Thursday, April 25, 2013

UPDATE: How arcane rules — not student achievement — drove No Child Left Behind

How arcane rules — not student achievement — drove No Child Left Behind:



How arcane rules — not student achievement — drove No Child Left Behind


nclbIf No Child Left Behind was supposed to be about anything, it was improving student achievement. Here’s an important piece about how it wasn’t really student achievement that affected NCLB outcomes but, rather, tiny differences in arcane rules. This was written by Matthew Di Carlo, senior fellow at the non-profit Albert Shanker Institute, located in Washington, D.C. This originally appeared on the Shanker Blog blog.
By Matthew Di Carlo
A big part of successful policy making is unyielding attention to detail (an argument that regular readers of this blog hear often). Choices about design and implementation that may seem unimportant can play a substantial role in determining how policies play out in practice.
A new paper, co-authored by Elizabeth Davidson, Randall Reback, Jonah Rockoff and Heather Schwartz, and presented at last month’s annual conference of The Association for 

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Jon Stewart’s pointed lesson on the U.S. Constitution

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