Sexy sound bite solutions dominate education policy airtime – paying kids for test scores, paying teachers for test scores, and eliminating teacher certification are some of the latest examples.
The No Child Left Behind Act may represent the largest threshold-based government accountability system in the country. Schools are evaluated not by how much progress students make, but by their success in pushing students over the proficiency bar. By now, you’re probably familiar with the discontents [...] 
Earlier this month, a team of researchers at MIT and Harvard released a report contrasting the impact of charter schools, “pilot” schools, and traditional public schools on student achievement. The finding of charter school effects on achievement, using a random assignment research design, fueled the rhetoric [...]
Here’s a little thought experiment: Suppose that, in addition to adequate yearly progress in literacy and mathematics, high schools had to demonstrate progress in students’ ethical behavior. Would the graduates of Far Rockaway High School in Queens in New York City be as proficient in their [...]
To celebrate this week’s historic inauguration, skoolboy and I are going to take a step back and make some big wishes – or at least predictions - for education policy in the next four years.While we await President-Elect Obama's Inauguration speech, here's a look at the rhetoric in ten mayors' "State of the City" speeches over the past year. Can you match the mayor with the quote?
1. We're going to demonstrate how a school community comes together when you give teachers, parents [...]
Yesterday, President George W. Bush, as part of his swan song, released a compendium entitled “Policies of the Bush Administration 2001-2009.” Not surprisingly, No Child Left Behind is the centerpiece of administration’s accomplishments in K-12 education, and the fact sheets detail the administration’s claims about [...]
Forget a PhD - profs might do better with improv training and Botox (seriously, attractive professors - especially attractive men - get better evaluations!). Reported this morning in the Chronicle:The chancellor of the Texas A&M University system wants to give faculty members bonuses of [...] 
When a school district makes a big to-do about the use of "evidence to make decisions about how to help students learn, where to put our resources and how to manage our staff," is it fair to criticize it for implementing unproven and experimental programs? skoolboy [...]
Okay, barring the bad karma that seems to hang over the state of Illinois, Arne Duncan is now firmly ensconced as President Barack Obama’s nominee as Secretary of Education, thereby forestalling the Apocalypse predicted by the detractors of Linda Darling-Hammond. But eternal vigilance is the price [...]
This blog has a history of profiling "cool teachers you should know," and I wanted to start off 2009 by celebrating the life and work of Bob Kiessling, a legendary New Jersey math teacher and cross country/track coach who passed away over the holiday [...] 
Yesterday, I wrote about Morgaen Donaldson’s research on the survival rates of three cohorts of Teach for America teachers in their initial placement schools and in teaching overall. Today, I’ll describe one of her analyses of why TFA teachers leave their schools, focusing on the complexity [...]
skoolboy remains fascinated by the way in which Teach for America, a program serving perhaps 3% of the students in the districts in which it operates, can seem like the tail wagging the dog. Like eduwonkette, I see many virtues to the program, but do not view it as a [...]
skoolboy still has nothing substantive to say about Arne Duncan. But he's pleased to note that Duncan's a member of the tribe: his B.A. from Harvard is in sociology. Duncan took a year off from school to write a senior thesis on life in Kenwood, the [...]
skoolboy has absolutely nothing of substance to say about Education Secretary nominee Arne Duncan, whom he has met exactly once. But he continues to mouth off about New York City's Teacher Data Reports, the NYC Department of Education's version of value-added assessment. Which are not to [...] 
This is too precious not to comment on: the Center for Education Reform, the organization that sponsored that full page ad slamming the AFT charter study and the Times in 2004, threw this celebratory paragraph into their newsblast today (see background here):WHAT'S [...]
Recall the Great Charter School War of 2004: After the NY Times published the results of an AFT report finding that traditional public schools outperformed charters, all hell broke loose. Every charter school advocate and their mother intervened in the name of educational research, arguing that [...] 
A thought experiment: If Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers, was to jello wrestle his alter ego on central matters of public education, who would come out on top?
Hilary Levey is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at Princeton University. Below, she shares findings from her dissertation, "Playing to Win: Childhood, Competition, and the Credentials Bottleneck."
I promise that this whole week won't be deadly depressing, but Alexander Russo threw down the gauntlet about the media's lack of attention to results in Chicago Public Schools under Arne Duncan. So I took a look at Chicago's NAEP performance.
We hear a lot about "gap closing" schools these days, though this term often gets tossed around loosely. Consider Steven Wilson's recent report on "gap closing" Boston charter schools, in which gap closing schools are defined as, "schools that serve students of color from economically [...] 
The recent flurry of attention to high school completion rates has revived interest in early warning systems designed to identify students at risk of dropping out of high school. The idea behind these early warning systems is that, through the analysis of administrative data, schools and [...] 
Sean Corcoran is an economist who teaches at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at NYU.
One of my all-time favorite bumper stickers is the now-classic:
To my knowledge, the Air Force has yet to experiment with bake sales. But—according to three papers [...]
DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee is on the cover of this week's Time magazine. The accompanying article features a striking statistic: according to her office, she answered 95,000 e-mails last year. Allow skoolboy to speculate about this figure.
Let's suppose that Chancellor Rhee responds to e-mail [...]
This week's COWAbunga award, i.e. comment of the week award, goes to Rachel, who has been commenting here since the very beginning. It turns out that she and I share a ed policy pet peeve:While we're on the subject of "causal connection" I'll bring up one of [...]
We've always had a blast writing exam questions on this blog, so let me throw out a few bones for all you wily academics teaching undergrad Stat I this fall. The reader who answers both questions correctly gets an award named after her/him, which will [...] 
Following up on a long discussion last spring about teachers displaced from their schools and not rehired - teachers who are part of New York City's "Absent Teacher Reserve:" the city and the union have reached a deal. Principals will not have to pay [...] 
Calm down. All you have to do is write a thousand words and everything will be fine. And you have all day, except it's already noon.
This fall, we've heard a lot about how short-term pay incentives on Wall Street encouraged traders to take huge risks, and ultimately ushered us into our current financial mess. Ask the folks at Lehman Brothers - the decisions that maximize profits in the short-term don't always [...] 
Richard Ingersoll is a sociologist who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. He studies teacher quality, teacher retention, and how schools make use of teachers once they are on the job.
skoolboy ventured into the rarified air of NYC’s Harvard Club yesterday to hear Marcus Winters present his new Manhattan Institute research on the effects of the 2006-07 New York City School Progress Reports on students’ 2008 performance on state math and English tests in grades four [...]
Few things cause skoolboy to laugh out loud uncontrollably, but this line from a story filed by Elizabeth Green at GothamSchools hit the spot:
As part of its new approach, the Gates Foundation will advocate for the politically thorny goal of national standards — and will [...]
Why is there so much interest in where Barack and Michelle Obama plan to enroll their daughters, Malia Ann and Sasha, in Washington, DC schools? Probably because most observers think that the choice of a school will reveal something meaningful about President-Elect Obama’s views about schooling [...]
Why, we sure have, according to Ward Connerly, former University of California Regent and longtime opponent of affirmative action. Connerly quotes one of his college professors as saying that we’ll know that we’ve overcome the scourge of race when (a) white men no longer object to [...]
It’s Halloween, and time for skoolboy to present eduwonkette’s second annual Edu-Parade. Here are some of the few costumes you won’t see at the Greenwich Village Halloween parade in New York City:
First up are Philissa Cramer, Kelly Vaughan, and Elizabeth Green as the Gossip Girls. (That’s Elizabeth as vulnerable part-good, [...]
Recently, skoolboy’s students had a spirited discussion of Subtractive Schooling (SUNY Press, 1999), Angela Valenzuela’s wonderful book chronicling the social relations between teachers and students in Seguin, a Houston high school serving a high concentration of Mexican immigrant and Mexican-American youth. A central theme of the [...]
Maybe to a duck. The term originated in the world of finance, accompanying bulls and bears, and gravitated from referring to businessmen who couldn’t pay their debts to describing politicians who lose political power in anticipation of their scheduled loss of office. It’s hard not to [...]
eduwonkette's Halloween parade last year was such a big hit, it's time for a reprise. Because she's on the road, skoolboy (who lacks her Photoshop chops) is at the wheel. Please post suggestions for parade participants and their costumes below, or e-mail them to me at skoolboy2 [...]
Each fall, [...]
1) 8% of This Year's Teaching Fellows to Be Let Go in December: 139 teachers, or 8% of the 1840 teachers who joined the NYC Teaching Fellows June 2008 cohort, will be let go on December 5th because they have not yet been placed in [...] 
Dan Brown's book, The Great Expectations School, is out in paperback now with some new endorsements. (As a sidenote, it turns out that the two of us went to the same elementary school, pictured left, in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and even shared four of [...] 
On Tuesday, the Broad Foundation awarded the 2008 Broad Prize for Urban Education to the Brownsville, Texas School District. skoolboy has a soft spot in his heart for Brownsville: skoolboy’s spouse (who has made it clear that he is a dead man if he refers to [...]
Many thanks to skoolboy for taking the reigns while I've been out of town. In a week, we will return to our regularly scheduled programming, and skoolboy will be back to entertain at the end of the week. In the meantime, consider the following links:
