Category: Education

One of the most interesting debates surrounding the Education Reform Movement has been about teacher evaluations. Education reformers operate off the assumption that bad teachers and bad schools are to blame for the achievement gap between poor and rich children, making teacher evaluations an important component of their reform program. Problematically for reformers, the value-added… Continue reading The new study on value-added teacher evaluations and its limitations

One of the Education Reform Movement’s most touted innovations is the implementation of value-added methods of teacher evaluations. Under these methods, teachers are not evaluated by the absolute skill level of their students on standardized tests; instead, they are evaluated by how much their students improve during their time under that teacher. This all sounds… Continue reading Meaningless measurements remain meaningless

The Education Reform Movement is hot. Donors have lavished money on projects like Teach For America, including $49 million from the Walton Family Foundation and a $100 million endowment from four other philanthropists. Media outlets and publishers have almost unanimously provided positive coverage and angles for those in the movement, the most notable instance being… Continue reading On the Education Reform Movement

A new study was released in the last week by MIT and Duke researchers about the efficacy of exclusive, magnet schools. In the working paper, the researchers compared the achievements of students who narrowly qualified for magnet schools in New York and Boston against those who narrowly failed to qualify for the same schools. The… Continue reading Study provides more evidence against the bad school hypothesis

The finale of the debt-ceiling theatre is nearing, and it is shaping up to be an exciting one. With this self-imposed disaster looming, two plans have moved ahead as front-runners in the negotiations. The two plans — proposed by Harry Reid and John Boehner — cut a basically identical amount of spending, with the exception… Continue reading Boehner and Reid agree that poor students should pay more