The battle over treating teachers as professionals
Should teachers be treated as professionals? The question may seem easy enough to answer—most people in education, whether they are union representatives or reformers advocating for more charter schools, say “yes.” Yet the question is in many ways at the heart of the raging debate–currently boiling over in New York–over how to improve struggling schools. [...]
Report cards for teachers: Are they fair?
A new study underwritten by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (which is among the funders of The Hechinger Report) tackles the question of whether the new teacher evaluation systems going into effect in school districts across the country are accurate and reliable in identifying which teachers are good and which are not. The researchers [...]
Winners of the Early Learning Race to the Top competition
—UPDATED— The announcement of nine winners in the Obama administration’s latest version of its “Race to the Top” education competition will push forward reforms that early learning advocates have lobbied heavily for over the past several years. The winners of the “Early Learning Challenge,” as the grant competition was called, are California, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, [...]
Should schools alone be held accountable for student achievement?
What if schools didn’t have to work alone to improve student achievement? That was the question we asked in a recent article about the miserable state of public education in Camden, N.J., one of the poorest cities in the country. Now, a study out today by Education Sector, a Washington, D.C.-based education policy think tank, delves further into [...]
With concentrated poverty on the rise, should ed reformers be worried?
The number of people living in concentrated poverty rose substantially over the past decade, according to a Brookings Institution report published on Nov. 3rd: ”After declining in the 1990s, the population in extreme-poverty neighborhoods—where at least 40 percent of individuals live below the poverty line—rose by one-third from 2000 to 2005–09.” Education reformers who ascribe to the [...]
States move quickly to change teacher evaluations: 33 and counting
How fast are states moving to change their teacher evaluation policies in the wake of a major, years-long reform push by the Obama administration and others? Very fast, according to a report released today by the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ). The NCTQ, an advocacy group that applauds most of these changes, counted 33 [...]
And they’re off … States apply for the Early Learning Race to the Top competition
The next installment of the Obama administration’s Race to the Top education-reform competition, focused on the youngest students, got off to a big start yesterday. Nearly three-quarters of the states threw their hats in the ring to win a portion of the $500 million the administration is offering to states with the best plans to overhaul their [...]
Should we revive academic tracking?
A new report showing that some high-achieving students fall behind (although not far behind) as they progress through school is reviving an argument in favor of tracking students by ability levels. America’s focus on closing the achievement gap during the past decade has left “advanced students to fend for themselves,” Frederick Hess, a researcher at [...]
Student teaching criticized in new study; schools of education fire back
Knowing the subject matter is all well and good, but one skill that many new teachers lack as they embark on their first year of teaching is how to control a classroom, or so say many critics of teacher education. This critical skill along with the other practical aspects of teaching — how to teach [...]
Holding students back: An international analysis
A new international analysis of countries that hold high proportions of students back to repeat a grade versus those that do not suggests grade repetition is a bad idea. Countries like the United States that have relatively high rates of students repeating a grade do relatively poorly on the tests, while those that have low [...]
