Raising Arizona’s children — a newcomer perspective
As a newcomer to Arizona since June 2014, and with an absorbing job that has been my focus for the last 15 months, I have largely stood back and watched the state’s education politics. For a small (-population) state such as Arizona, it has been an eventful 15 months: The (former) incumbent state superintendent was […]
Steal my job (or part of it)
This semester I am serving as interim associate dean for the Office of Scholarship at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. This is in addition to my more persistent role as a division director, and my interim role is to start implementing the recommendations of a task force — creating a more connected structure to support […]
“Weeks/days of learning” is well-intended bad interpretative factoid
The Institute of Education Sciences has released a new Evaluation of the Teacher Incentive Fund, or TIF, (after two years), which is generally solid research by Mathematica Policy Research, at least at a quick first read today. The main findings: Most of the experimental part of TIF was implemented by the schools. Some parts of the program […]
Who will tell you that your utopian school-improvement gambit has been tried before?
Jack Schneider is the star of Amy Scott’s Marketplace piece last Friday on the XQ competition to redesign high schools: [P]eople have tried to reinvent high school before. “That idea is as old as students sitting in desks and a teacher lecturing at the front of the classroom,” said education historian Jack Schneider, an assistant professor at […]
Kudos to the U.S. Department of Education
Hold onto that blog entry title, folks — it’s going to be pretty rare around these parts. Two events this weekend justify the praise: The Saturday-morning release of institution-level data on loans, paybacks, income, and other data, including some data specific to Pell-grant recipients. Even more to its credit, the department made tools available so […]