Happy National Teacher Day. Here are 13 people you may not know were teachers. (Parade)

Dating advice to college men. This 10-year-old is not mad; he’s just disappointed in college guys. Watch him teach them how to be gentlemen and treat everyone with kindness. (BuzzFeed)

Time off makes better students. While gap years are popular in Europe, the idea of putting off college after hContinue Reading »

There’s an important new study out looking at what happened in states that mandated all high school juniors take a college entrance exam. It measured the impacts for the first two states with mandates in place, Colorado and Illinois, which both created mandates around the year 2000 forcing all students to take the ACT*. It found some promising results.

Obviously test-taking went up, partContinue Reading »

Accountable for student achievement. Principals in Los Angeles Unified School District will now be evaluated, in part, on student performance. (District Dossier/Education Week)

Gauging college and career readiness. Wisconsin’s state superintendent of instruction wants the state to pay for all 11th-graders to take the ACT, as well as a career skills test, so officials can see if students Continue Reading »

California is touting a big number this week: 95. That’s the percentage of students who passed the state’s high school exit exam, a requirement for graduation. It’s 4.6 percent higher than in 2006, when the exit exam requirement began, and includes notable gains among the African American and Latino populations. It’s a number worth touting.

Or is it?

Opinion poll on public schools released. The poll, conducted by Phi Delta Kappa and Gallup, asked questions about issues such as trust in teachers, technology, test scores, unions, and choice. Hechinger Ed distills the essentials for you.

ACT reports on college readiness. The ACT has released its yearly report on college and career readiness of high school graduates who took the ACT. TheContinue Reading »

Colleges and universities distinguish themselves from one another in lots of different ways– scholarly reknown, the size of the endowment, success on the athletic fields, etc. But the most commonly-used measure is probably the “quality” of the freshman class, as measured by standardized tests like the SAT and ACT. Average incoming SAT scores at University of Texas campuses, foContinue Reading »

Despite piles of research showing what works in raising retention and graduation rates, more emphasis on the need for college graduates, and new instruments to measure student engagement, ACT published data yesterday showing we still lose about a quarter of college students after one year and only manage to graduate about half of our students in five years. These are nearly identical to the ratContinue Reading »

So says my former employer Kati Haycock in today’s NYTimes article about a recent study from ACT documenting the lack of rigor in high school curricula. Kati’s talking about her suggestion that some analysis might be in order. I’ve got nothing to add, other than to say that (A) there’s every reason to believe things are as bad as the report says they are (look at remediaContinue Reading »