From the press release by the Boston-based Community Training and Assistance Center: As states and school districts increasingly use Student Learning Objectives (SLOs) in high stakes teacher evaluation and compensation systems to measure student academic growth, a new five-year study reports that high quality SLOs do improve teaching and bolster student growth. The national SLO Read more about New Study Corroborates State SLO Plans[…]
A new paper recently released by the Center for American Progress argues that excessive teacher absences, as might be expected, cause decreases in student achievement and waste school district resources. However, the paper asserts that problem of these excessive absences could be fairly easily alleviated because “the vast variation in teacher absence behavior means there Read more about Teacher Absenteeism is a “Leading Indicator” of Student Success[…]
Last week, the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) and Mathematica released a follow-up study to their January report on successful charter management organizations (CMOs). The new report, Learning from Charter School Management Organizations: Strategies for Student Behavior and Teacher Coaching, delves deeper, explaining how five successful CMOs put two successful approaches into practice. This Read more about Report Reveals Promising Practices of High-Impact CMOs[…]
A new working paper by C. Kirabo Jackson, Assistant Professor at Northwestern, takes a closer look at value-added measures and their application to high school teachers. Jackson notes that there is ample research at the elementary level detailing the importance of individual teachers on student outcomes in reading and math, but there isn’t much supporting Read more about Do High School Teachers Matter?[…]
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[…]
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[…]