a cool piece from EdNavigator on how they think about building a language-inclusive culture and how it relates to their work with parents.

Mike Goldstein, the founder of Match Education in Boston (and a frequent Eduwonk commenter!), has a great entry in Fordham’s Wonkathon about why struggling students remain below grade level, and how to help them.

And here’s an update on the school that LeBron James supported in Akron.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman  

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Thoughts on Recent Edu-Reads

A typical teacher pension formula multiplies some factor (usually around 2 percent) times the employee’s salary and years of experience. It might look like this:

Pension = 2 percent X salary X years of experience

In the education context, we know that high-poverty schools tend to employ teachers with lower salaries and fewer years of experience. Pensions literally multiply those problems together. Max Marchitello explains and gives an example from West Virginia.

Technically speaking, Ohio school districts aren’t contributing toward teacher retirement benefits.

Tomas Monarrez, Brian Kisida, and Matthew M. Chingos have new work out on the intersection of charter schools and school segregation. They find that charters do contribute to segregation, a bit, but charters are not the primary driver and there’s wide variation across states and geographies. Here’s the Matt Barnum write-up or the Education Next version from the authors.

Even as someone with concerns about private school choice programs, I was reluctant to tout research showing that private school choice programs seemed to have a negative effect on student achievement in states like Indiana, Ohio, and Louisiana. I wondered if those results were driven more by alignment issues than quality ones. That is, it may be the case that private schools were no better or worse than public schools, but public schools were simply more focused on preparing students to pass state achievement tests. The Urban Institute is out with a new study this week supporting this theory. They found that private school choice programs in Florida and Milwaukee improved college enrollment and graduation rates (although not in Washington, D.C.). Personally, I think the debate over private schools comes down to a values question rather than being resolved by purely objective outcomes data.

Cara Jackson on how teacher residency programs can improve the diversity of our teacher workforce.

For-profit colleges have “got a friend in Trump.”

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman