Successful school turnarounds have long been elusive and have depended on finding talented teachers and leaders to engage in the transformation of school cultures and teaching norms. A newly piloted model out of Boston shows some promise for staffing school turnaround and providing career ladder options for experienced teachers. The Teacher Turnaround Teams (T3) program, Read more about Teacher Turnaround Teams in Boston[…]
Class-size reduction, or CSR, is enormously popular with parents, teachers, and the public in general. The latest poll results indicate that 77 percent of Americans think that additional educational dollars should be spent on smaller classes rather than higher teacher salaries. Many parents believe that their children will benefit from more individualized attention in a Read more about The False Promise of Class-Size Reduction[…]
A new issue brief released by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices offers lessons drawn from its State Strategies to Improve Chronically Low-Performing Schools project, which sought to address underlying causes of failing schools: weak leadership; inadequate skill levels among teachers; and insufficient high-quality teaching materials. In 2009, the project gave Colorado, Maryland, Read more about State Strategies to Improve Chronically Low-Performing Schools[…]
In Customized Schooling (Harvard Education Press, 2011), editors Frederick M. Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and Bruno V. Manno, senior adviser, K-12 Education Reform Initiative at the Walton Family Foundation, lead a group of education experts to look at “how providers might use new tools to deliver Read more about Recommended Reading: Customized Schooling[…]
The latest results of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) garnered all the usual headlines about America’s lackluster performance and the rise of competitor nations. And to be sure, the findings—that America’s 15-year-olds perform in the middle of the pack in both reading and math—are disconcerting for a nation that considers itself an international Read more about American Achievement in International Perspective[…]
The PIE Network’s most recent report, “Schools in High Gear: Reforms That Work When They Work Together” is a set of essays written by the network’s policy partners, leaders from the five policy organizations that support the network. The policy partners span the ideological spectrum but come together around the core ingredients for education reform. Read more about Alignment of Reform Efforts[…]
The Albert Shanker Institute has issued a “Call for Common Content.” The proposal would go beyond the academic standards adopted by all but 9 states to seek more specific details regarding the knowledge, skills and understandings required of students to meet each standard. Specifically, the “Call” states, “Attaining the goals provided by these standards requires Read more about Common Core Standards Not Enough?[…]
The New Teacher Project (TNTP) announces the launch of The School Leader’s Toolbox, a new collection of resources used by the nation’s top charter schools to recruit, manage and support a high-performing teacher workforce. Effective strategies for building and managing teacher talent are singularly important in light of decades of research showing that teachers have Read more about The School Leader’s Toolbox[…]
In the spring 2011 issue of Education Next, Erin Dillon and Bill Tucker equate online learning with charter schools. Is online learning the next “cure-all” that will be implemented without any real way to assess its effectiveness? Their article, “Lessons for Online Learning” studies the lessons learned from the charter movement, such as focusing on Read more about Lessons for Online Learning[…]
A new book released this month by Education|Evolving associate Tim McDonald examines strategies for making schools more cost-effective and productive. Federal stimulus funding for K-12, McDonald argues, has created an impression that schools are suffering today because of the economic downturn. This is true. But the downturn is not the principle reason for their financial Read more about UNSUSTAINABLE: A Strategy for Making Public Schooling More Productive, Effective, and Affordable[…]
Principals arguably play the most important role in ensuring that excellent teaching occurs in their school. Principals’ Approaches to Developing Teacher Quality: Constraints and Opportunities in Hiring, Assigning, Evaluating and Developing Teachers by The Center for American Progress and The Education Trust provides key findings from a study of 30 principals working in charter and Read more about Principals’ Approaches to Developing Teacher Quality[…]
Four new education titles top my list for must-reads: A New Culture of Learning, The Influence of Teachers, Too Simple to Fail: A Case for Educational Change, and Teaching the Taboo. For those who are looking forward to what schooling might become, “A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Read more about New Education Titles that Can’t Be Missed[…]
The Center on Education Policy has released a report based on an October 2010 survey of state education officials, which discusses state education budgets, implementation timeline for initiatives to support the four American Recovery and Reinvestment Act reform assurances, state education agency capacity, and Race to the Top. The full report, More To Do, But Read more about Reform Implementation[…]
Digital learning is disruptive. The personalization of learning that it makes possible is a radical break from the course-and-class model of school with its technology of teacher-instruction. Personalization would change school, change teaching and change learning. What is the best way to go about changing the long-standing system of schooling? It may be more difficult Read more about Strategy for Realizing Digital[…]
Marc Tucker of the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) co-authored with the Organization for Economic and Co-operation and Development (OECD) the recently released report, “Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education”. The report examines in detail success stories from high-performing and fast-improving nations and highlights for policymakers, educators, and media in the Read more about Success Stories from High-Performing Nations[…]
I taught middle school English for five years, and I can honestly say that middle schools are strange (and wonderful!) places. They are not quite elementary schools, although some students are still struggling to master basic skills, and they are not quite high schools, although some students are earning high school credit and seriously considering Read more about Gaining Ground in Middle School[…]