Latest News and Comment from Education

Tuesday, August 5, 2014

8-5-14 Answer Sheet

Answer Sheet:











Michelle Rhee has a new position
Michelle Rhee just got a new position. According to the Sacramento Bee she was just named interim board chairwoman of St. Hope Schools, a small group of Sacramento charter schools. The new position gives “Rhee a powerful new role in the charter school system founded by her husband, Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson.” But she isn’t […]
School reforms that actually work
For years now education leaders have been pushing onto school districts school reforms that don’t show any sign of working while giving short shrift to those that have a track record of working. Gary Ravani, a 35-year public school teacher and president of the California Federation of Teachers’ Early Childhood/K-12 Council, explains in this post. […]
If this isn’t school reform failure, what is?
School reformers have made student standardized test scores the most important measure of how public schools are doing, so it seems only fair to measure their performance by their own definition of success. The newly released 2014 high-stakes test scores tells us that D.C. Public Schools doesn’t have a great deal to show for its […]


8-4-14 Answer Sheet
Answer Sheet: It’s innovative, but is it really better?The word “innovative” is invoked a lot to describe school reform policies that are alleged to be improvements over what existed before. But is innovative inherently better? Arthur H. Camins answers the question in the folowing post. Camins is the director of the Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education at the Stevens Institut