Hechinger Report | Thinking we know what we test

Hechinger Report | Thinking we know what we test:

Thinking we know what we test

from Hechinger Report by Justin Snider

An op-ed in The New York Times on August 20th, “Testing What We Think We Know,” argued that many medical procedures are carried out in the United States despite a very thin evidence-base for their efficacy. It’s high time to invest more in research, the author wrote, to figure out first what actually works. The op-ed’s author, H. Gilbert Welch, is a professor of medicine at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice and a co-author of Overdiagnosed: Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health (2011).
Welch’s op-ed about the field of medicine could just as easily have been about the field of education (but then, would The Times have published it?). The problems besetting both are strikingly similar. In that spirit, what follows is a riff on Welch’s op-ed, and it’ll likely make sense only if you first read “Testing What We Think We Know.”
By 2010, many politicians were recommending top-down accountability to healthy schools and rigorous

School vouchers make a comeback, stir concerns about quality

from Hechinger Report by Sarah Carr

NEW ORLEANS — As Louisiana debuts one of the nation’s most extensive private-school voucher programs, deep divides persist over who should be accountable for ferreting out academic failure and financial abuse: the government or parents.

Photo by Sarah Garland

Across the country, vouchers have resurged in a big way over the last two years—both as a form of school choice and a political lightning rod. Republican governors in Louisiana, Indiana, New Jersey and other states have championed them as a solution to the challenges besetting public education. More recently, Republican