K-12 Education

Online education offers more choices for students and personalizes their learning, something traditional public schools can’t always do. It’s adaptable and flexible to students’ needs. It provides credit recovery options for students who have fallen behind, accelerated options for those breezing ahead of their peers, and everything in between.

This is why a moraContinue Reading »

Sigh. It’s now considered “federal overreach” to insist that states set performance goals for their students and schools. If you thought we settled this argument back in 1994, you would be wrong. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., the ranking Republican on the Senate HELP Committee, backed out of bipartisan talks with Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, because Harkin insisted on the goal that students make sContinue Reading »

You can read summaries of the latest No Child Left Behind (NCLB) reauthorization attempt, Sen. Tom Harkin’s Strengthening America’s Schools Act at Politics K-12 or New America, but here are 11 key takeaways from the bill:

1. Some Good Common Sense: If you wait 11 years (and counting) between reauthorization, there are going to be some common sense fixes that nearly everyone agrees Continue Reading »

Online education offers more choices for students and personalizes their learning, something traditional public schools can’t always do. It’s adaptable and flexible to students’ needs. It provides credit recovery options for students who have fallen behind, accelerated options for those breezing ahead of their peers, and everything in between.

This is why a moraContinue Reading »

While Mississippi’s population is predominantly white, its public schools are less so. In fact, public schools in Mississippi remain nearly as segregated as they did in the 1960s, writes Alan Richard in the Hechinger Report. In 2010, 51 percent of the public school population in Mississippi was black but only 44 percent were white students—one of the lowest percentages of white stuContinue 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 »

More than 50 percent of students who have completed Algebra II in high school find themselves in a remedial math course in college. (Even 13 percent of those who complete Calculus do.) How can this happen?

A new report suggests that these students have been pushed through basic math concepts, such as math modeling and complex measurement, so they can complete high school graduation requiContinue Reading »

Someone needs to tell U.S. News & World Report‘s Robert Morse that data he says he wants to include in his magazine’s high school rankings are already available. In a short interview with the Education Writers Association’s Emily Richmond, Morse said:

The rankings don’t tell us how students do once they leave a high-scoring high school – for exContinue Reading »

Before you roll your eyes at another MOOC story, consider this: An Ohio community college has developed a math MOOC not for its students, but for its local high school students. Why? To get more students math-ready before they come to campus.

It’s an interesting take on the Massive Open Online Course, which — for all its fanfare — still hasn’t seemed to have developed a scalable, sustainContinue Reading »

You can read summaries of the latest No Child Left Behind (NCLB) reauthorization attempt, Sen. Tom Harkin’s Strengthening America’s Schools Act at Politics K-12 or New America, but here are 11 key takeaways from the bill:

1. Some Good Common Sense: If you wait 11 years (and counting) between reauthorization, there are going to be some common sense fixes that nearly everyone agrees Continue Reading »

In an Education Sector report released today—The New State Achievement Gap: How Waivers Could Make It Worse-Or Better—Constance Clark and I report the effects of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) on education inequality, the ill that the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was long ago written to cure. ESEA was conceived, we should remember, as a way for the federal government to help stateContinue Reading »

More than 50 percent of students who have completed Algebra II in high school find themselves in a remedial math course in college. (Even 13 percent of those who complete Calculus do.) How can this happen?

A new report suggests that these students have been pushed through basic math concepts, such as math modeling and complex measurement, so they can complete high school graduation requiContinue Reading »

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 »

The National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems is concerned that public sector pensions are the “whipping-boy for state budget ills across the country,” which they tackled by hosting “1,000 trustees, administrators, state and local officials, investment, financial and union officers, pension staff and regulators” at a six-day conference at the Hilton Hawaiian Village on beautifulContinue Reading »

The big news out of the latest Public Education Finances Report is official confirmation that school districts spent less money per student in 2010-11 than they had the year before, the first one-year decline in nearly four decades. It’s worth taking some time to reflect on that fact, but the full report is also a valuable source of data on state and district revenues and expenditures and the eContinue Reading »

Sigh. It’s now considered “federal overreach” to insist that states set performance goals for their students and schools. If you thought we settled this argument back in 1994, you would be wrong. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., the ranking Republican on the Senate HELP Committee, backed out of bipartisan talks with Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, because Harkin insisted on the goal that students make sContinue Reading »

You can read summaries of the latest No Child Left Behind (NCLB) reauthorization attempt, Sen. Tom Harkin’s Strengthening America’s Schools Act at Politics K-12 or New America, but here are 11 key takeaways from the bill:

1. Some Good Common Sense: If you wait 11 years (and counting) between reauthorization, there are going to be some common sense fixes that nearly everyone agrees Continue Reading »

In an Education Sector report released today—The New State Achievement Gap: How Waivers Could Make It Worse-Or Better—Constance Clark and I report the effects of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) on education inequality, the ill that the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was long ago written to cure. ESEA was conceived, we should remember, as a way for the federal government to help stateContinue Reading »

Sigh. It’s now considered “federal overreach” to insist that states set performance goals for their students and schools. If you thought we settled this argument back in 1994, you would be wrong. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., the ranking Republican on the Senate HELP Committee, backed out of bipartisan talks with Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, because Harkin insisted on the goal that students make sContinue Reading »

You can read summaries of the latest No Child Left Behind (NCLB) reauthorization attempt, Sen. Tom Harkin’s Strengthening America’s Schools Act at Politics K-12 or New America, but here are 11 key takeaways from the bill:

1. Some Good Common Sense: If you wait 11 years (and counting) between reauthorization, there are going to be some common sense fixes that nearly everyone agrees Continue Reading »

In an Education Sector report released today—The New State Achievement Gap: How Waivers Could Make It Worse-Or Better—Constance Clark and I report the effects of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) on education inequality, the ill that the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was long ago written to cure. ESEA was conceived, we should remember, as a way for the federal government to help stateContinue Reading »

The National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems is concerned that public sector pensions are the “whipping-boy for state budget ills across the country,” which they tackled by hosting “1,000 trustees, administrators, state and local officials, investment, financial and union officers, pension staff and regulators” at a six-day conference at the Hilton Hawaiian Village on beautifulContinue Reading »

The big news out of the latest Public Education Finances Report is official confirmation that school districts spent less money per student in 2010-11 than they had the year before, the first one-year decline in nearly four decades. It’s worth taking some time to reflect on that fact, but the full report is also a valuable source of data on state and district revenues and expenditures and the eContinue 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 »

Even in a perfect world—say, Missouri in the mid-1990’s—enhancing pension benefits for teachers creates winners and losers. A new report on Missouri’s teacher pension system shines a light on just how stark the difference is—and how damaging these changes will be for the teaching profession overall.

From 1995 to 2002, Missouri implemented a series of retroactive benefit enhancements to tContinue Reading »

Well it was a long and troubled birth, and a snowstorm confined the keynote speaker to an electronic feed, but officials in Providence, R.I. on Monday finally launched the groundbreaking non-profit education management organization that will work to turn around the city’s lowest-performing public schools.

United Providence — or UP! — is a novel collaboration between the Providence TeacheContinue Reading »

Conventional wisdom states that when politicians make hard decisions, they’re punished at the polls. But Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island is proving to be the exception to the rule.

In 2011, Raimondo, general treasurer of Rhode Island, spearheaded the painful but necessary public pension reform that Rhode Island passed on November 17, 2011. (Many of those reforms were anticipated in an EducContinue Reading »

Online education offers more choices for students and personalizes their learning, something traditional public schools can’t always do. It’s adaptable and flexible to students’ needs. It provides credit recovery options for students who have fallen behind, accelerated options for those breezing ahead of their peers, and everything in between.

This is why a moraContinue Reading »

Before you roll your eyes at another MOOC story, consider this: An Ohio community college has developed a math MOOC not for its students, but for its local high school students. Why? To get more students math-ready before they come to campus.

It’s an interesting take on the Massive Open Online Course, which — for all its fanfare — still hasn’t seemed to have developed a scalable, sustainContinue Reading »

Blended learning was the topic of a lively Education Sector panel discussion on March 22, and, along with the video, we wanted to share some highlights. The inspiration for the talk was a recent Education Sector article on the Alliance Tennenbaum Family Technology High School, a two-year-old Los Angeles charter school that mixes traditional teacher-led lessons, collaborative learning, and indepContinue Reading »