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Students who won lotteries to attend charter middle schools performed, on average, no better in mathematics and reading than their peers who lost out in the random admissions process and enrolled in nearby regular public schools, according to a national study released today.

On average, though, the charter middle schools in the study enrolled a lower percentage of students who are eligible for free and reduced-price school meals than charters nationally, and served smaller percentages of students scoring below proficiency levels on state exams than their national peers.

ClarkAC wrote: I think this just adds weight to the notion that the devil is in the details. Some charters (i.e., some KIPP schools - not all) are producing great results. Some are not.Some kids getting vouchers are doing much better. Some are not.Some traditional public schools are great. Some are not.On average, no one solution shows impact because we are looking at averages.I agree. We need to get under the hood. Until then, we won't find the solutions we seek. 6/29/2010 12:38 PM EDT on EdWeek

First, an increasing number of people have concluded that we need to add a truly human dimension to our educational benchmarks.

if a lower school subject area like hands-on science is taught in a way that students understand, they go on to high school and college and explore biology, chemistry and physics with greater enthusiasm

What Do We Mean by Learning?

allowing students to pursue their interests in the context of the curriculum

Teachers must be colearners with kids, expert at asking great, open-ended questions and modeling the learning process required to answer those questions. Teachers should be master learners in the classroom

The 5th graders in Doug Hinkle's class at the DaVinci Academy in School District 20 are among the first elementary students in the country to be part of a "flipped" classroom.

Instead of spending 20 minutes each hour lecturing, Mr. Hinkle pre-records video podcasts to teach his lessons.

Removing the lectures from the school day frees up Hinkle to give more attention to individual students or small groups. If you were to drop into his class unannounced, it may seem a bit chaotic, but Hinkle says it's a controlled chaos.

Thus, the old pre-reqs are out: GPAs, transcripts, SATS.  In fact, Google is beginning to disregard academic educations altogether: they're just not a good predictor of success at the company. Says Bock, "After two or three years, your ability to perform at Google is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in school, because the skills you required in college are very different. You’re also fundamentally a different person. You learn and grow, you think about things differently." According to the Times, Google is putting its money where its mouth is: they've actually increased their hires with no college education—14% of some of its teams have never been to school, according to Bock. Instead, the emphasis is on hiring candidates who are leaders, and work well in teams. The only way to discover this, says Bock, is through "structured" behavior interviews that assess how a person makes decisions. The winning interviewees will be able to demonstrate that they are "consistent and fair in how [they] think about making decisions and that there’s an element of predictability." This is key to building trust among team members once hired, he explains. "If a leader is consistent, people on their teams experience tremendous freedom, because then they know that within certain parameters, they can do whatever they want. If your manager is all over the place, you’re never going to know what you can do, and you’re going to experience it as very restrictive."