Gates Teacher Study, California Test Pushback: Ed Today
How Are Teachers Measured? As we reported yesterday, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation finished its three-year, $50 million study on measuring teacher effectiveness. The researchers found that neither test scores nor observations alone will do the trick. Click here for WSJ's take, and here for another look in the Washington Post.
What Does Nate Silver think?Just as the Gates Foundation released its report, the famous New York Times wonk weighed in on the topic on Reddit: sometimes, he writes, no data is better than bad data. "There are certainly cases where applying objective measures badly is worse than not applying them at all, and education may well be one of those," says
What Does Nate Silver think?Just as the Gates Foundation released its report, the famous New York Times wonk weighed in on the topic on Reddit: sometimes, he writes, no data is better than bad data. "There are certainly cases where applying objective measures badly is worse than not applying them at all, and education may well be one of those," says
Michelle Rhee's Charter School Push: Good For Kids? The Debate Continues
Last Friday, I wrote a story about a crop of high-profile Democrats leaving StudentsFirst, the organization run by former Washington, D.C. schools chief Michelle Rhee.
Several sources suggested that the move spoke to a broader change in StudentsFirst: a group once extremely self-conscious about its positioning as a bipartisan organization is now more interested in being purist and ideological in implementing its ideas. (This theory played out interestingly on Monday when the group releasedits report card of state education policies).
I was excited to see that the piece spurred dialogue on a few different corners of the web -- particularly on the
Several sources suggested that the move spoke to a broader change in StudentsFirst: a group once extremely self-conscious about its positioning as a bipartisan organization is now more interested in being purist and ideological in implementing its ideas. (This theory played out interestingly on Monday when the group releasedits report card of state education policies).
I was excited to see that the piece spurred dialogue on a few different corners of the web -- particularly on the