Before the holiday, Chad posted an item about a November ‘08 NBER study by Tom Kane and others titled “Can You Recognize An Effective Teacher When You Recruit One?” Their conclusion: not really. Even though the study included ”a number of non-traditional predictors of effectiveness including teaching specific content knowledge, cognitive ability, personality traits, feelings of [...]
All Posts Tagged: 'Malcolm Gladwell'
The Gladwell/ Kane Theory of Teacher Recruitment
Overheard: a business CEO will hire any Harvard MBA before they even begin the program. It isn’t the education itself that makes them valuable employees, in this estimation, it’s the screen that let them in that proves their quality. In education, it turns out all of our traditional screens, and even some untraditional ones, don’t [...]
Finlandia
We returned from Finland on Saturday, so here are my initial overall impressions, focused mostly on the implications for K–12 education. To begin, let me acknowledge that one can’t draw firm conclusions about cause and effect after a short visit. Spending a week in a far-off country means you return knowing a lot more than [...]
The Ryan Leaf Syndrome
What do leaders in other industries do when they aren’t certain about which credentials matter for success? If the markets for football quarterbacks and financial advisers are any indication, as Malcolm Gladwell argues they should be, education leaders must be willing to interview and try out many candidates for teaching jobs.
Making professional sports predictions based [...]
Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers, Part 2
Continuing from yesterday’s post about Gladwell’s new book, which is basically an inventory of all the things besides individual talent and initiative that lead to unusual success. Put another way, it’s a book about unequal opportunity–how individual success and failure are a product of external circumstances, much more so than people like to believe, and how [...]
Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers,, Part 1
Malcom Gladwell’s new book, Outliers, was released last week. I read it over the weekend, on the theory that I had roughly 60 days–90 at the outside–before I’d heard it referenced at so many conferences that mere mention of the central anecdotes would cause me to reach for a hotel pen and stab myself in [...]
Race and IQ
Malcolm Gladwell’s latest piece forays into the IQ-race debate most recently scandalized by the declaration by James Watson, co-winner of the 1953 Nobel Prize for the discovery of DNA, that Watson is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because of Africans’ general lack of intelligence. Gladwell’s article reviews a new book by James Flynn [...]
Mysteries, Puzzles, and Think Tanks
Malcom Gladwell published an article in the New Yorker a few weeks ago about the difference between a puzzle and mystery. While his focus was mainly on Enron, Watergate, and the changing nature of foreign intelligence, it strikes me that the distinction has a lot of relevance to some of the ongoing tensions between the [...]
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
03/11/10 | Kevin Carey is quoted on the rising costs of education in The Economist.
03/10/10 | Chad Aldeman Aldeman's False Fronts is quoted on Accuracy in Academia.
03/09/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on loan origination on the Firedog Lake blog.
03/07/10 | Kevin Carey calls for a Race to the Top in higher education in a column in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
03/08/10 | Andrew Rotherham's Eduwonk post on RTT finalists is quoted on Class Struggle.
03/07/10 | Andrew Rotherham is quoted on the success of MATCH in The Times-Picayune.
03/06/10 | Eduwonk's reaction to Ohio's status as a RTT finalist is cited in a Wall Street Journal editorial.
03/05/10 | Andrew Rotherham's reaction to New York's status as a Race to the Top finalist is cited on National Journal.