One of the most important lessons of No Child Left Behind is that raw test scores are not a reasonable proxy for school quality unless they are combined with other measures. Yet the implementation of one of the Obama Administration’s signature initiatives, the School Improvement Grant program (SIG), suggests we have yet to absorb this lesson.

SIG targets those “persistently lowest achievContinue Reading »

Vermont has had school choice for over a century, and yet the struggle of one southern Vermont public school to close its doors and reopen as an independent school has stirred up all the controversy that one might expect elsewhere in the country. Despite significant pushback from some local voters, the independent school has ultimately been approved at both the local and state level. Still, oppContinue Reading »

This guest blog post written by Danny Rosenthal, who is a graduate of Harvard Law School and a former high school math teacher. He practices labor and employment law in Washington, D.C.

Two years ago, Florida’s Alachua County was faced with a dilemma. Under the state’s new teacher evaluation law, the county was required to base 40 percent of evaluations on value-added student achievementContinue Reading »

Some say I’m a lucky anomaly, but I believe I am the poster child of a faulty college financial aid system. When my mother unexpectedly passed away two months before my third year of college, I knew nothing about how to find the more than $25,000 needed to pay for my next year of school. My lack of knowledge about financial aid was only exacerbated by multiple run-arounds from the Office of FinContinue Reading »

The Department of Education’s planned release of the first year of School Improvement Grant (SIG) data has important implications for the future of the program – and for reform generally.  While much of the early attention devoted to SIG has focused on its cost-effectiveness, in light of the ongoing debate over school and district human-capital policies the question of which of the four SIG modContinue Reading »

Negotiations over the new District of Columbia teachers’ contract have begun with Chancellor Kaya Henderson predicting that “some interesting things” will be incorporated into the final agreement, including (perhaps) giving effective teachers the option of earning more money in exchange for agreeing to teach larger classes than their fellow teachers.

Letting better teachers teach larger Continue Reading »

Guest blog post written by Jane Wellman.

The student credit hour  ”system” is the major currency of higher education.  It is a Mobius strip of a measure:  turned one way, it measures academic credits.  Turned another, it’s a measure of resource use, faculty workload, staffing, enrollments, and pretty much everything else.  It is loosely regulated by accrediting agencieContinue Reading »

This video by the New York Times illustrates just how much faster sprinter Usain Bolt is than Olympic medalists of yore.  The video’s key takeaway is that the crème de la crème of athletes have over the years pushed themselves to consistently higher standards.  Whereas breaking 10 seconds used to seem nearly impossible, it is now all but a requirement of medaling in the 100m sprint.  While the Continue Reading »

When I meet new people I like to do a small social experiment by either telling them, “I work with Teach For America” or leaving that out entirely and just telling them “I am a teacher.”  The difference in how people respond is amazing.  I must admit, at first as a kid right out of college I thought dropping the Teach-For-America line was great because girls would actually talk to me and even sContinue Reading »

This guest blog post is written by Jordan Horowitz, Vice President, Foundation Relations and Project Development at the Institute for Evidence-Based Change (IEBC) – a California-based initiative that collects, analyzes, and shares student data in order to track performance and improve success from elementary school through university.

In Ready by Design, Bill Tucker and Anne HyslopContinue Reading »