On Monday, five states announced that they would add at least 300 hours of learning time to some schools in the fall of 2013. These states—Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, and Tennessee— are working with the Ford Foundation and National Center on Time & Learning  to roll out this initiative in two stages. In 2013-2014, 35 schools that enroll about 17,500 students will increasContinue Reading »

“A college system at the breaking point meets the Internet revolution.” Jeff Selingo, a member of Education Sector’s new K20 Task Force, talks MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses) and the future of higher education. (On Point)

With a January 2013 deadline pending. School district officials in New York are grappling with the amount of the weight to give student test scores, observations,Continue Reading »

Providing tuition aid for those who don’t truly need it. Richard Kahlenberg calls tuition tax breaks “food stamps for the relatively wealthy” and encourages Congress, like Education Sector’s Steve Burd, to allow the tax breaks to expire, in favor of diverting that money to truly needy students, like Pell Grant recipients. If you haven’t read Burd’s most recent report, which shows that upper-midContinue Reading »

Too many chefs and only one pot. Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute says the problem with education reform is that “there are so many cooks in the education kitchen that nobody is really in charge.” (Flypaper)

Learning from the best. Students from one Indiana elementary school without access to cool technology, like iPads, are getting after-school lessons from tContinue Reading »

With headlines like “Test scores down sharply; biggest decline for needy students,” it’s no wonder that politicians are sometimes reluctant to raise educational standards: it can make them look bad. That’s unfortunate, because here we have a state, New York, essentially saying that it’s test score proficiency bar was too low and that kids need higher standards. InsContinue Reading »

Chad Aldeman discusses Boston’s and New York’s mandatory school choice programs with Professors Alvin Roth and Atila Abdulkadiroglu, two of the economists who developed them. The choice matching systems are examined in detail in a new Education Sector report entitled Matchmaking: Enabling Mandatory Public School Choice in New York and Boston. Tweet Continue Reading »

When I read the headline of this New York Times article (Leaving the City for the Schools, and Regretting It), I was excited – perhaps there was finally an article extolling some of the virtues of urban public schools. Yes, these schools have plenty of troubles and there are schools in NYC that any parent would run from (assuming they could), but there are also schools in NYC that provide a goContinue Reading »