Tag Archive for 'Education Sector'

Outta Here!

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 15, 2009 in Educational Policy. 0 Comments

Andy Rotherham is leaving Ed Sector, reports Michele McNeil on her Politics K-12 blog.  Everyone seemed to expect Rotherham to head for the turnstiles and take up a post in the Obama administration earlier this year.  That didn’t happen, but now he’s leaving “to work on broader issues.”   And what of Eduwonk,the 800-pound gorilla of ed blogs?  “The blog will live on, Rotherham says, although it will likely be re-branded once his future becomes more clear,” McNeil writes.   Does that mean Rotherham will continue to write it?

Update:  Andy emails to say: “Yes, I will continue to pen Eduwonk.com although in a different venue than where it lives now.  I’m also not planning major changes in board service or the writing I do, for instance at U.S. News and various venues.  So, depending where you sit in this debate I guess that’s welcome or unwelcome news.”

Core Knowledge: A “21st Century Skill”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on November 11, 2008 in Assessment and Testing and Core Knowledge. 5 Comments

“The common idea that we can teach thinking without a solid foundation of knowledge must be abandoned, notes Lauren Resnick, a professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, in a new report from Education Sector, Measuring Skills for the 21st Century.  “So must the idea that we can teach knowledge without engaging students in thinking. Knowledge and thinking must be intimately joined.” The report is by Ed Sector’s senior policy analyst, Elena Silva, who notes:

The belief that there should be a solid, specific, and shared core curriculum, an idea advanced most notably by the nonprofit Core Knowledge Foundation, founded and led by former professor and literary scholar, E.D. Hirsch Jr., is not at odds with this approach. The Core Knowledge curriculum supports the point that learning factual knowledge and the ability to apply, analyze, and solve problems go hand-in-hand. Teachers using the Core Knowledge approach do not stress rote memorization of facts; they use an array of strategies including workshops, research projects, dramatizations, and collaborative learning groups because they know that students will learn best if they are exposed to both subject knowledge and ways to apply this knowledge at the same time.

The full report is here.  Silva is hosting a weeklong online discussion on it with Eva Baker, director of UCLA’s Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing, and Paul Curtis, chief academic officer of New Technology Foundation, on Ed Sector’s website here. 

 

 

Teacher Quality, Unintended Consequences, and the Baseball Achievement Gap

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 6, 2008 in Education News and Educational Policy. 2 Comments

New York’s Department of Education is beginning to measure the performance of thousands of elementary and middle school teachers based on how much their students improve on annual state math and reading tests, the New York Times reported last week. A joint letter to NYC teachers from Chancellor Joel Klein and UFT President Randi Weingarten explained the data is intended to “empower teachers with information useful in our teaching. In this same vein, the letter expressly prohibits the use of that information for evaluating teachers, in both annual ratings and tenure decisions.”

When the plan first came up in February, Ed Sector’s Kevin Carey wrote a much-discussed op-ed in the New York Daily News, comparing value-added data to the pioneering work done by maverick baseball general manager Billy Beane. The subject of Michael Lewis’ 2003 book, Moneyball, Beane has often managed to keep his small-market Oakland A’s competitive with deeper-pocketed teams by rejecting conventional baseball wisdom in favor of data-driven decision-making. “By crunching numbers without prejudice, Beane discovered that certain statistics that really mattered on the field, like on-base percentage, were being hugely undervalued in the player job market,” Carey wrote. “While scouts and other executives made decisions based on personal bias and flawed perceptions, Beane kept to the statistical bottom line.” Seen through this lens, the hope and promise is that we can find equivalents to on-base percentage in teacher performance that drive student achievement.

The Moneyball comparison, however, strikes me as a potentially dangerous analogy. Here’s why: Players are to baseball teams as students — not teachers — are to schools. Teachers succeed by getting the best performances from their students. Their closest counterparts in baseball are managers and coaches. Baseball executives like Billy Beane do not use data to help ordinary players over-perform. They use data to replace underperformers with overachievers.  To run a school like Billy Beane runs the Oakland A’s would mean regularly replacing low-scoring students with high-scoring students.

That would be one way to close the achievement gap. Continue reading ‘Teacher Quality, Unintended Consequences, and the Baseball Achievement Gap’

Turning Around a Turnaround Tale

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 4, 2008 in Education Leadership and Education Practice. 0 Comments

A few years ago, the trustees of Chattanooga’s Benwood Foundation resolved to do whatever it took to reverse the failure of several of that city’s failing schools, devoting millions of dollars in grants to raise student achievement. The focus on attracting and retaining highly qualified teachers with financial incentives paid off and the “Benwood Initiative” became a nationally heralded school turnaround “how-to” tale.

Education SectorA new Education Sector report by Ellen Silva argues that “Benwood’s success was not just about attracting new talent, but helping existing teachers improve the quality of their instruction. Arguments that the initiative brought new and better teachers to troubled Chattanooga schools, however are overstated.

“These findings have implications for other districts looking to turn around low-performing schools—of which there are many in the era of the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB),” Silva notes. “There is no doubt that disadvantaged students are disproportionately likely in American education to be taught by less experienced, less qualified, less effective teachers….As the Benwood Initiative demonstrates, individual teacher effectiveness is not a fixed trait. School systems can take many steps, as Hamilton County has, to improve teachers’ work in classrooms.”

The Pangloss Index: How States Game the No Child Left Behind Act

Published by CKF on November 13, 2007 in Educational Policy, Podcast and Video and Research and Reports. 0 Comments

Education SectorAuthor: Kevin Carey

Despite the poor performance of Birmingham City Schools,

The Alabama Department of Education … says everything is fine, that Birmingham City Schools made “adequate yearly progress” last year under the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). And only five of the district’s 65 schools are “in need of improvement.” The serious consequences and strong interventions that NCLB’s authors envisioned for chronically underperforming districts like Birmingham are nowhere to be found.

The reason is simple: While NCLB was designed to raise achievement standards … , the Alabama Department of Education has lowered standards annually, to the point where even abjectly failing districts like Birmingham make the grade. And it’s not alone — every one of the accountability-avoidance gambits used in Alabama has been adopted in many other states. Indeed, the most noteworthy thing about Alabama’s elaborate plan to avoid NCLB accountability, and the impact of those actions on Birmingham, is how mundane they really are. Similar stories could be written about states and districts across the nation.

Collectively, these states and districts provide a case study in how determined states can undermine even tightly constructed laws like NCLB. And, as importantly, they provide a cautionary tale for members of Congress working to write the next version of the nation’s most important education law.

Download the full report

Read the full article on Education Sector’s website

Education Sector: Explaining NCLB policy issues

Published by CKF on November 1, 2007 in Assessment and Testing, Educational Policy and Research and Reports. 0 Comments

Education SectorFrom an Education Sector newsletter:

Education Sector’s Explainer series unpacks key school accountability issues!

Current education news and debates all seem to revolve around the federal No Child Left Behind Act and school accountability. Education Sector’s Explainer Series will help you make sense of these confusing education policy issues.

Education Sector’s Explainer series gives lay readers insights into important aspects of education policymaking. Explainers are designed to bring clarity to key, but complex, concepts and terms within the education landscape that often are misunderstood by the public. They are straightforward, cut-through-the-jargon guides that can be used alone, or as a reference when reading education news stories or research on related topics.

Recent Explainers have focused on deciphering some of NCLB’s fundamental features including how states set “cut scores” on their tests, what it means for states to make “adequate yearly progress” under the federal law, and how the controversial National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) works.

Read, reference, and share these Education Sector Explainers:

Making the Cut: How States Set Passing Scores on Standardized Tests

Passing or “cut” scores are a key factor in determining the rigor of state tests, which matter more than ever before under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Yet, when states and the media report student results on exams, they rarely include information on passing scores or the process by which they are determined. This Explainer describes how states set cut scores and why they matter.

States’ Evidence: What It Means to Make ‘Adequate Yearly Progress’ Under NCLB

Under NCLB, states must set performance targets for schools to meet, known as “adequate yearly progress,” or “AYP.” And those schools that do not meet these goals or “make” AYP face considerable consequences. But what does it really mean for a school to make AYP? This Explainer describes how NCLB’s complex accountability system works overall and in different states and discusses the basics of “making” AYP and the multiple routes schools can take to get there.

Understanding NAEP: Inside the Nation’s Education Report Card

The National Assessment of Educational Progress is one of the most trusted resources for comparing student achievement across states and demographic groups. But it is also one of the most complex tests in existence, leading to difficulty in interpreting and reporting its results. This Explainer is a guide to understanding NAEP’s complex features and the challenges ahead for the test in an era of increased accountability.

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English, Math Time Up in ‘No Child’ Era

Published by CKF on July 25, 2007 in Research and Reports. 0 Comments

Washington Post44% of Schools Polled Reduce Other Topics

By Jay Mathews, Washington Post Staff Writer

In the five years since a federal law mandated an expansion of reading and math tests, 44 percent of school districts nationwide have made deep cutbacks in social studies, science, art and music lessons in elementary grades and have even slashed lunchtime, a new survey has found.

The most detailed look at the rapidly changing American school day, in a report released today, found that most districts sharply increased time spent on reading and math.

… But Andrew J. Rotherham, a co-founder of the Education Sector think tank in the District who serves on the Virginia Board of Education, likened the increased hours spent in reading instruction, devoid of history and science, to a diet full of empty calories. “If you have just doughnuts for breakfast, you will be hungry again soon,” he said. “But a balanced breakfast can carry you to lunch.”

He cited the work of University of Virginia researcher E.D. Hirsch Jr., who has said elementary students need exposure to history and science to be able to handle the concepts and vocabulary that make them good readers.

Read the complete article

Core Convictions: An interview with E.D. Hirsch

Published by CKF on September 26, 2006 in Curriculum, Education Theory, Educational Policy and Interview. 0 Comments

Education SectorE.D. Hirsch, Jr., a slightly awkward man with a quick smile, seems an unlikely combatant in the culture wars. Once best known in academic circles as a literary critic, author, English professor, and scholar of hermeneutics, the theory and methodology of interpretation of texts, Hirsch was catapulted to the center of the culture debate with the publication of his 1987 book Cultural Literacy (Houghton Mifflin).

Since then, Hirsch has become a lightning rod for criticism from multiculturalists in the academy. Said Harvard professor Howard Gardner in 1997: “[Hirsch] has swallowed a neoconservative caricature of contemporary American education. If this kind of angry, stereotypical thinking is what results from a ‘core knowledge’ orientation, then I want no part of it.” But Hirsch’s supporters, including national organizations such as the American Federation of Teachers, argue that his work espousing a coherent and content-rich curriculum for American students has been an indispensable part of school improvement.

Hirsch is professor emeritus of education and humanities at the University of Virginia and the founder and chairman of the nonprofit Core Knowledge Foundation, an organization dedicated to excellence and fairness in early education. The organization conducts curriculum research, develops materials for parents and teachers and offers professional development to help elementary and middle schools deliver a solid, specific and shared core curriculum that enables children to develop strong foundations of knowledge.

… In May, 2006, Education Sector Co-director Andrew J. Rotherham sat down with Hirsch in Charlottesville, Virginia, to talk about his new book, the links between his work in education and literary scholarship, school choice, the standards movement, and the politics of education.

Read the complete interview