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Kansas Courts Get It Right (March 12, 2014)
There is a small community that closely watches the various school finance court cases that are always creating background noise for education policy discussions. This community was rewarded last week with a new decision from the Kansas Supreme Court. Importantly, its decision in Gannon v. Kansas potentially signals a new direction for these cases. Instead of deciding whether or not the Kansas legislature had dedicated sufficient funds to its local schools, it chose to highlight the importance of student outcomes.
Some Perspective on Common Core (October 28, 2013)

The presumption behind having national standards is that having a clearer and more consistent statement of learning objectives across states would tend to lessen the problem of heterogeneous skills that students bring to the labor market. Again, however, the fundamental problem is lack of minimal skills and not the heterogeneity of skills per se.

What Happened to 2007? (March 06, 2013)

A little more than a decade ago we embarked on what is arguably the most significant change in educational policy of the past half-century—the introduction of No Child Left Behind. As with any 1,000-page guess about how to do something, I thought the idea of revisiting the law in 2007, the date designated for its reauthorization, was an important part of the underlying wisdom of the act. Without researching it, I suspect that other congressional acts have missed their reauthorization date by wider margins. But, given the importance of this act to the hopes, aspirations, and operations of our schools, I am willing to assert that this ranks among the most consequential dropped balls of Congress.

Exchanges with Deborah Meier, “Bridging Differences” (February 26, 2013)

Over a five week period in early 2013, there were a series of exchanges with Deborah Meier about accountability, testing, personnel evaluation, and salaries. The sequence of posts is provided here, along with a link to the responses by Deborah Meier.

We Know the Answer, But What Is the Question? (January 28, 2013)

Secretary Duncan and others have emphasized the mediocre international test scores of U.S. students. Martin Carnoy and Richard Rothstein now tell us that performance is not as bad as you think and that Secretary Duncan should stop making “exaggerated and misleading statements” about the performance of U.S. students. However, we cannot paper over the fact that a large number of other countries have shown that it is possible to develop considerably higher skills in their youth.

For now, they are overrated, but in the future they could do a lot of good (December 10, 2012)

Are Video Games the Learning Tools They’re Cracked Up To Be? Three facts about educational video games—and educational technology more generally—are important to consider as we look at their current use and impact. First, video games, educational and otherwise, show that clever technologies can attract and hold the attention of users and can teach them a variety of sophisticated thinking patterns. Second, educational games have made little dent in education. And, third, advanced technologies will be an important part of education in the future.

Evaluating Teachers AND Administrators (November 26, 2012)

Recent school reform talk has focused importantly on teacher evaluations and on using evaluations for personnel decisions – both positive and negative. But this discussion is almost always too narrow. We should never focus exclusively on teacher evaluations without also including administrator evaluations.

The California Student Lockout (July 23, 2012)

When asked to propose ways to deal with budget cuts, the National Park Service famously proposed closing the Washington Monument, and this tactic of choosing the most egregious conceivable action as a way of forestalling budget cuts is enshrined in budgeting lore.

Human Capital and the Latin American Growth Puzzle (July 18, 2012)

Long run growth is very closely linked to the human capital of the population as measured by international mathematics and science scores. On this count, the nations of Latin America have done very poorly compared to those in all other regions except Sub-Saharan Africa.

International Benchmarking of Student Achievement (June 05, 2012)

There has been considerable discussion about the advantages of benchmarking the performance of American students in various states and localities to international tests. In simplest terms, this is something we should support because it would provide new and important information to both states and localities. This new information would also provide added impetus to the imperative to improve our schools.

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