Checking in on teacher evaluations. Tennessee teachers whose students got failing grades often got glowing evaluations from their administrators, according to a state department of education report. Department officials believe these two indicators should be the same—i.e. if a teacher’s students get failing grades, that teacher should also likely have a poor evaluation. (The Tennessean)

Continue Reading »

Budding entrepreneurs. The First-Fourth Key Chain Co. is a business of first- and fourth-grade partners who create and sell key chains, setting their prices based on the cost of their supplies. (h/t ASCD Smart Brief) (Cleveland Plain Dealer)

Making higher ed more cost-efficient. Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam has started a series of roundtable discussions that focus on more accountability anContinue Reading »

It’s no Super Bowl, but this weekend’s Masters golf coverage featured a few exciting, innovative ads of its own. And this time they weren’t for Chrysler, M&Ms, or Doritos. It seems Exxon Mobil, one of the event’s three major corporate sponsors, chose to use its ad time to promote its education agenda: the National Math and Science Initiative, the Common Core State Standards, and, for good mContinue Reading »

Ticking time bomb. America is staring down another major economic threat, akin to the home mortgage crisis, according to a new report from the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys. The culprit? Student loan debt. Education Sector’s Kevin Carey was talking about this last week, when he testified in front of the Senate education committee on the issue of college affordabiliContinue Reading »

Flickr photo by skyloader

The Center for American Progress released the first analysis of the initial 11 ESEA waiver applications that moves beyond the contents of each waiver proposal to the merits of a state’s application. As noted here, and here, and here the report calls out Massachusetts and Tennessee for submitting particularly well-crafted proposals and Continue Reading »

Eleven states yesterday applied to the federal government for relief from much of the law formerly known as No Child Left Behind, including the law’s demand that all students be proficient in reading and math by 2014. To get that freedom the states had to commit themselves to implementing: “career and college ready” standards; accountability systems that focus more attention on low-perforContinue Reading »

Higher ed disclosure. Under the Higher Education Opportunity Act, which was reauthorized in 2008, colleges must provide Pell graduation rates, credit transfer information, employment placement, and textbook prices to prospective students. Armed with these stats and others, students will be able to make more informed choices during their college search. But a new report by Education Sector’s KevContinue Reading »

ESEA continues. A number of amendments have been approved – and ditched – during today’s Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) committee meeting. At the time we posted this, senators continued to push through the stack of amendments still pending. An official count hasn’t been confirmed, although Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., did acknowledge that he cut his offers down to “seven or eigContinue Reading »

Mrs. Q unveils her identity. The Chicago educator who, last year, set off on a quest to buy school lunches, photograph them and blog about the quality — or lack thereof – daily, revealed her identity today via newspaper articles and an appearance on Good Morning America. The author of the “Fed up with lunch” blog had good reason: she released a book with the same name. (Chicago TribContinue Reading »

Ed. Note: Last week, Education Sector published a report titled “Are We There Yet? What Policymakers Can Learn About Tennessee’s Growth Model.” The report examines Tennessee’s model for using measures and projections of annual student learning growth as a means of determining whether schools are making “Adequate Yearly Progress” under the No Child Left BehindContinue Reading »