The National Education Policy Center is a think tank known for its incisive reviews, studies, and reports. In this post, it demolishes five myths about teaching.
Myth 1: Evaluating teachers based on student test results is fair, objective, and effective. Wrong.
Myth 2: We’d get better performance out of teachers CONTINUE READING: NEPC: Five Myths About Teaching | Diane Ravitch's blog
With great frequency, promoters of privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools like to claim that charter schools are so great that they have very long lists of students waiting to get into them. They use such claims and “data” to argue that more charter schools are needed and that more public money should be spent on creating and multiplying more privately-operated charter schools.
However, many reports show that such waitlist numbers need to be taken with a grain of salt because they are usually inaccurate and misleading for various reasons. For example, a recent report from the North Carolina State Board of Education reported that:
During the 2019-2020 school year, over 117,000 North Carolina students were enrolled in [200] charter schools. As of October 1, 2020, over 126,000 North Carolina students are enrolled in charter schools. Self-reported data from the state’s charter schools indicate that 78% of charter schools had a waitlist totaling nearly 76,000 students statewide. (p. 3)
But in a footnote attached to this observation, the report notes that this “Figure may include duplicates, as students are often waitlisted at multiple charter schools.” An article from NC Policy Watch states: “76,000 names on waitlists aren’t the same as 76,000 students.” Names that appear on waitlists at multiple schools can result in a large overcount. Thus, for example, when one student is on multiple school’s waitlists, they are counted as being on each school’s waitlist. In other words, one student could be counted two, three, or more times, thereby inflating the final waitlist number. Such data could cause people to “mistakenly think that demand for charter schools is a lot higher CONTINUE READING: Inflated Charter School Waitlists | Dissident Voice
Big Education Ape: National Education Policy Center: The Myth of Charter School Waitlists | Diane Ravitch's blog - http://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2020/02/national-education-policy-center-myth.html
I have had a hard time locating actual classroom observations of hybrid teaching and learning. I did find that The New York Times sent journalists to visit seven different urban and rural districts that provided some evidence of what occurs in schools during the pandemic.
Doug Green emailed me that he had visited a small district near where he lives. I asked him to send me the results of his observations. Dr. Doug Green is a former teacher and principal in upstate New York. He blogs at https://DrDougGreen.Com
Since March of 2020, I have read countless articles about remote schooling. I have yet to see a convincing study on the relative quality of remote and in-person schooling, but I have seen many authors make unequivocal statements in favor of the in-person model. Whenever I see people stating hypotheses as facts I try to come up with reasons why they might be wrong, so here are the problems I find with the general consensus.
As part of my post-retirement professional life, I am the independent observer for a local school district. There I get to observe 120 teachers from K to12 thanks to the fact that our government doesn’t trust our principals to fairly evaluate CONTINUE READING: Back To School Covid Myths (Doug Green) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice
