Should banks stay in the student loan business? Secretary Duncan weighs in. (Wall Street Journal)
Which state now has the most ambitious version of a “smart cap” for charter schools? (Detroit News)
What do you have to do to get tenure in L.A.? Apparently not much. (LA Times)
What can graphic novels teach us about verbs? (Sherman Dorn)
All Posts Tagged: 'Teacher Quality'
QUICK Hits
Extending School Time
A new report by the Center for American Progress on district-union partnerships to extend school time profiles three models, including Brooklyn Generation. More about Brooklyn Generation and the Generation Schools model, which extends time for students but not for teachers, in this ES report and on our online discussion, which you can read here.
Also, tomorrow [...]
The Link Between School Design and Quality Teaching
Generations Schools has found a way to redesign teachers’ work, ending the isolated classroom, enabling ongoing teacher collaboration and planning, and giving teachers time to learn from each other and to learn from their work. It has extended its school year to 200 days for students—20 more than the national average—without having to extend work [...]
QUICK Hits
Are promoting teacher quality and promoting equal access to good teachers mutually exclusive? Ed Trust doesn’t think so. (Education Trust)
If parents are still their child’s first and most important teacher, will proposed Delaware legislation help them play a more active role? (Delaware Online)
Could the head of a teachers union find happiness running a school system? [...]
Pie-Net Helps Ed Reformers Prepare for Race to the Top
The Policy Innovators in Education Network (Pie-Net) held their policy summit last week in Denver. If you are not familiar with Pie-Net that is a shame; it is a network of the education advocacy organizations (EAOs) from around the country that are doing the work in the trenches to get policies implemented to really transform [...]
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 [...]
Salary Schedule Slopes
At the 2008 annual meeting of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teacher’s union, then-Senator Barack Obama endorsed changing teacher compensation structures from traditional single salary schedules—where teachers are paid based only on their educational credentials and years of experience—to one reflecting the performance of individual teachers in the classroom. His mention of pay [...]
Not Exactly
Fred Hiatt sat down with Bill Gates to talk education reform, producing a pretty straightforward reformist summary in the Post yesterday. One point, however, deserves clarification. Hiatt said:
In fact, Gates said, evidence shows no connection between teaching quality and most of the measures used in contracts to determine pay. Seniority, holding a master’s degree or teacher’s [...]
The Difference Between Knowing and Caring
Frank Heppner, honors professor of biological sciences at the University of Rhode Island, wrote a good column in the Chronicle a couple of weeks ago that nicely illustrates the importance of understanding the nature of problems. Heppner’s essential point is that because universities value research more than teaching, teaching suffers, hurting students and the university [...]
Economic Theory in Teacher Salaries: Why the ProComp Negotiations Matter
Imagine you have complete control over a new school district. You need to design a salary structure that fits what we know about education. Empirical evidence suggests that:
Teachers have steep learning curves, making dramatic improvements in the first few years, but showing few gains, or possibly even slowing, as they near retirement.
Teachers, as [...]
Self-Tying Logical Knots
Reporting from the recent AFT convention, Sherman Dorn makes an important point w/r/t a discussion led by Susan Ohanian (who is waaaay out there on the fringes of anti-NCLB absolutism, to the point where she recently took to the pages of Kappan to denounce the NEA for being too moderate on No Child):
Ohanian worried about [...]
Hearing Back on Benwood
I’ve been getting a lot of feedback on the report about the Benwood Initiative that we recently released. Some who appreciated the “nuance” of the findings, others who had great methodological questions, and a smattering of folks who offered terse commentary that can be summed up as “you’re saying it takes everything to change the [...]
Compete or Litigate?
Earlier this week I received a press release from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) annoucing, with enthusiasm, that “a coalition of parents, students, community groups, and legal advocates sued the United States Department of Education and Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings for violating the teacher quality provisions of the No Child [...]
Stop. No, STOP. Read this Report.
This report should be ( and I promise this phrase will be used with extreme judiciousness here at the Quick and the Ed) required reading for anyone interested in improving the quality of teachers in American classrooms.
Written by Robert Gordon, Thomas Kane, and Douglas Staiger, the premise is straightforward: school districts should pay less attention [...]
Anecdotes, Suspicion, Discrimination, and How Gender Sterotypes Hurt Early Learning
I think this Tampa Tribune article (hat tip to the EdWonks) about the suspicions unfairly cast on male kindergarten teachers is pretty silly. For starters, it’s a prime example of the non-education education story, to steal a phrase coined by Kevin. In March, a local male kindergarten teacher was arrested on charges of “sexual [...]
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's False Fronts paper is quoted on Accuracy in Academia.
03/09/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on Federal Family Education Loan defaults on The Huffington Post.
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.