The three stages of defending bad research
It’s been 11 days since the NCTQ report on teacher ed (see my comment from earlier this week), and we’re already into the third stage of defending bad research. It’s great research, and the conclusions are essential to understand and spread. It’s flawed research, but we should give it some credibility since it tracks with […]
The reports of machismo are greatly exaggerated (NCTQ)
A week has passed since the National Council for Teacher Quality (NCTQ) released its report on teacher education programs across the country. Historians joke that current events become a focus of our thoughts after about 30 years or so, but that’s not true. We can start to see the broader issues of the NCTQ report […]
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 […]