Frederick M. Hess's Blog
Of Evaluation and Transparency
by Frederick M. Hess • Apr 2, 2010 at 8:45 am
Cross-posted from Education Week
Cross-posted from Education Week
The evidentiary standards for i3 have stirred much conversation. On those standards, I've mixed feelings. On the one hand, the i3 criteria have healthfully prompted would-be applicants to think much more seriously about evaluation than has been the norm. Just in the past few weeks, I've heard from a number of outfits that have suddenly gotten religion on this question. This has the potential to weed out so many of the cruddy fly-by-night operators in the space and to foster a culture of performance.
At the same time, if foundations wind up mimicking federal decisions, standards of evidence could become a roadblock for promising new providers; it's not clear how consistently or how carefully the evidentiary standard will be applied; and I have worried visions of bloated evaluation shops padding their pockets at usurious mark-ups and then taking care to produce evaluations that show sufficient promise to keep their clients happy.
But, I want to set the "evaluation" question aside for a moment and focus on the broader question of transparency. Just last month, Microsoft's Mary Cullinane and I published What's Next? Educational Innovation and Philadelphia's School of the Future (Harvard Education Press 2010). For me, less compelling was an
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