George Will asks some good questions about the Obama Admnistration’s proposal to link $14.5 billion in federal funding to whether a state certifies their education standards as “college- and career-ready” in this New York Post op-ed. He writes:
But how does one fulfill — or know when one has fulfilled — Obama’s goal of “college and [...]
Accountability
Education Sector's K-12 accountability work focuses on research and analysis designed to increase the effectiveness of current and future K-12 accountability systems. Quick and the Ed blogger Robert Manwaring directs Education Sector's accountability work.
Remembering the “Career” in “College- and Career-Readiness”
Debating Diane Ravitch
Diane Ravitch’s new book The Death and Life of the Great American School System, has been getting a lot of attention lately. This morning, she and I debate the book over at The New Republic. Preview: I don’t like it very much. See earlier entries in the discussion from Ben Wildavsky and Richard Rothstein here.
Smarter Data Systems: The New York City Experience
Part VIII of the Five Principles for Smarter Data Systems series–a guest post from Arthur VanderVeen, Chief of Innovation, New York City Department of Education:
… it is astoundingly difficult to impact day-to-day classroom practices. And unless we design data systems with a primary goal of improving classroom teaching and learning, our investments will show little [...]
Washington State Enters the Race to the Top
Congratulations to education reformers from my home state, Washington, for helping to pass a package education reform bills that take a significant step forward for a state that did not even bother to apply for the first round of Race to the Top. Basically the state knew that it did not have a chance of [...]
Smarter Data Systems: Urban Districts Lead the Way
Part VII of the Five Principles for Smarter Data Systems series–a guest post from Lori Fey, Director Policy Initiatives, Michael & Susan Dell Foundation:
Bill Tucker and the Education Sector make important and relevant points about next-generation data systems in Five Design Principles for Smarter Data Systems to Support Student Learning. We should [...]
In Search of a Theory of Action: A Letter to Race to the Top Finalists
Part VI of this week’s Five Principles for Smarter Data Systems series–a guest post from Laurence Holt, EVP and Chief Product Officer for Wireless Generation, and an author of And Now For Something Completely Different, a guide to Instructional Improvement Systems from which the post below is adapted:
Dear Finalist,
First, congratulations! I assume you are busy [...]
Cliffs Notes to Race to the Top Applications
Trying to figure out what the 16 Race to the Top Finalists are doing that your state is not? Too lazy to read the thousands of pages of applications to figure it out. You are in luck. The Partnership for Learning in Washington state has summarized it for you. If there are other summaries out [...]
Smarter Data Systems: The Data-Assessment Partnership
Part V of this week’s Five Principles for Smarter Data Systems series–a guest post from Ben Boer, Senior Policy Associate at Advance Illinois:
Education Sector’s five principles for use of data re-imagine the relationship between data and education. Today, too much good data lives in silos — in state agencies, in districts, in schools, even at [...]
Five Big Ideas for Data Rigor….Without Mortis
Part IV of this week’s Five Principles for Smarter Data Systems series–a guest post from Dr. Heather Weiss, Founder and Director of the Harvard Family Research Project (HFRP):
Education Sector’s five design principles powerfully reframe the conversation about how, when and where to use data to support student learning so that it will not die in [...]
What Do Bicycles and Copiers Have to Do With Student Data Systems?
Part III of this week’s Five Principles for Smarter Data Systems series–a guest post from Vincent Cho, M.Ed., former teacher and assistant principal, now a PhD student and researcher on educational data use at The University of Texas at Austin:
Education Sector’s Five Design Principles raises important questions about the technology tools we provide to schools. [...]
Smarter Data Systems: The Classroom View
Part II of this week’s Five Principles for Smarter Data Systems series–a guest post from Norton Gusky, Coordinator of Educational Technology, Fox Chapel Area School District (PA):
We began a concentrated focus on using data about six years ago. We made the common mistake of purchasing an administrative system that really did nothing for teachers–and more [...]
We interrupt this gnashing of teeth . . .
with a little reality check.
Since the 16 finalists for Race to the Top funding were announced last Thursday, there has been a general gnashing of teeth and rending of garments.
“A sad day for reformville,” Petrelli writes. Today’s WaPo says the list isn’t “exclusive” enough.
I think that Secretary Duncan did just what you’d expect a college [...]
RTT4HE
Getting ESEA reauthorized is going to be a tough slog in the best of times, and these times are definitely not those. So it seems increasingly likely that Race to the Top will remain the center of the Obama administration’s education agenda. And not just the RTT program but the larger theory behind it: instead [...]
Five Design Principles for Smarter Data Systems
Part I of this week’s Five Principles for Smarter Data Systems series:
In the past decade, school districts and states have spent more than a billion dollars to build and implement data systems. Data about student learning—and the systems that collect, organize, and report on this data—are what U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan calls “the [...]
Race to the Top Bracketology
Fifteen states and Washington DC made it to the finals of the first round of the Race to the Top (RttT) – Colorado, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, and Tennessee. The Secretary of Education has stated “we expect no [...]
Goldilocks and the RTTT Finalists
The Department of Education announced today that there are 16 semi-finalists, out of 41 states (including the District of Columbia) that applied for a chance at the $4 billion in competitive funds known as Race to the Top (RTTT). These 16 states (Colorado, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New [...]
Performance Pay Adiosed in Arizona
Teacher performance based pay looks like it’s about to be shown the door in the Grand Canyon State. A judge ruled Arizona’s Career Ladder program unconstitutional because it isn’t open to all its districts. Expanding the program will cost $175 million—an unlikely feat as the state attempts to recover from the economic recession. The [...]
Title I College- and Career-Ready Standards
Last week President Obama announced plans to require all states to certify that their standards were “college- and career-ready” in order to obtain their portion of $14.5 billion in federal education funds. This is the single largest pot of education money in the federal budget–it’s previously been called Title I of the Elementary and Secondary [...]
When Policy Becomes Ideology
Last week Andy and I offered some ideas on the best way to characterize the theoretical and ideological divisions in education policy. Justin Cohen followed up:
I like Andy’s “Choice/Accountability” matrix, it’s far superior to the dichotomy that both of their posts reject. I worry, though, that it conflates “choice” and school-based “autonomy.” Right [...]
A Race to the Top Summation Question
Back when I was in college, my student government would do incredibly stupid and illogical things. Instead of setting priorities and deciding which groups to fund, they would try to appease everyone by giving every group half of what they asked for. This would result in things like a student group asking for a $250 [...]
Moving Beyond High School Exit Exams
Monday’s big New York Times article, As School Exit Tests Prove Tough, States Ease Standards, describes why we need to develop better accountability solutions for our nation’s high schools:
The real pattern in states has been that the standards are lowered so much that the exams end up not benefiting students who pass them while still [...]
College- and Career-Ready
The goal of helping all students become college- and career-ready has become a focal point for U.S. schools. This goal has been interwoven into the $48.6 billion State Fiscal Stabilization Fund and $4.35 billion Race to the Top Fund. In recent years, states have adopted more rigorous academic standards, increased graduation requirements, and improved access [...]
Can We Please Mess With Texas?
Mariah Blake describes some deeply disturbing developments in the ongoing process of writing new social studies textbook standards in Texas, which, due to the state’s size and textbook purchasing power, end up influencing what students are taught nationwide:
When the process began last January, the Texas Education Agency assembled a team to tackle each grade. In [...]
Top-Down Federal Programs
Teachers unions in two states have apparently decided their best route to attack the $4.35 billion Race to the Top (RTTT) Fund, the largest discretionary federal investment in public education ever, is to impugn it as “top-down” management.
I don’t get it. Aren’t all federal programs inherently top-down? Isn’t that what makes it federal, as opposed [...]
Counting Past 12
A couple weeks ago the Center for American Progress released a report looking at what happens to students in “Year 13,” the year after they leave high school. The piece is informative and useful, and has some particularly helpful tips if you’re a school district looking to be able to track your high school graduates [...]
Math in the Nation’s Cities
States are required by law to measure the academic progress of their students, but they use very different measurements and have an incentive to make their schools look good, so we can’t quite trust the results. For decades now, we’ve had national and state educational report cards that take a representative sample that allows us [...]
Random Thoughts on the Race to the Top
First of all kudos to the Dept. of Education staff for putting out these regulation and largely sticking to a reform agenda while making reasonable adjustments. While some technical details caught my attention like the myopic calculation of ensuring that education is a funding priority, I found myself agreeing with most of the priorities the [...]
A Developing Scandal in Oklahoma
In September a survey of Oklahoma high school students found only 2.8 percent were able to achieve a passing score on the U.S. Citizenship Test. The actual test has a 92.4 percent pass rate, so it would be quite a problem if Oklahoma high schoolers performed so poorly. But, thankfully, the results appear to have [...]
This Week’s Sign of the Apocalypse
North Carolina has figured out how to raise the number of adults with a high school diploma:
Because of a retroactive change in state graduation requirements, some students who didn’t pass the state competency tests as far back as 1981 may now get a high-school diploma.
In Forsyth County, an average of 30 to 40 students in [...]
Action Speaks Louder than Words
The National Center for Education Statistics released a mapping of state standards to the NAEP assessment confirming much of what we already knew about how states have set low expectations for students, and unfortunately many states have continued to lower their standards even further from 2005 to 2007. Education Sector has shown in a series [...]
First Take: $350m Assessment Competition Guidelines
Last week, the U.S. Department of Education released its initial overview of the competition process for the $350 million in stimulus funding set aside to improve student assessment (see Education Week’s helpful summary).
What We’ve Learned
It’s All About Accountability: Not surprising, but important to distinguish that ED’s plans are for assessments related to current NCLB mandates–reading [...]
How much is too much to pay for saved jobs?
Earlier this week the White House released a report that said that the stimulus package has saved or created 250,000 education jobs so far. Fortunately the roundness of the number suggests its level of accuracy. But, lets assume for a minute that the number is right. The question to ask, is what did schools do [...]
In Defense of Trains Running on Time
Talk about a buried lead. In a new Education Next profile of District of Columbia Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, the conclusion that, “Rhee’s most important achievement might be in the management fixes most people can’t see,” is hidden deep under a horrendous PhotoShop job of Rhee dressed as Joan of Arc and he-said she-said [...]
Crossing the Assessment Innovation Chasm
The announcement of a new National Science Foundation grant to the University of Wisconsin to further develop a game-based science and math learning program, along with an associated assessment system, caught my eye. It’s the exact type of promising technology-enabled assessment system that I wrote about in “Beyond the Bubble.” It’s also a good opportunity [...]
Improving Assessment: Getting from Here to There
In our op-ed earlier this week, my colleague Elena Silva and I reflected on Secretary Duncan’s Race to the Top “moon shot:”
The secretary wisely prods states to expand public charter school options, improve the quality of teaching, and address failing schools. But, unless his plans for improving our underlying navigational instruments—the tests that generate the [...]
Updated: Dear Iowa Republicans,
I get what you’re trying to do. Really I do. Implementing statewide graduation standards backed by high school exit exams sounds like a great idea in theory, but it just doesn’t work that well in practice.
There’s ample evidence from other states that the tests try to have it both ways: they get (rightly) criticized for [...]
Getting a Good Shot
“Flu shots here.” Drive by any pharmacy and you’ll see signs promoting the vaccine for this year’s expected strain of influenza. (And later on, we’ll all be expected to line up again to get vaccinated against the H1N1 flu.)
No one expects that this year’s vaccination will protect us against next year’s flu. But, according to [...]
Can You Support “Growth” and Oppose “Value-Added”?
The National Education Association (NEA), the nation’s largest teacher’s union, opposes the draft regulations for the $4 billion Race to the Top Fund primarily because of language requiring states to be able to link teachers with student test score results. They cannot support it because:
Reviews of research on value-added methodologies for estimating teacher “effects” based [...]
Defining NCLB’s Value
Mike Petrilli and Tom Loveless take to the pages of the NY Times to argue, yet again, that No Child Left Behind has been harmful to gifted students. Their real critique is with a recent report that attempts to show, with state test trend lines, that NCLB has benefited both top and bottom students. That’s [...]
Green Dot Has a Long Way to Go
A couple of months ago, I postulated that Green Dot’s new high school takeover, Locke High School, would start to outperform two other chronically low performing LA Unified schools—one run by the mayor and one run by the district (here) . Now Green Dot and the mayor just took possession of these schools at the [...]
Will Race to the Top Spur a New Generation of Assessment?
Perhaps. Significantly improving student assessment is the real “moon shot” for the stimulus funds.
A new Education Week article highlights the potential impact of these funds:
What now seems to be an intractable choice between richer tasks and reliable data, though, could be mediated by advancements in technology that could improve access, cost, and reliability of performance-based [...]
Willful Misunderstanding
Over at the National Journal’s group edu-bigwig blog, they’re debating the question “Are the Race To the Top Requirements Fair?” A lot of the discussion centers on the RTT requirement that states eliminate prohibitions against linking student test score data with individual teachers. Most of the bloggers are in favor of this, on the grounds [...]
Taking Your College to Court
A college should be responsible for the career prospects of its graduates. That’s the conceit put forth by Trina Thompson, a 27-year-old graduate of Monroe College, who is suing her alma mater for the $70,000 she paid for tuition because she has not been able to been able to find a job since graduating in [...]
The Bland Accuracy of the GAO
Today the GAO released an evaluation of District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS). Long known as one of the worst-performing districts in the country, it has been the site of radical change in the last two years ever since Mayor Adrian Fenty took over the schools and hired Chancellor Michelle Rhee. Today’s GAO report is [...]
Just Asking
To all those who argue mayoral control of schools is bad for democracy, isn’t it a good thing that schools are the issue in this year’s New York City mayoral race? There’s an incumbent mayor up for reelection using his success running the schools as his major claim, and now we have a challenger disputing [...]
Higher Education Accountability Systems
In 2008 and 2009, Education Sector conducted a comprehensive analysis of higher education accountability systems in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. We analyzed thousands of documents, Web sites, policies, and laws attempting to answer two questions:
What information do states collect on their higher education institutions?
How does the state use that [...]
The Truth About New York City’s High Schools
Dana Goldstein and Ezra Klein both linked last week to a graphic showing the school choice process in New York. The graphic is originally from an excellent report by Clara Hemphill and Kim Nauer on the impact small high schools are having in New York City, but, unfortunately, Goldstein and Klein continue the media’s misinterpretation [...]
Changing the Game
Typically video games are associated with violence and turning kids into couch potatoes. But a report released by the Sesame Workshop this week challenges this stereotype. The report, titled “Game Changer,” discusses the potential benefits digital learning has on educating children and motivating them to make healthier choices.
Panelists commenting on the report at The Woodrow [...]
Tale of Three Turnarounds
Turning around a low performing high school may be the most difficult task in K-12 education. This week Sec. Duncan has suggested that charter schools should play a critical role in the effort to turn around low performing schools. Perhaps this comparison will start to suggest why. There is a lot to learn about two [...]
Assessing the Common Core
I’m at the Council of Chief State School Officers’ (CCSSO) assessment conference, so naturally there was a big plenary session focused on the common core standards work (led in part by CCSSO). But, even though the session was held before hundreds of assessment experts—and despite Secretary of Education Duncan’s commitment of $350 million in stimulus [...]
More Standards, Please
Why is a highly promising, successfully piloted technology that can help resolve a number of important issues around testing students with special needs — and save money — still sitting on the shelf?
In this case, the barrier is getting the tools to integrate into current testing processes and software platforms. Sounds complex and geeky, but [...]
Scaling Innovation in Assessment (in China)
While the rest of the policy world is at the national charter school love fest conference, I’m in Los Angeles at the national student assessment conference.
I had one of my more disturbing, but unfortunately, not surprising, conversations yesterday after a session where I learned more about an innovative, NSF-funded science assessment project. “What’s next?” I [...]
USA vs. The World
United States schoolchildren are not the highest performing in the world, on average. This is well known and constantly cited in various calls-to-arms, from the memorable “hostile foreign power” rhetoric of A Nation at Risk to garden-variety speeches warning of economic threats from brainy children in Beijing and Bangalore. The track record is spotty, to [...]
Arts, Continued
Per Chad below, new results from the NAEP 8th grade Arts & Music test show very little change over time. So little change that’s it’s really kind of fascinating. In 1997, respondents got 42 percent of the art questions right. In 2008, they also got 42 percent of the questions right. Of the 12 listed [...]
New Report: NCLB Did Not Narrow Arts Curriculum
Under the headline, “Frequency of arts instruction remains steady, ” a new report from the National Assessment of Education Progress concluded:
In 2008, fifty-seven percent of eighth-graders attended schools where music instruction was offered at least three or four times a week, and 47 percent attended schools where visual arts instruction was offered at least as [...]
Positive Reinforcement
The ES on-line discussion on positive incentives continues today (here). Join Michael Barber, Sandy Kress, Dominic Brewer, Andy Rotherham and myself in discussing the role of positive incentives in our school system. While the conversation started off focused on positive incentives and school reward programs, we quickly broadened the scope. This is in recognition that [...]
Diplomas and Dropouts
Postsecondary institutions with similar student bodies do not achieve similar outcomes. Even among the most competitive institutions, where entering students must be in the top 10-20 percent of their high school class and score above 655 on each section of the SAT or above 29 on the ACT, graduation rates vary widely. These institutions accept [...]
Think Positive
You get more flies with honey than vinegar. In Psychology 101 you learn that people are more responsive to positive reinforcement than negative reinforcement or punishment. While both positive incentives and punishment can be effective at modifying behavior, punishment tends to lead to other negative responses like anger and resentment. Yet, much of our current [...]
The Condition of Education: Economic and Racial Segregation
The National Center for Education Statistics holds an annual Condition of Education event that’s sort of like a State of the Union speech, only without politics, fanfare, or clapping, and with graphs and a sole focus on education. Other than the annual “special analysis” section (this year’s is on International Assessments and will come out [...]
Lie To Me Frame Policies With Human Nature in Mind
Kevin Drum responds to this post about school funding, futility, etc:
It sounds to me like Kevin C. is agreeing that suburban parents will protect their schools like crazed weasels, and the only way to overcome this is to lie to them early and often. And he thinks I’m the pessimistic one?
In retrospect, titling that [...]
State Budgets Vary
The Center on Reinventing Public Education last night released an interesting analysis of state budgets under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the stimulus bill). The biggest takeaway is that the current economic crisis, combined with the federal government’s response, will impact states in very different ways. The chart at left shows expected state K-12 [...]
Lie To Me
As a rule I enjoy Kevin Drum’s blog at Mother Jones. But his occasional forays into education generally descend into naysaying and pessimism–Kevin’s one all-purpose insight on the subject is that education policy is hard and as such not worth trying to solve. For example:
But to some extent education is a zero-sum game. If [...]
Harlem Miracles?
Elizabeth Green asked for my thoughts on a recent study of the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), especially in relation to two counter-claims on its findings: either the HCZ is, as David Brooks posited, a “Harlem Miracle,” or, as argued by Aaron Pallas over at Gotham Schools, Brooks is “gullible” and “dumbstruck,” and it’s just too [...]
Civics 101
Jay Greene continues to fight the fight on vouchers:
the suggestion that DC vouchers were not democratically created because they affected DC and DC does not have a vote in Congress wouldn’t just call into question the legitimacy of DC vouchers. All federal laws affecting DC would be undemocratic by this standard. This would include NCLB [...]
Comparing Effectiveness
The NY Times magazine last weekend ran a lengthy interview with President Obama. Part of it deals with education and his opinions on education, but the most interesting passage was when the president is talking about health care. In it, he describes how, while a patient’s involvement in their own care is a good thing, [...]
Guest Blog: The Realities of K–12 Virtual Education
“The Realities of K–12 Virtual Education” is a policy brief released this month (April 2009) by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice. Written by education policy expert Gene Glass, the brief summarizes the growth in virtual schools over the past decade and discusses questions of costs, funding, and quality before recommending regulation, [...]
Mayoral Control is, in Fact, about Style
Secretary Duncan’s public endorsement of mayoral control in New York City this month comes on the heels of months of controversy for the city’s chancellor Joel Klein, whose tenure seems to be endangering not only NYC’s mayoral control but the viability of Mayor Bloomberg’s entire reform agenda. The allegations driving the calls for Klein to [...]
Stimulating Stimulus Discussion
The Department of Education is in the process or has distributed the first $44 billion of K-12 stimulus funding. Most of this funding will flow to school districts based on established formulas. Clearly this funding provides a great opportunity for local education leaders to do the right thing with the funds and make investments that [...]
The Other Lake Wobegon
There are a lot of cute references to No Child Left Behind as some sort of Lake Wobegon law, because of its provision that all children must be “proficient” by 2014. The reference is to Garrison Keillor’s famous book by the same name, where all the children from the town of Lake Wobegon are above [...]
Late Choices
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan today released a letter to chief state school officers regarding regulations passed back in October. In what is no April Fool’s joke, his letter rolls back a regulation that could have helped provide parents of children enrolled in unsuccessful schools the option of choosing a better one.
No Child Left Behind [...]
Maybe Alaska Should Use the Stimulus Funds to Settle Adequacy Lawsuit?
Last week Governor Palin declared that Alaska would only apply for around half of the stimulus funding for which it is eligible; largely funding for infrastructure projects, but not for operational programs like education (here). This of course was seen much more as a political move than a policy one, and as you would expect, [...]
Illegals Get All the Breaks
The DREAM Act was just reintroduced in the House and Senate…again. First time was in 2001 and last time was in 2007, when its passage fell short by just a handful of votes. And again this bill, which is essentially about a “path to citizenship” for youth who were brought to the U.S. as children, [...]
Some things you can’t explain, like why we’re all embracing conventional wisdom in a world that’s so unconvential
The longer I work in public policy, the more I think about conventional wisdom.
These little nuggets of thought–some essentially correct, others partially so, others not at all–are the building blocks of a shared narrative that profoundly shapes how we see the world, and thus how we act within it. While some methods of changing public [...]
Backfilling Cuts? Not at the State Level
In California, the state took action last month to address an over $40 billion budget gap through a combination of program cuts, new taxes and a whole lot of other manipulations. The voters will decide what they think about the package in a special election on May 19th. While the actions taken were historic, they [...]
Points for Style?
Nick Kristoff’s recent column about Michelle Rhee brings up a common trope in school reform controversies: “leadership style,” with Kristoff averring that “Ms. Rhee’s weakness is her bedside manner.” Per Eduwonk–really? Is that all? Read Dana Goldstein’s informative new TAP article about UFT President Randi Weingarten, Rhee’s chief antagonist, who “speaks in the commanding, practiced [...]
Murray Vs. Murray
Earlier this month Charles Murray, of The Bell Curve fame, gave this year’s Irving Kristol Lecture at the American Enterprise Institute. Most of it reads like an Ayn Rand objectivist diatribe against socialist democratic states using”Europe” as the code word for all that is wrong with the world. Apparently that sort of thing is popular [...]
The Rich Get Richer
Per Sam Dillon’s New York Times article about how education stimulus funds are being distributed through funding formulas that advantage rich states over poor states, it’s all true, there’s no excuse for it (note the lack of anyone offering a policy justification), for a more detailed (but not boring!) explanation see this from Marguerite Roza [...]
Tennessee Growth Models: A Response from Dr. William Sanders
Ed. Note: Last week, Education Sector published a report titled “Are We There Yet? What Policymakers Can Learn About Tennessee’s Growth Model.” The report examines Tennessee’s model for using measures and projections of annual student learning growth as a means of determining whether schools are making “Adequate Yearly Progress” under the No Child Left Behind [...]
The Potential for Obama’s Promise Neighborhoods
Every week, Geoffrey Canada’s hallmark Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) provides well over 10,000 students with the kinds of educational and developmental supports and opportunities that suburban students enjoy as a matter of course. Almost two years ago, then-candidate Barack Obama announced his plan to replicate the HCZ’s efforts in twenty “Promise Neighborhoods” across the country. [...]
The Real 21st Century Skills
The question of so-called “21st Century Skills” has been subject to hot debate in education circles recently; you can read Elena Silva’s thoughtful take here, a more skeptical perspective in a recent U.S. News & World Report column from Andy Rotherham here, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills web site, hostility to the whole idea [...]
Comparing Treatments
The recently-passed stimulus bill provides money for comparative analysis of medical treatments for various ailments. It’s the first such authorization, and it will allow us to answer whether ailment X is best treated with pills, therapy, or surgery. These types of comparisons have long been absent in discussions of educational pedagogy, but yesterday’s IES/ Mathematica [...]
Lessons from Grey’s Anatomy?
Beyond the Bubble discusses how technology can provide opportunities to improve student assessment. The report briefly highlights iStan, a life-like, sensor filled mannequin used by medical and nursing schools to simulate patient interactions and responses.
Medical education is obviously very different from K-12. But, it’s not so different that we can’t learn from the practice. Examples [...]
Reassurance Needed
In addition to fully funding NCLB, the stimulus bill includes a gargantuan $54 billion fiscal stabilization fund for education. In many ways this money is best understood as not education-related at all, but simply a politically palatable way for the federal government to prevent pro-cyclical state and local budget cuts that would accelerate the current [...]
Bill Tucker on Technology’s Potential to Transform Academic Testing
In a new Education Sector report, Chief Operating Officer Bill Tucker, argues that technology has the potential to drastically improve our current assessment systems and practices, leading to significant improvements in teaching and learning in the nation’s classrooms.
Beyond the Bubble (cont.)
Below, Chad highlighted my new Education Sector report on technology and the future of student assessment. In the report, I show how technology can help to both deepen and broaden assessment practice–by assessing more comprehensively and by assessing new skills and concepts.
Beyond the Bubble, of course, refers to the multiple choice question types that dominate [...]
Stalled at Launch
In K-12 education we have long debates about the purposes of public schooling, whether the focus should be on the basics or 21st century skills or if that’s even a useful distinction, the best ways to assess student learning, how to contruct accountability systems that do more harm than good, etc. But underyling that discussion [...]
Beyond the Bubble
During the 2008 presidential campaign, candidate Barack Obama frequently made comments like this one from April, where he said too much time was spent, “preparing students for tests that do not provide any valuable, timely feedback on how to improve a student’s learning. Creativity has been drained from classrooms as too many teachers are forced [...]
That’s Settled
The recently-enacted stimulus bill includes $13 billion in extra funding for Title I of the No Child Left Behind Act. Since Title I currently receives a little over $12 billion per year and the maximum amount authorized under the law is $25 billion, by my count NCLB is now “fully funded” and I assume those [...]
Duncan Puts Up a Three-Pointer
There’s a clear message emerging from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s early public pronouncements: He’s going to push for higher standards than most states have adopted under NCLB, and that may include national standards (and tests). In pushing the Obama administration’s stimulus priorities in a speech yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Council [...]
Big Edu-cuts Proposed for Stimulus Package, Maybe
The latest tin can to come flying out of the maelstrom over the Congressional stimulus package is a document purporting to be recommendations for education cuts by the staff of centrist senators Ben Nelson, a Nebraska Democrat, and Republican Susan Collins of Maine, increasingly key players in the stimulus debate.
Passed along by folks with a [...]
Bill-Board
Bill Gates, borrowing a tradition from his mentor Warren Buffett, has published his first Annual Letter, his reflections on the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, where he has been full-time since leaving Microsoft last summer.
Education commentators have focused on what they’ve characterized as a quasi-mea culpa in Gates’ discussion of the foundation’s [...]
Lowering Student Loan Default Rates: What One Consortium of Historically Black Institutions Did to Succeed 
College and Career-Ready: Using Outcomes Data to Hold High Schools Accountable for Student Success
03/19/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on college graduation rates and the NCAA Tournament in the Detroit Free Press.
03/19/10 | Linda Perlstein links to Education Sector's "College- and Career-Ready" event.
03/17/10 | Ben Miller's column on graduation rates and NCAA Tournament eligibility is mentioned on The Wall Street Journal's The Daily Fix.
03/17/10 | Kevin Carey's critique of Diane Ravitch's latest book is quoted in Doublethink's Conventional Folly blog.
03/15/10 | Ben Miller pens an op-ed for US News & World Report on using graduation rates to determine NCAA Tournament eligibility.