Wisconsin Gov. Walker was pro-teachers union before he wasn’t
Only a few days before Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker started a war with organized labor, he was effusively praising the state’s teachers and their union, the Wisconsin Education Association Council. On Feb. 8th, WEAC proposed two big reforms that it had previously opposed: the creation of a statewide system for evaluating teachers that took into […]
Making a difference in a new role
Editor’s Note: Today, Education Sector Board Chair Macke Raymond announced that Richard Lee Colvin will join Education Sector as its executive director. For the past eight years, I’ve had the great fortune to lead the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media at Teachers College, Columbia University where, most recently, we created The Hechinger Report, […]
Education research vs. education policy
The debate about how (or whether) to consider student achievement when evaluating teacher performance appears to put policy makers and some of the leading scholars in the field on a collision course. As the matter of whether New York City should release the ratings of 12,000 teachers based on their students’ test scores goes before […]
Venture capital for digital learning and technology
In a conference call with reporters today, Bill Gates announced that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will put up an initial $20 million to help colleges, non-profits, entrepreneurs and others to come up with new ways of using digital media in postsecondary education. (The Gates Foundation is one of the supporters of The Hechinger […]
Out of the starting blocks
By the time nine states and the District of Columbia were awarded more than $3.3 billion for school reform in the U.S. Department of Education’s “Race to the Top” competition in August, Delaware and Tennessee had already been hard at work for six months. What early lessons did leaders in those two states learn that […]
A bump in average starting salaries for English majors?
By Casey Selix | MinnPost.com To me, it’s news when English majors see their average starting salary increase. It’s not news when engineering grads see another bump in pay that’s sometimes double an English major’s. That story is getting kind of old, frankly. The National Association of Colleges and Employers this week released its summer […]
Bill Gates on charter schools
Microsoft founder Bill Gates told a huge crowd of charter school advocates, researchers, principals and operators that the non-traditional public schools have “the potential to revolutionize the way students are educated. But to deliver on this promise, it’s important that the movement do even more to hold itself accountable for low-performing charters.” “The deal that […]
Teachers cheating on students’ tests? A response to today’s New York Times story
What is the real point of today’s New York Times story on cheating? Testing is bad. When test results matter, some percentage of educators (the story suggests perhaps 1% to 4%) will cheat to get them. Testing “ends up pushing more and more of them over the line,” says Robert Schaeffer, spokesperson for the anti-testing organization FairTest, […]
Judging in the “Race to the Top” competition
The federal education department’s $4 billion “Race to the Top” competition received lots of attention from journalists and education policy types. Most federal education money is given to states and school districts using complex formulas that depend on factors such as population, poverty and political calculations. The Obama Administration was encouraged by Jon Schnur, one […]
State of play: teacher unions and school reform
It’s well known that labor unions in general tend to support Democrats. It’s also well known that teachers unions, whose memberships make up one in four union members, are particularly supportive of Democrats. About one in 10 delegates to the Democratic Convention in 2008 were teacher union members. Democrats, of course, tend to favor more […]
