Cross-posted at Education Week A new report from the Council of the Great City Schools has done what seemingly nothing or no one has yet been able to do: Convince the current administration that the rampant over-testing in U.S. schools is proving harmful for the quality...
by Nathan Driskell As this month’s Statistic of the Month shows, teacher preparation in the top-performing jurisdictions involves practical experience working with and learning from experienced teachers in schools. But many of the top performers do not stop there. They recognize that even after completing...
Cross-posted at Education Week An interesting story appeared on the op-ed page of the New York Times on July 22. In it, Sandeep Jauhar, a cardiologist, tells a story of accountability gone awry. It seems that a number of states got a bright idea a while...
Cross-posted at Education Week In several blogs that preceded this one, I have made the case that mandated annual testing of all students in the United States, when coupled with an accountability regime in which the data produced by those tests is used to make important...
Cross-posted at Education Week So we now have the civil rights community accusing those who oppose annual accountability testing of deliberately undermining the civil rights of minority children. The No Child Left Behind Act required not only that students be tested each year in grades...
Cross-posted at Education Week There is a large literature on teachers' professional development. Unfortunately, it is mostly about the provision of workshops. I doubt that anyone is surprised to learn that workshops that teachers attend only because they are required to do so and are paid...
Cross-posted from Education Week With each new report from the PISA surveys, the United States drifts a little further down the international rankings of national school performance. You might think that would concentrate the minds of our federal policy makers. What we have instead is a...