Latest Edu-Reads

The 13th annual CALDER conference is coming up in February. The agenda is here. It’s open to all who can make it in D.C. (plus free breakfast and lunch!), or there’s a webinar option for those who prefer to follow along remotely.

EdTrust has an important report looking at what’s driving inequities in access to advanced courses. They find that Black and Hispanic students perform well when given opportunities, but a lack of seats, and inequitable distribution in those seats, deny them equal opportunities. The report also comes with a nifty data tool to see how your state is doing.

Rachel Canter talks to Jennifer Schiess on the educational progress in Mississippi.

Mike Antonucci looks at how California school districts, “are approaching financial crisis even as California increased education expenditures by extraordinary amounts — about 50 percent in the last five years.”

“One of the most consistent findings in education research” is that Master’s degrees don’t make people better teachers. And yet we continue to reward teachers for earning Master’s degrees. Grace Gedye asks why, and Ben Miller looks at implications for the debt burdens we’re placing on teachers. And remember, these same useless Master’s degrees are also distorting the teacher “wage gap” data that get tossed around ad nauseam.

Taylor Swaak dives into a new report showing that 41 percent of New York City schools don’t represent their neighboring district’s student demographics.

A new policy brief by Melanie Rucinski and Joshua Goodman finds, “the lack of diversity in Massachusetts’ teacher workforce largely stems from early stages of the teacher development pipeline. Licensure exam takers and passers are substantially less diverse than the college-enrolled population, but among those who pass the exam there are few racial differences in rates of initial teaching employment or retention.” Listen to Rucinski talk about the paper on the latest Education Next podcast.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman 

Latest Edu-Reads

Chicago teachers are out on strike today. The strike is not primarily about pay or benefits, but those issues are certainly lurking in the background.

A new study finds that universal free school lunch had positive benefits for poor and non-poor students. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates its new rules on school lunch eligibility could take away these very same benefits for up to 982,000 students nationwide (h/t Lauren Camera).

How to read charts accurately, or, how to make your own graphs more accurate.

Millennials aren’t drowning in student debt, argues Beth Akers.

Christopher Ruszkowski points out a recent Collaborative for Student Success estimate that more than 200,000 more students of color were reading at grade level in 2018 versus 2015. Christopher is right; we should be talking about that progress more!

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman