Is education a good field for leaders, or just for managers?
Who is a leader, and who is a manager? A leader creates change. She leads by example, through charisma, persuasion, and reason, and is concerned with effectiveness and ultimate goals. A manager is someone who implements change. He coordinates, directs, and is concerned with efficiency, with means rather than ends, and with control rather than trust. In short, everyone wants to be a leader. And th
Why the NCTQ ratings won’t have much influence, now or later
How time flies. It’s been scarcely a month since the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) released its inaugural ratings of teacher-preparation programs across the country. Already, NCTQ is gearing up for next year’s model, envisioning an annual roll-out via its partnership with U.S. News & World Report.
The first edition was riddled with problems large and small. The small ones involved misunderstandings of institutions and their programs. My own institution—Teachers College, Columbia University—had its undergraduate programs rated for student selectivity, which was quite a trick, as Teachers College is a graduate school with no undergraduate programs. NCTQ no longer lists the undergraduate education program at Barnard College as a Teachers College program, but the organization still completely misunderstands the distinctions among Columbia University, Barnard College and Teachers College. (Pro tip: If two institutions of higher education have different presidents, boards of trustees and endowments, they’re not the same institution.)
The bigger problems are rooted in the design of NCTQ’s ratings, which relied heavily on course syllabi as a source of data about program quality, rather than more direct evidence of how those programs operate, or what their graduates know and can do. Why anyone would find this a
Early warning systems to detect high-school drop outs are all the rage in education data circles. See this post on a new early warning system in Wisconsin. Like the Wisconsin example, most data systems focus on identifying middle school students. But what if researchers could use grades, attendance and behavior data to identify at-risk students as soon as possible — as early as first grade? That w