Lost in the 24 to 48 hour furor over Mitt Romney’s off-the-cuff promise to eliminate the Department of Housing and Urban Development AND slash the Department of Education? Romney has occasionally (albeit under pressure) admitted that Race to the Top, the signature effort of the Obama Administration’s Department of Education so far, was working. But, see, … Continue reading
The NYTimes reports: Elementary- and middle-school teachers who help raise their students’ standardized-test scores seem to have a wide-ranging, lasting positive effect on those students’ lives beyond academics, including lower teenage-pregnancy rates and greater college matriculation and adult earnings, according to a new study that tracked 2.5 million students over 20 years. … Replacing a … Continue reading
Opponents of education reform often portray policy disagreements in terms of democratic public education vs. corporate privatization. Look, for instance, at Diane Ravitch’s and Randi Weingarten’s comments on this post from Mike Petrilli. Petrilli argues that reformers need to work much harder to push back against union-controlled school boards: And that’s where we get to the … Continue reading
This comes a little late (10/31), but it’s well worth the read: Democrats for Education Reform’s Charles Barone explores the various unholy alliances at the heart of the effort to take teacher accountability measures out of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Read it. Barone covers ground I’ve hit before—like how opponents of test-based accountability blithely … Continue reading
• Fran Tarkenton, in the Wall Street Journal, on applying seniority-based pay scales to the NFL. • Freddie DeBoer with a beautiful, devastating post on the relationship between capitalism, our education system, and the blogosphere’s pettiness.
As you may have heard, average SAT scores were down in the United States this year. The College Board explains this is mostly the result of including scores from students who take the test later in the year (during the summer after graduation) in the national average. These students (at least 50,000 more) are taking … Continue reading
I’ve written a new column for the Huffington Post on how the opponents of education reform sound a lot like the free market wing of the GOP. I’m not sure that this means that they’re wrong, per se, but it certainly means that they’re short on new ideas.
Steven Brill reports, in his book, Class Warfare: Randi Weingarten told me that she spoke with Ravitch often while she was preparing her book and urged her to take her message far and wide as soon as it was published, “because she had an important story to tell that no one else could tell.” Weingarten … Continue reading
For reasons unknown (tough job market? Debt ceiling boredom? General ennui?), bloggers the Internet over have gotten really interested lately in the question of college’s worth (See here, and here, and here, etc). Louis Menand’s New Yorker piece (which I’ve linked before), is still my favorite of the recent crop. While working on my dissertation, … Continue reading
David Brooks takes on Diane Ravitch in his NYTimes column today: Ravitch makes some serious points…If you make tests all-important, you give schools an incentive to drop the subjects that don’t show up on the exams but that help students become fully rounded individuals — like history, poetry, art and sports. You may end up … Continue reading
