International workshop for free (or, rather, for time)
This weekend, Christian Ydesen (Aalborg University) and I hosted a small workshop on the comparative history of school accountability. We had six papers written by eight scholars from three time zones in two hemispheres. I’m excited by the subject of the papers — all told, the papers discussed school accountability in some detail in six […]
“Waiver Waver… Don’t tell me [it’s a moratorium]!”
To be very clear, this is not a pause or a moratorium — U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, June 19, 2013 Alyson Klein covered the news yesterday that the U.S. Department of Education will give the majority of states the option to request a one-year delay in using value-added measures as part of teacher […]
The “can we do better?” standard
Last Thursday’s commentary by Tom Kane in the Brookings Institute education blog is an interesting new argument around teacher evaluation. He suggests that the modal first-year/novice teacher performance is the proper criterion for giving teachers permanent employment status (he uses the word tenure inappropriately here). As a hypothetical, Kane’s column moves us away from an algorithmic […]
How to teach critical thinking: an immodest idea
This entry is going to proceed through some maddeningly vague statements, so I will start with the bottom line: currently my best idea for teaching critical thinking in social sciences or related areas is to have students wrestle with an important substantive question or puzzle in a reasonably-well-bounded area of knowledge. The structure may be […]
The right-wing goat rodeo and the Common Core
Checker Finn and Mike Petrilli have a short essay this morning, Repairing the Conservative School Reform Coalition, that addresses their sense of fragmentation on the right in education policy. In the last few weeks, debates over both the Common Core and reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act have shown additional shredding of what was once […]