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She realized that her students, presumably grown accustomed to rubrics in other classrooms, now seemed “unable to function unless every required item is spelled out for them in a grid and assigned a point value.  Worse than that,” she added, “they do not have confidence in their thinking or writing skills and seem unwilling to really take risks.”[5]

This is the sort of outcome that may not be noticed by an assessment specialist who is essentially a technician, in search of practices that yield data in ever-greater quantities.

The fatal flaw in this logic is revealed by a line of research in educational psychology showing that students whose attention is relentlessly focused on how well they’re doing often become less engaged with what they're doing.

The fundamental premise of Moneyball is that the labor market of sports is inefficient, and that many teams systematically undervalue particular athletic skills that help them win. While these skills are often subtle – and the players that possess them tend to toil in obscurity - they can be identified using sophisticated statistical techniques, aka sabermetrics. Home runs are fun. On-base percentage is crucial.

The wisdom of the moneyball strategy is no longer controversial. It’s why the A’s almost always outperform their payroll,

However, the triumph of moneyball creates a paradox, since its success depends on the very market inefficiencies it exposes. The end result is a relentless search for new undervalued skills, those hidden talents that nobody else seems to appreciate. At least not yet.

I am talking about data-driven instruction–a way of making teaching less subjective, more objective, less experience-based, more scientific.

Data-driven instruction, advocates say, is scientific and consistent with how successful businesses have used data for decades to increase their productivity.

Of course, teachers had always assessed learning informally before state- and district-designed tests. Teachers accumulated information (oops! data) from pop quizzes, class discussions, observing students in pairs and small groups, and individual conferences.

What’s happened to get people thinking and talking about “different” instead of “better?”

The Web and the technologies that drive it are fundamentally changing the way we think about how we can learn and become educated in a globally networked and connected world. It has absolutely exploded our ability to learn on our own in ways that schools weren’t built for.

In that respect, current systems of schooling are an increasingly significant barrier to progress when it comes to learning.

 A brand-new study on the academic effects of homework offers not only some intriguing results but also a lesson on how to read a study — and a reminder of the importance of doing just that:  reading studies (carefully) rather than relying on summaries by journalists or even by the researchers themselves.

First, no research has ever found a benefit to assigning homework (of any kind or in any amount) in elementary school.  In fact, there isn’t even a positive correlation between, on the one hand, having younger children do some homework (vs. none), or more (vs. less), and, on the other hand, any measure of achievement.  If we’re making 12-year-olds, much less five-year-olds, do homework, it’s either because we’re misinformed about what the evidence says or because we think kids ought to have to do homework despite what the evidence says.

Second, even at the high school level, the research supporting homework hasn’t been particularly persuasive.

Tacyana will be asked to determine how her own work stacks up to a model.

Gust is one of a growing number of schools across the country where student self-assessment is one type of formative assessment that is woven into the school day.

'Hey, wait a minute, kids have to be involved, too.'"

A few years ago, a student at my high school was having a terrible time passing one of the exams needed to earn a Regents Diploma.

Mary has a learning disability that truly impacts her retention and analytical thinking.

Because she was a special education student, at the time there was an easier exam available, the RCT, which she could take and then use to earn a local high school diploma instead of the Regents Diploma.

We will need to accept that we have to teach in ways that we ourselves were never taught.  We will have to work on shifting from a model of content delivery to a serious emphasis on mentoring students on how to learn. 

We have to do the hard work of teaching them how to work with that content, how to develop a set of learning behaviors that are transferable to everything they do.

Here's the follow-up post to "Why I'm For the Common Core." It explains why we should be leery of the forthcoming "core-aligned" tests -- especially those in English Language Arts that people are rightly anxious about.

These tests could endanger the promise of the Common Core.

The first thing I'd want to do if I were younger would be to launch an effective court challenge to value-added teacher evaluations on the basis of test scores in reading comprehension. The value-added approach to teacher evaluation in reading is unsound both technically and in its curriculum-narrowing effects. The connection between job ratings and tests in ELA has been a disaster for education.

Yet in actual schools, curiosity is drastically underappreciated.

The power of curiosity to contribute not only to high achievement, but also to a fulfilling existence, cannot be emphasized enough.

When Orville Wright, of the Wright brothers fame, was told by a friend that he and his brother would always be an example of how far someone can go in life with no special advantages, he emphatically responded, “to say we had no special advantages … the greatest thing in our favor was growing up in a family where there was always much encouragement to intellectual curiosity.”

Students who are presented with unfamiliar concepts, asked to work through them, and then taught the solution significantly outperform those who are taught through formal instruction and problem-solving. The approach is both utterly intuitive—we learn from mistakes—and completely counter-intuitive: letting kids flail around with unfamiliar math concepts seems both inefficient and potentially damaging to their confidence.

So far, teachers have mixed reactions. They recognize that the approach is good but they worry about efficiency and standardized tests: will kids fall on high-stakes national and international tests?

Kapur uses the research to make his case. Students get more output (deeper learning) for the same input (hours of instruction), which presents another problem: teachers have to get out of the way. “They [teachers] say it’s stressful to teach this way,” he says. “It’s easier to tell them [students] what you know.”

This dispute is just one example of the mathematical acrobatics required to isolate the effect of one teacher on their students' test scores, when so many other factors inside and outside the school's walls affect how students perform.

When a teacher whose students do well on tests moves to a school where test scores were improving the previous year, and average scores continue improving after that teacher arrives, it is hard to know how much of that continued improvement is due to the new teacher and how much to other factors.

I often recall Houston's Apollo 20 experiment, designed to bring "No Excuses" charter school methods to neighborhood schools. Its output-driven, reward and punish policies failed.  It was incredibly expensive, costing $52 million and it didn't increase reading scores. Intensive math tutoring produced test score gains in that subject. The only real success was due to the old-fashioned, win-win, input-driven method of hiring more counselors.

Michels finds no evidence that Grier's test-driven accountability has benefitted students, but he describes the great success of constructive programs that build on kids' strengths and provide them more opportunities.

With the help of local philanthropies, however, Houston has introduced a wide range of humane, holistic, and effective programs. Michels starts with Las Americas Newcomer School, which is "on paper a failing school." It offers group therapy and social workers who help immigrants "navigate bureaucratic barriers—like proof of residency or vaccination records." He then describes outstanding early education programs that are ready to be scaled up, such as  the Gabriela Mistral Center for Early Childhood, and Project Grad which has provided counseling and helped more than 7,600 students go to college.

“most educators aren’t aware of the function bullying serves in school,”

The majority of kids don’t bully other kids and haven’t been victimized

Kids pick on others as a way to secure their standing among their peers or to move up a notch.