Group items tagged

"Scores on tests of students' academic achievement are currently widely used in educational accountability systems. This use typically rests on two assumptions: that students' scores are a reasonable measure of educational output, and therefore that holding teachers accountable for them will provide appropriate incentives to improve the performance of teachers and the functioning of schools. This paper explains why neither of this commonsensical assumptions is warranted and argues that over-reliance on achievement tests in accountability systems produces perverse incentives. Better incentives may require that test scores be used along with numerous other measures, many of which are more subjective than test scores are."

"..."It's Orwellian in the sense that through this vast funding they start to control even how we tacitly think about the problems facing public education," said Bruce Fuller, an education professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who said he received no financing from the foundation..."

"New Jersey's current commissioner of education seems to stake much of his arguments for the urgency of implementing reform strategies on the argument that while New Jersey ranks high on average performance, New Jersey ranks 47th in achievement gap between low-income and non-low income children (video here: http://livestre.am/M3YZ). To be fair, this is classic political rhetoric with few or no partisan boundaries."

"The Brookings Institution has now released their web based version of Passing Muster including a nifty calculation tool for rating teacher evaluation systems. Unfortunately, in my view, this rating system fails muster in at least two major ways."

"Because of its length, this entry will come in two parts. I'll post part two in a week or so. This essay originally appeared in Dissent,, Spring, 2011. If you share or repost it, please acknowledge the magazine."

"...Today, the bands of nouveau corporate royalists (with coats of arms bearing such names as Coors, DeVos, Koch, Scaife, and Walton) are determined to take back those middle-class gains of yesteryear."

"Beneath the political and corporate veneer espousing teaching as a profession lurks a simple fact: the corporate and political elite wants teaching to be a service industry. Worse yet, they have their wish, because teaching is now a service industry, ultimately devoted to perpetuating an economic system based on social inequity and a venal consumer culture."

"Did Education Department officials leak market-sensitive info to stock traders?" That's the provocative headline from Project on Government Oversight reporting on a probe by the agency's inspector general into controversial claims that may implicate Education Secretary Arne Duncan. "

"If the mayor's proposed budget goes through and the promised 4,000 New York City teachers are laid off (costing the city 6,000 jobs, with attrition), P.S. 41, in the heart of Greenwich Village, will lose 12 teachers. That is more than the number of teachers now teaching the school's fourth and fifth grades. "

"The Atlanta cheating scandal has sparked a national debate about the wisdom of accountability based on high-stakes testing. As I argued in my last post, I don't think tests themselves are the problem; it's our accountability structures that need to be rethought. Here's my take on what we should do to fix accountability."

Sixteen years ago, as students were enjoying their summer break, Nobel laureate Milton Friedman issued his own report card on the American education system. In a guest commentary in The Washington Post, he described it as "backward," often producing "dismal results."

Mission Statement To build a bi-partisan, volunteer-led, grassroots and grass-tops team throughout Texas in order to pass and defend Universal Educational Choice legislation.