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Jeff Bernstein

Wisconsin Senate Blocks School Choice Expansion - 0 views

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    The Wisconsin Senate approved a measure Tuesday that would freeze the expansion of school vouchers and grant the Legislature the power to decide which schools or districts should qualify. The bill would limit voucher participation to school districts already in the program on the day the measure takes effect. Any school districts who want to get in after that would need separate legislation. The bill's author, Senate President Mike Ellis, R-Neenah, said the proposal would give the Legislature more say and flexibility on voucher expansion than the one-size-fits-all criteria laid out in current law.
Jeff Bernstein

Estimating the Impacts of Educational Interventions Using State Tests or Study-Administ... - 0 views

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    This report takes an important first step in assessing the consequences of relying on state tests versus study-administered tests for general, student-level measures of reading and math achievement in evaluations of educational effectiveness.
Jeff Bernstein

Cuomo promotes new kindergarten evaluation - 0 views

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    Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and other state authorities are pushing a plan to evaluate all kindergartners as they enter school, to determine their readiness for the classroom. The proposed new requirement, which would take effect in the 2014-15 school year, aims in part at helping the state win an estimated $100 million in grants offered by the Obama administration to upgrade early-childhood education.
Jeff Bernstein

The Feds' For-Profit Double Standard in Ed - Rick Hess Straight Up - Education Week - 0 views

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    I'm frequently frustrated by our inability to talk sensibly about the role of for-profits in schooling. Most discussion amounts to reflexive demonization, occasionally interspersed with hired-gun salesmanship or protestations of good intentions. Nearly absent is thinking about the role for-profits can play in promoting quality and cost-effectiveness at scale, or what it'll take to make that happen.
Jeff Bernstein

The Supplement Not Supplant Conundrum - Rick Hess Straight Up - Education Week - 0 views

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    In our last post, we introduced the idea that federal compliance rules can have an unintended effect on what goes on in the classroom by encouraging defensive spending, discouraging comprehensive programs, and creating administrative burdens that take away resources from students. Over the next two days we will give examples of how two seemingly unrelated rules - supplement not supplant, and time and effort - interfere with comprehensive school improvement.
Jeff Bernstein

Memphis schools grapple with maintaining Gates reforms after money runs out »... - 0 views

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    Two years into work with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to improve teacher effectiveness, city school officials have determined that the financial outlook has changed so much that the effort will be unsustainable without a major retooling. By revamping teacher salaries -- paying for test results instead of degrees or years of service -- Memphis City Schools leaders hope to find a big chunk of the $34 million a year it will take to keep going when the Gates money stops in 2015.
Jeff Bernstein

Denver's School Board Battles -- In These Times - 0 views

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    School boards typically control massive amounts of money and assets that can be dished out through contracts for services, purchases of land, and diverted into charter schools and voucher programs. Despite school boards' power, however, until now board elections around the country have typically been fueled by door-to-door canvassing rather than high dollar fundraising. But increasingly, large donations from wealthy individuals and corporations are pouring into schools board races around the country to enact an agenda that attacks collective bargaining rights of teachers unions and increases the privatization of public education through charter schools and vouchers. The Denver Public School Board race, which took place yesterday, is a prime example of outside money from wealthy individuals and corporate funded groups flooding elections. That money proved to have a significant effect on last night's election for the union-back candidates opposed to the so-called "reform slate."
Jeff Bernstein

Can Value-Added Measures of Teacher Performance Be Trusted? - 0 views

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    Our main research question is the following: How well do commonly used estimators perform in estimating teacher effects under a variety of known conditions, including those in which particular underlying assumptions are violated?
Jeff Bernstein

A Legal Argument Against The Use of VAMs in Teacher Evaluation - 0 views

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    "Value Added Models (VAMs) are irresistible. Purportedly they can ascertain a teacher's effectiveness by predicting the impact of a teacher on a student's test scores. Because test scores are the sin qua non of our education system, VAMs are alluring. They link a teacher directly to the most emphasized output in education today. What more can we want from an evaluative tool, especially in our pursuit of improving schools in the name of social justice? Taking this a step further, many see VAMs as the panacea for improving teacher quality. The theory seems straightforward. VAMs provide statistical predictions regarding a teacher's impact that can be compared to actual results. If a teacher cannot improve a student's test score in relatively positive ways, then they are ineffective. If they are ineffective, they can (and should) be dismissed (See, for instance, Hanushek, 2010). Consequently, state legislatures have rushed to codify VAMs into their statutes and regulations governing teacher evaluation. (See, for example, Florida General Laws, 2014). That has been a mistake. This paper argues for a complete reversal in policy course. To wit, state regulations that connect a teacher's continued employment to VAMs should be overhauled to eliminate the connection between evaluation and student test scores. The reasoning is largely legal, rather than educational. In sum, the legal costs of any use of VAMs in a performance-based termination far outweigh any value they may add.1 These risks are directly a function of the well-documented statistical flaws associated with VAMs (See, for example, Rothstein, 2010). The "value added" of VAMs in supporting a termination is limited, if it exists at all."
Jeff Bernstein

'School Choice' and Disenfranchising the Public | Peter Greene - 0 views

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    ""School choice" is one of those policy ideas that just never goes away, and it probably never will. For some people it is an irresistible way to unlock all those public tax dollars and turn them into private profits. For others it's a way to make sure their children don't have to go to school with "those people." Other people are justifiably attracted to the idea of more control over their child's education. And still others have a sincere belief that competition really does create greatness. Voucher fans and proponents of modern charters like to focus on those promises. They're much quieter about one of the other effects of a choice system. School choice disenfranchises the public."
Jeff Bernstein

Is Poverty the Key Factor in Student Outcomes? - Public Education | The Texas Tribune - 6 views

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    "...After looking at the data, Marder has yet to be convinced that any teaching solution has been found that can overcome the detrimental effects of poverty on a large scale - and that we may be looking for solutions in the wrong place..."
Jeff Bernstein

Chetty, et al. on the American Statistical Association's Recent Position Statement on V... - 0 views

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    "Over the last decade, teacher evaluation based on value-added models (VAMs) has become central to the public debate over education policy. In this commentary, we critique and deconstruct the arguments proposed by the authors of a highly publicized study that linked teacher value-added models to students' long-run outcomes, Chetty et al. (2014, forthcoming), in their response to the American Statistical Association statement on VAMs. We draw on recent academic literature to support our counter-arguments along main points of contention: causality of VAM estimates, transparency of VAMs, effect of non-random sorting of students on VAM estimates and sensitivity of VAMs to model specification. "
Jeff Bernstein

Teacher Tenure: An Innocent Victim of Vergara v. California - Education Week - 0 views

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    "It was determined at trial that between 1 percent and 3 percent-roughly 8,200-of California's 275,000 teachers are grossly ineffective. Yet, only 2.2 teachers, on the average, are dismissed for unsatisfactory performance per year. Although intended to support the case against tenure laws, these statistics are actually an indictment against those responsible for evaluating teachers effectively."
Jeff Bernstein

The Big Error of School Accountability - Living in Dialogue - 0 views

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    "With the debate over testing roiling Congress and state capitals nationwide, it is important to recognize the damage done to American pedagogy by high-stakes testing and the deleterious effects of punitive accountability on the students who depend on public schools."
Jeff Bernstein

Paul Horton: Will the Market Destroy Public Education? - Living in Dialogue - Education... - 0 views

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    "In effect, "the invisible hand" behind the push to create new education markets is coming from Wall Street investors who are flush with capital for investment. Wall Street bundlers and investment firms are buying up stock in charter school companies and big education vendors. These bundlers not only fund both party's campaigns, they also sell stock, betting on the futures of big education vendors, start-ups, charter schools, and vouchers. They "encourage" political leaders to pursue policies that will hedge their bets on education products and to view all schools as portfolios that will increase in value as long as the Feds and the states pursue policies that encourage privatization."
Jeff Bernstein

Go Ahead. Ask. No, Demand. | Arthur Camins - 0 views

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    "Improving education is not simple because the human beings who inhabit schools, their relationship with one another and the social system in which they live are complex and varied. While simple solutions to complex problems always fall short, the elements of effective systemic solutions in education are not so hard to imagine. In fact, they are well known."
Jeff Bernstein

Inside Philanthropy: The Scariest Trends | Diane Ravitch's blog - 0 views

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    "David Callahan wrote an insightful article in "Inside Philanthropy" about something that most of us have noticed: the growing power of foundations that use their money to impose their ideas and bypass democratic institutions. In effect, mega-foundations like Gates and Walton use their vast wealth to short circuit democracy."
Jeff Bernstein

NYSED Recommends "Teacher Effectiveness Gnomes" to Fix Persistent Inequities | School F... - 0 views

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    "As I've pointed out over, and over and over again on this blog, NY State maintains one of the least equitable educational systems in the nation."
Jeff Bernstein

David Berliner: Effects of Inequality and Poverty vs. Teachers and Schooling on America... - 0 views

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    "This paper arises out of frustration with the results of school reforms carried out over the past few decades. These efforts have failed. They need to be abandoned. In their place must come recognition that income inequality causes many social problems, including problems associated with education. Sadly, compared to all other wealthy nations, the USA has the largest income gap between its wealthy and its poor citizens. Correlates associated with the size of the income gap in various nations are well described in Wilkinson & Pickett (2010), whose work is cited throughout this article. They make it clear that the bigger the income gap in a nation or a state, the greater the social problems a nation or a state will encounter. Thus it is argued that the design of better economic and social policies can do more to improve our schools than continued work on educational policy independent of such concerns."
Jeff Bernstein

Implications for Policy Are Not So Clear : Education Next - 0 views

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    Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff have carried out a remarkable study, but I suspect it will be misinterpreted. The main contribution of their research is quantifying the importance of teaching.
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