The Education Department’s strange new report on teaching
One of the most controversial issues in public education today is the use of “value-added measures” to evaluate teachers and principals. What these measures, known as VAM, purportedly do is to calculate the “value” of a teacher in student achievement through complicated formulas that use student standardized test scores as a base. Assessment experts have […]
MLK: ‘Intelligence plus character — that is the goal of true education’
I published this last year, and I’m doing it again: Martin Luther King Jr., was prescient on a lot of things, including education. Here are some things he wrote decades ago that sound contemporary. – Here’s an excerpt from “The Purpose of Education,” a piece he wrote in the February 1947 edition of the Morehouse College student newspaper, the […]
Why Christie’s school ‘fix’ is misguided
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie recently proposed extending the school year and school day in State of the State speech as reforms intended to improve student achievement, though he didn’t provide details or make any mention of how he would fund it. Here’s a piece questioning the notion that simply adding seat time works. This was written […]
All Week @ The Answer Sheet 1-18-14
The Answer Sheet:All Week @ The Answer SheetEverything you need to know about Common Core — RavitchDiane Ravitch, the education historian who has become the leader of the movement against corporate-influenced school reform, gave this speech to the Modern Language Association on Jan. 11 about the past, present and future of the Common Core State Standards. Here’s her speech: As an organization of t