The Answer Sheet - More to education than data

The Answer Sheet- More to education than data:

"Here’s Diane Ravitch’s response to a post I wrote last week about Teach for America. In that post, I had noted that “Teach For America” founder Wendy Kopp went to Capitol Hill to talk about new research on effective teachers.


Using test score data, the nonprofit organization--which recruits college graduates to teach in low-income schools for two years--has determined that effective teachers are those who employ the same strategies as successful leaders in any field.


I also pointed to a critique by educator Diana Senechal published on the Core Knowledge Blog, called “There Is No Such Thing as Teaching."

National ed reporting overrated

Those of us who write about schools were supposed to rise in anger and frustration when the Brookings Institution revealed that during the first nine months of 2009 “only 1.4 percent of national news coverage from television, newspapers, new Web sites and radio dealt with education.” A headline on the Brookings Web site said: “Invisible: 1.4 Percent Coverage for Education is Not Enough.”

I’m not feeling it. To begin with, the headline was misleading. Brookings probably learned that trick from us newspaper people, but still, get real. Maybe national education news is hard to find. Maybe it deserves to be, as boring and repetitive as it can be. But education reporting, at least the local kind that fills most of my days, is alive and well and provides more than 1.4 percent of what Americans read in their newspapers each day.

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