Following the money to the country’s worst schools
Where are the lowest-performing schools in America? They tend to be in California, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Washington, D.C. and Wisconsin (specifically, Milwaukee) — at least, as judged by where federal money is going. A federally funded study out this week by researchers at the American Institutes for Research digs into the data on the group of […]
College: Worth it, or worthless?
Is a college degree worthless? An article this week in New York magazine poses this question, which has generated lots of commentary and controversy in recent years, what with The Atlantic’s anonymous professor tell-all and a series of books (including one whose findings we detailed here). New York magazine’s “The University Has No Clothes” is […]
Teacher merit-pay study doesn’t get a gold star — yet
The U.S. Department of Education’s “What Works Clearinghouse” issued a note of caution today about a much-ballyhooed study of teacher merit pay in Tennessee. The Project on Incentives in Teaching (POINT) study, released in September 2010 by researchers at Vanderbilt University, found that offering bonuses to middle-school math teachers in Nashville if they raised student […]
Newspaper reporters: Proudly innumerate?
Kevin Carey, writing in a blog post yesterday that criticizes a Washington Post writer’s analysis of an academic study, says a lot of newspaper reporters are “proudly innumerate,” meaning they lack basic knowledge of mathematics and the scientific approach. Carey’s argument is used to bolster another, more run-of-the-mill complaint: that reporters are biased. The topic […]
Gentrification and school reform
What if gentrification could solve the problems of inner city public schools? The root problem behind the poor academic achievement in most struggling inner city schools is concentrated poverty. Being poor, while not a guarantee of low achievement in itself, is attached to all kinds of other problems that can hurt a child’s academic chances: […]
Are charters in the North losing black students to the South?
Reports in recent years have documented a trend of higher attrition rates in charter schools than traditional public schools. For instance, a charter might start out with 100 students in its first-grade class but, five years later, end up with only 80 graduating fifth-graders. Many of these reports have been published by teachers’ unions, which […]
Charter universities: Let the controversy begin
In cash-strapped states where governors are proposing major cuts to services, some public universities that face deep cuts are set to adopt an innovation from the K-12 world: chartering. A story in Stateline last week reported that several states, including Wisconsin, are proposing to cut loose some of their public universities from certain state regulations […]
The evidence disconnect in education policy
Is good evidence winning or losing the battle over education policy? I sat in on an interesting panel discussion on reading last week hosted by the New America Foundation, where the conclusion was, in essence, good evidence isn’t winning often enough. In the case of reading, where there is relatively abundant research on what works, […]
Can standards for charter schools improve their performance?
A coalition of groups announced today the publication of new national standards for charter schools. Here’s the lead of the press release: “A coalition of leaders in the national charter movement is today announcing the culmination of a four-year, federally-funded project titled Building Charter School Quality (BCSQ) that has resulted in the development of national […]
Memphis: A reminder that the fight over desegregation never ended
The city of Memphis, Tenn. and the suburban county that encompasses it are locked in a battle over whether to consolidate their schools into one large system. The city board, which proposed the merger, says the move is in reaction to a county proposal to transform itself into a “special district,” which would keep it […]
