schoolinfosystem.org
Wall Street Journal: The paper’s authors, three professors of economics or education policy, explain what happened after Massachusetts raised its charter cap in 2010. The state set rules encouraging successful charter schools—deemed “proven providers”—to seed new campuses. Most follow a “no excuses” framework, with high expectations and a low tolerance for misbehavior. After the cap […]
Andrew Kay: All around them, the humanities burned. The number of jobs in English advertised on the annual MLA job list has declined by 55 percent since 2008; adjuncts now account for all but a quarter of college instructors generally. Whole departments are being extirpated by administrators with utilitarian visions; from 2013 to 2016, colleges […]
Esmeralda Fabián Romero: NAACP branches in three California cities that have some of the state’s largest populations of black students are calling to end the charter school moratorium adopted by their national board in 2016. The San Diego, Riverside and San Bernardino branches have submitted separate resolutions to NAACP’s state board saying they oppose the […]
Tobias Smith: As the recent college admissions scandal is shedding light on how parents are cheating and bribing their children’s way into college, schools are also focusing on how some students may be cheating their way through college. Concern is growing about a burgeoning online market that makes it easier than ever for students to […]
Josie Huang: UCLA is at the center of a cheating scandal that federal authorities say involved former and current students impersonating dozens of Chinese nationals who needed good scores on English tests to get into college in the U.S. The six defendants, five with ties to UCLA, allegedly used fake passports, doctored with their own […]
Janan Ganesh: On a long-haul flight, Can You Ever Forgive Me? becomes the first film I have ever watched twice in immediate succession. Released last month in Britain, it recounts the (true) story of Lee Israel, a once-admired, now-marginal writer who resorts to literary forgery to make the rent on her fetid New York hovel. […]
Michael Standaert: In Shenzhen, even kindergartners have homework. You can see it in the workbook-laden backpacks weighing them down as they waddle through the school gates at 8 a.m. and back out again at 5 p.m. Many are not headed home yet. There are dance classes, piano lessons, English tutors, kung-fu sessions to get to. […]
Mary Hudson: Aside from the history teacher from Texas, other Washington Irving educators stood out as extraordinary, and this in an unimaginably bad learning environment. One was a cheerful Lebanese math teacher who had been felled as a child by polio. He called himself “the million dollar man” because of his handicapped parking permit, quite […]
Mary Hudson: Bad teaching is a common explanation given for the disastrously inadequate public education received by America’s most vulnerable populations. This is a myth. Aside from a few lemons who were notable for their rarity, the majority of teachers I worked with for nine years in New York City’s public school system were dedicated, […]
BBC: Milton’s Paradise Lost is rarely read today. But this epic poem, 350 years old this month, remains a work of unparalleled imaginative genius that shapes English literature even now. In more than 10,000 lines of blank verse, it tells the story of the war for heaven and of man’s expulsion from Eden. Its dozen […]
Zachary Wright: Alongside the whiteboard in the front of my 12th-grade English classroom in Philadelphia, there are sentence strips listing the names of the authors we have read thus far this school year. The names read like a syllabus to “Political Philosophy 101”: Hobbes. Locke. Rousseau. Plato. Marx. Hume. Machiavelli. Sun Tzu. These authors and […]
Alan Borsuk: To set the context briefly: Comparing three years ago to last year, the percentage of students statewide who are rated as proficient or advanced in language arts, math and science has gone down. Just above 40% of Wisconsin kids are proficient or better in each subject, which means close to 60% are not. […]
Eli Meixler: A resume for a kindergartener who possesses “rich and varied experience” and “an independent personality” prompted ridicule on Chinese social media this week, but also called attention to the high-stakes pressure children in China can face from a young age. The document kicked off a storm after an entertainment blogger posted it Tuesday […]
Erin Richards: Test scores tell another story. Less than 5 percent of students are proficient in English and math on the state exam. The vast majority score “below basic,” the lowest category, in both subjects. Despite devoted teachers, a spirit of achievement, extra money and five years of attention from Milwaukee’s best minds in business […]
Will Flanders: Less discussed in Wisconsin is the tremendous impact that economic status has on student achievement. A school with a population of 100% students who are economically disadvantaged would be expected to have proficiency rates more than 40% lower than a school with wealthier students. Indeed, this economics achievement gap is far larger in […]
Molly Beck and Erin Richards: “We set a high bar for achievement,” DPI spokesman Tom McCarthy said. “To reach more than half (proficiency), we would need to raise the achievement of our lowest district and subgroup performers through policies like those recommended in our budget, targeted at the large, urban districts.” The new scores reveal […]
David Gelernter: Welcome to Yale. Please disregard what you’ve been told so far, and follow these instructions. 1. Understand that you’re here to learn how to be good citizens of the United States. Many of you come from Japan or Ghana or France, and we’re glad to have you. But Yale can’t teach you to […]
Laurie Frost and Jeff Henriques [PDF]: Dear Simpson Street Free Press: Thank you for leading the way in looking more closely at recent reports of an increase in MMSD minority student graduation rates and related issues: http://simpsonstreetfreepress.org/special-report/local-education/rising-grad-rates http://simpsonstreetfreepress.org/special-report/local-education/act-college-readiness-gap Inspired by your excellent work, we decided to dig deeper. We call the result of our efforts […]
Radio Free Asia: A pro-democracy party in Hong Kong has hit out at newly published school textbooks backed by the Chinese government as “biased,” and aimed at “brainwashing” students. The books and teaching materials published by Educational Publishing, which is wholly controlled by Beijing’s Central Liaison Office in the city, contain a biased account of […]
Benjamin Schmidt: People have been proclaiming the imminent extinction of the humanities for decades. A best-selling volume in 1964 warned that a science-focused world left no room for humane pursuits, even as Baby Boomers began to flood the English and history departments of new universities. Allan Bloom warned about academics putting liberal ideology before scholarship […]
Elizabeth Ross: This study examines all 50 states’ and the District of Columbia’s requirements regarding the science of reading for elementary and special education teacher candidates. Chan Stroman: “Report finds only 11 states have adequate safeguards in place for both elementary and special education teachers.” Make that “10 states”; with Wisconsin PI 34, the loophole […]
Matthew De Four: It wasn’t until the end of Wednesday night’s Democratic gubernatorial forum at the Madison Public Library that someone took a swing at the candidate who has led in all of the polls. Former party chairman Matt Flynn in his closing statement called State Superintendent Tony Evers “Republican lite” and criticized him for […]
Anna Welch: The Madison District has seen graduation rates improve. But, it remains unclear if those students are prepared for college and career. Students who are not adequately prepared before they graduate often pay the price in college. In 2016, Act 28 took effect requiring the UW Board of Regents to submit an annual report […]
Chester E. Finn, Jr. President, Fordham Foundation Academic Questions, Spring 1998e: What’s going on in the college curriculum cannot be laid entirely at the doorstep of the K-12 system. Indeed, as Allan Bloom figured out a decade or more ago, it has as much to do with our educational culture, indeed with our culture per […]
Peter Thonemann: The first date in English History, according to 1066 and All That, is 55 BC, the year of Julius Caesar’s memorable landing at Thanet. “The Ancient Britons”, Sellar and Yeatman remind us, “were by no means savages before the Conquest, and had already made great strides in civilisation, e.g. they buried each other […]
Eric Bennett: Can the average humanities professor be blamed if she rises in the morning, checks the headlines, shivers, looks in the mirror, and beholds a countenance of righteous and powerless innocence? Whatever has happened politically to the United States, it’s happened in stark opposition to the values so many philosophers and English professors, historians […]
Alec MacGillis: The real driver of growth at Liberty, it turns out, is not the students who attend classes in Lynchburg but the far greater number of students who are paying for credentials and classes that are delivered remotely, as many as 95,000 in a given year. By 2015, Liberty had quietly become the second-largest […]
Eric Bennett: Can the average humanities professor be blamed if she rises in the morning, checks the headlines, shivers, looks in the mirror, and beholds a countenance of righteous and powerless innocence? Whatever has happened politically to the United States, it’s happened in stark opposition to the values so many philosophers and English professors, historians […]
Dan Walters: There was a bit of good news for California in the federal government’s latest round of academic test results: it’s one of seven states that registered four-point gains in reading comprehension among eighth-graders. But that positive morsel in the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) testing of fourth- and eighth-graders released this […]
Kyle Spencer: “My parents don’t want to just throw money around now,” Ms. Shahverdian said as she walked across Pasadena’s 53-acre campus, heading toward her English class. “I’m getting a great education at a fraction of the cost.” Community colleges have long catered to low-income students who dream of becoming the first in their families […]
Alicia Duran: My 10 years as a high school English teacher at Volcano Vista in Albuquerque were awesome. I love the art of teaching, the science of teaching and the joys of teaching. My students’ learning came first, which is at the heart of why I love our profession – making an impact on kids’ […]
Nick Anderson: An education company backed by U.S. and Chinese investors is launching a global private school for students ages 3 to 18, with the first two campuses scheduled to open next year in Washington and the Chinese coastal city of Shenzhen. Whittle School & Studios will offer foreign-language immersion — Chinese in the United […]
Alan Borsuk: Don’t think this is a piece only about schools in Milwaukee, either public or private. I got responses from suburban schools where the same issues are seen, and from across the state. People working in affluent areas said behavior has gotten worse in their schools, as well. English language arts begins. You pull […]
Bill Donahue: the U.S. and landed in western Maine. They planned to grow potatoes. Instead they were taken in for a summer by a kind family, the Adamses, whose ramshackle farm was a mess, a melange of dogs and cows and chickens and broken tractor equipment. To Bernd, the place was paradise, as he writes […]
Leslie Brody: As the private Dwight School in Manhattan gears up to open a new campus, it is recruiting dozens of American teachers with perks such as free housing and tuition for their children. The rub is that the new site is almost 7,000 miles away in Dubai, a city on the Persian Gulf where […]
Gu Liping : The Jack Ma Foundation on Monday announced a new plan to invest at least 300 million yuan (45 million U.S. dollars) to encourage graduates of normal schools to teach in rural areas in the next 10 years. The first 10 million yuan will be invested in selecting 100 fresh graduates from normal […]
American Institutes for Research (AIR): Wisconsin annually differentiates across all public schools based on scores for the individual federally-required accountability measures (not annual summative ratings for all schools/all students based on all indicators). Schools for comprehensive support and improvement, targeted support and improvement, and additional targeted support and improvement are identified using the following composite […]
Matt Taibbi: On a wind-swept, frigid night in February 2009, a 37-year-old schoolteacher named Scott Nailor parked his rusted ’92 Toyota Tercel in the parking lot of a Fireside Inn in Auburn, Maine. He picked this spot to have a final reckoning with himself. He was going to end his life. Beaten down after more […]
Nadia Naviwala: On a visit to a village school in the mountains near Abbottabad in northwestern Pakistan, I asked a group of third graders to spell “Pakistan.” They stared at me, silent and bewildered. The school had 20 students; only two have survived till the fifth grade. The two fifth graders were somewhat literate. One […]
Claudio Sanchez: Most teachers these days last no more than five to 10 years in the classroom, but Paul Miller taught math for nearly 80. At one point, he was considered the “oldest active accredited teacher” in the U.S. His career started in his hometown of Baltimore. It was 1934, the Dust Bowl was wreaking […]
Kyoto Hamada: “There’s nothing that has no relationship to science,” Comer said after the class. “It’s very important to me that students know how the world around them functions.” But learning science is like learning another language, she said, and only 10 percent of Baychester’s students read English at or above grade level. Complicating matters, […]
Amber Walker For math, the numbers were 46 percent for proficiency and 65 percent for growth. Over the past four years, students’ reading proficiency increased 10 percentage points in reading and 8 percentage points in math. The largest achievement gap in elementary school reading exists between African-American and white students, with 18 percent of black […]
Elissa Nadworny: Teachers have one of the lowest-paid professional jobs in the U.S. You need a bachelor’s degree, which can be costly — an equation that often means a lot of student loans. We’ve reported on the factors that make this particular job even more vulnerable to a ton of debt, including chronically low teacher […]
David Bell: IN 1922, Austrian art historian Josef Stryzgowski lectured in Boston on “The Crisis in the Humanities as Exemplified in the History of Art.” In 1964, British historian J.H. Plumb published a volume of essays entitled The Crisis in the Humanities. Between 1980 and 2000 a “crisis in the humanities” was discussed more than […]
Sandra Stotsky, via Will Fitzhugh: Most books on public education in any country do not favor workforce preparation for all students in place of optional high school curricula or student-selected post-secondary goals. Nor have parents in the USA lauded Common Core’s effects on their children’s learning or the K-8 curriculum. Indeed, few observers see anything […]
Joseph Stromberg: You likely don’t give a ton of thought to the sounds and patterns that make up the language you speak everyday. But the human voice is capable making of a tremendous variety of noises, and no language includes all of them. About 20 percent of the world’s languages, for example, make use of […]
Joseph Tago: Mr. Hayes’s solution is to improve education, specifically with a national apprenticeship program that would guide local public-private partnerships to train and prepare the workforce better. He knows the problem firsthand: “I’ve got thousands of job openings.” Do you really? “Thousands,” he replies. “A lot of this is because we’ve got growth in […]
David Matthews: In 2016, German universities enjoyed another big rise in the international student population, according to the latest data. Germany recorded close to a 7 percent increase in international students coming to the country. This follows a jump of nearly 8 percent the previous year. Numbers have risen about 30 percent since 2012. In […]
NCES: This report looks at changes in several key characteristics of the teaching force between the 1987-88 and 2011-12 school years, including the number of teachers, the level of teaching experience, and the racial/ethnic diversity of the teaching force. The report focuses on how these demographic changes varied across different types of teachers and schools. […]
Howard Blume: Add Long Beach Unified to the list of California school districts accused of improperly spending money intended to help students with some of the greatest needs. The system, with about 78,000 students, is the seventh to be targeted by Public Advocates. The watchdog law firm has filed a complaint on behalf of Children’s […]
The Hub: By using the categories of evidence—strong, moderate, and promising—outlined in the law, Evidence for ESSA makes it easier for school leaders to determine which programs are in compliance. Programs without evidence of effectiveness are not ranked on the website, and the CRRE plans to incorporate new educational studies and new programs into the […]
Brook Larmer: As the plane descended over Iowa, Fan Yijia could see a quilt of green and yellow cornfields extending to the horizon. It had taken more than 24 hours – and one missed flight – for the first-year University of Iowa student to travel from Jiaxing in eastern China to the American Midwest. To […]
Because of its location near the nation’s capital, its charming historic Old Town, and its median family income of $109,228 (the highest of any city in Virginia), outsiders might think that Alexandria boasts a first-rate public-school system. It doesn’t. The quality of the public schools within the city varies greatly, and system as a whole […]
Rachel Cohen: This morning, teachers at Paul Public Charter School, one of the oldest charters in Washington, D.C., publicly announced their intent to unionize—a first for charter schoolteachers in the nation’s capital. As in other cities where charter teachers have formed unions, the Paul educators are forming their own local—the District of Columbia Alliance of […]
Molly Beck: A group of school officials, including state Superintendent Tony Evers, is asking lawmakers to address potential staffing shortages in Wisconsin schools by making the way teachers get licensed less complicated. The Leadership Group on School Staffing Challenges, created by Evers and Wisconsin Association of School District Administrators executive director Jon Bales, released last […]
Tony Evers (PDF): 1. Why are you running for State Superintendent of Public Instruction? I’ve been an educator all my adult life. I grew up in small town Plymouth, WI. Worked at a canning factory in high school, put myself through college, and married my kindergarten sweetheart, Kathy-also a teacher. I taught and became a […]
The Economist: FOR a glimpse of the Soviet Union’s influence on English education, head to a sixth-form college in Lambeth, a 20-minute stroll from Parliament. There, in a former 1930s bath-house sunk low amid housing estates, sits King’s College London Mathematics School (KCLMS). Inside, pupils can spend their free time solving mathematical problems on whiteboards […]
Molly Beck: Overall on school funding, Evers said that the state is not spending enough on schools and that more funding should be sent to schools with higher numbers of students in foster care, students living in poverty and students who don’t speak English as a first language. Humphries said academic achievement — particularly elementary […]
Erin Richards: Together, Travis Academy and Holy Redeemer have received close to $100 million in taxpayer funding over the years. The sum is less than what taxpayers would have paid for those pupils in public schools, because each tuition voucher costs less than the total expense per pupil in Milwaukee Public Schools. But vouchers weren’t […]
Catrin Einhorn & Jodi Kantor: As soon as Bayan Mohammad, a 10-year-old Syrian refugee, arrived here last winter, she began her transformation. In her first hour of ice-skating, she managed to glide on her own. She made fast friends with girls different from any she had ever known. New to competitive sports, she propelled herself […]
Mareesia Nicosia: They’ve waited every morning since, Gunter told The 74 in a recent interview, until the doors open and staff welcomes them warmly inside, trading handshakes and high-fives as music courses through the halls. Not long ago, though, there was little enthusiasm from students, their families — and staff, for that matter. The pre-K–5 […]
Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email: It has become common knowledge that Wisconsin students do not perform well in 4th grade reading, and that efforts to improve performance over the past two decades have been largely ineffective. On the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), the only means we have to compare Wisconsin apples-to-apples […]
Adam Creighton The world’s highly skilled immigrants are increasingly living in just four nations: the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia, according to new World Bank research highlighting the challenges of brain drain for non-English-speaking and developing countries. Falling transport costs combined with growing competition for talented workers have seen the ranks of highly skilled immigrant […]
Colleen Flaherty Faculty members in English at Ohio State University say 18 non-tenure-track lecturer jobs have been saved, at least for this year. The university maintains that their jobs were never at risk. Faculty members said earlier this week that Ohio State had been struggling to come up with approximately $500,000 to fulfill the 18 […]
Doug Erickson: On the latest round of statewide tests, fewer than half of Wisconsin public school students in grades three through eight scored proficient or better in English language arts or math. The results, released Tuesday by the state Department of Public Instruction, showed 42.5 percent of students scored in those top two categories in […]
Joseph R. Teller My students can’t write a clear sentence to save their lives, and I’ve had it. In 10 years of teaching writing, I have experimented with different assignments, activities, readings, approaches to commenting on student work — you name it — all to help students write coherent prose that someone would actually want […]
Alan Borsuk: About a dozen years ago, Willie Jude, a longtime Milwaukee Public Schools administrator who was principal of Custer High School at the time, told me that many Custer grads who went on to higher education (and there weren’t that many) realized quickly they were way behind many other students when it came to […]
Brian Krez’s: The source code that powers the “Internet of Things” (IoT) botnet responsible for launching the historically large distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against KrebsOnSecurity last month has been publicly released, virtually guaranteeing that the Internet will soon be flooded with attacks from many new botnets powered by insecure routers, IP cameras, digital video recorders […]
Simon Keper: ‘A 10-year-old in western Europe is probably the safest demographic since man first walked upright, but try telling that to your brain’ I’d like to have a soldier stationed outside the classroom door,” my son’s teacher told the parents’ meeting. “And I’d like him to be young and handsome.” My children’s primary school […]
Beckie Strum The University of Oxford, the oldest in the English-speaking world, took the top spot in the latest World University Rankings, released annually by Times Higher Education. The English university dating to 1096 dethroned the California Institute of Technology, a small, private school in Pasadena that had ranked No. 1 for five consecutive years, […]
George Anders: Six years ago, Andy Anderegg’s decision to major in English looked like an economic sacrifice. When she left academia in 2010, with a master’s degree in fine arts from the University of Kansas, the first job she landed was a Groupon Inc. writing gig paying all of $33,000 a year. Now, however, Ms. […]
Vivett Dukes: Let me get personal and tell you a little bit about me: in particular, what sparked my passion for educational equity and commitment to giving disenfranchised children a shot at success. When I took 11th grade English with Mr. Frank McHugh at Elmont Memorial Senior High and we read D.H. Lawrence’s “Sons and […]
Adam Clark: TRENTON — The results of controversial standardized tests that many New Jersey students have yet to pass will carry three times as much weight in some teacher’s evaluations this school year, the state announced Wednesday. Teachers in grades 4-7 whose students participate in the PARCC math tests or in grades 4-8 whose students […]
Chris Cook: Few intra-governmental memos have sparked more anger than one called Circular 10/65, a memorandum sent 51 years ago by Anthony Crosland, then the education secretary, to local authorities. The document instructed local officials to commence converting grammar schools into comprehensives. Only a few English counties, such as Kent and Lincolnshire, retained many. Today, […]
Federation of American Scientists: This report contains short summaries describing warnings similar to the Miranda warning that are required in 108 jurisdictions around the globe. The summaries are divided into sections based on broad geographic categories: Americas and the Caribbean, East Asia and the Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa, South […]
Hamilton Nolan: I got my PhD in Classics, which maintains a bit of an old school appeal to pedigree (and white males). Our PhDs are being churned out at an alarming rate (not as bad as English, though), and there are few tenure track jobs. If you look at the Classics wiki, which goes back […]
Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter (PDF), via a kind Jeanie Kamholtz email: (By Andrew McCuaig, English teacher, LaFollette High School) Joining a union is an act of faith: a belief that people coming together with similar daily work lives can have an impact on those people who may have goals that don’t take into account […]
Esther Cepeda We’ve heard for years that when it comes to African-Americans, Hispanics and low-income minority communities in general, expectations for academic achievement are low. Indeed, the Center for American Progress found in 2014 that 10th-grade teachers thought African-American students were 47 percent, and Hispanic students were 42 percent, less likely to graduate college than […]
Claudio Sanchez: back in school, bored to death, with limited academic options. Because you’re learning English, everybody assumes you’re not ready for more challenging work. What they don’t realize is that you’re gifted. Researchers say this happens to lots of gifted children who arrive at school speaking little or no English. These students go unnoticed, […]
Scott Cowley: Purdue, in West Lafayette, Ind., has 30,000 undergraduate students. Indiana residents pay annual tuition fees of $10,000, while students from other states pay nearly $30,000. Its average graduate emerges owing $28,000. The income-sharing program will offer terms based on students’ majors and the projected salaries in those fields. A comparison tool on Purdue’s […]
Andrew Simmons: I’d drawn a little tombstone on the board. I was in the middle of leading a class of 10th-grade English students through Piggy’s death scene in Lord of the Flies: the rock, the shattered conch, Piggy’s long fall, the red stuff flowing out, the twitching legs. The corners of her eyes bubbling, a […]
Kang Shu: Shenzhen’s government has doubled this year’s budget for programs related to attracting talented people to the city to 4.4 billion yuan this year in a bid to attract more academics and professionals to help nurture innovation. The city government, which announced the plans through media outlets on March 21, made especially rich offers […]
Roxana Robinson Last week publishers, copyright experts and other supporters filed amicus briefs petitioning the Supreme Court to hear the copyright-infringement case against Google brought by the Authors Guild. The court’s decision will determine how and whether the rights and livelihood of writers are protected in the future. If you type, “Shall I compare thee […]
Jennifer Brown: I wish I could say that this honor was for jovial purposes. It wasn’t. I appeared before the committee not to discuss the amazing job our teachers are doing in classrooms across the state, but instead to defend Alabama’s College and Career Ready Standards from the latest legislative attempt to reverse what the […]
Teresa Elms: This chart shows the lexical distance — that is, the degree of overall vocabulary divergence — among the major languages of Europe. The size of each circle represents the number of speakers for that language. Circles of the same color belong to the same language group. All the groups except for Finno-Ugric (in […]
John Morgan: The government’s removal of student number controls has led some English universities to increase their student intake by more than 20 per cent in a year, while others have recorded drops of up to 10 per cent, with larger institutions in London seeing a particular decline. Analysis by Times Higher Education of figures […]
Andrew Lih: This month, Wikipedia officially celebrates 15 years as the internet’s free encyclopedia, cataloguing humankind’s achievements in real time and, more importantly, rescuing desperate students facing assignment deadlines. In that time, it has hastened the end of Microsoft’s Encarta encyclopedia and supplanted Britannica as the dominant reference work in English. While the digital landscape […]
Elaine Sohn: It was June, 2006. The place was the Adult Learning Center at the Aguilar branch of the NYPL on 110th Street near Lexington, where more than a hundred students and twenty-five volunteers met regularly to study together. Around a table, small groups of students met with one or two volunteers for four hours […]
Annysa Johnson: They do not include individual district- and school-level data for public schools or the scores for private schools participating in the state-funded voucher programs. Among the highlights: The composite score for juniors who took the ACT was 20 on a scale of 36. That’s below the 22.2 reported in August 2015. Again, DPI […]
Rani Neutill: Gradually, I started to resent academia, partly because I couldn’t get a permanent job and partly because of the elitism and snobbery that came with the profession—an elitism that seemed inextricable from the environment and the people in it. I would grit my teeth at academic parties, listening to conversations where it was […]
New York Times: Teachers unions and other critics of federally required standardized tests have behaved in recent years as though killing the testing mandate would magically remedy everything that ails education in the United States. In reality, getting rid of the testing requirement in the early grades would make it impossible for the country to […]
Rishawn Biddle: Yesterday’s analysis of exclusion data from the reading portion of this year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress revealed that far too many states were excluding numbers of children in special education ghettos and English Language Learner programs far above what is allowed under federal law. But none of those revelations are a stark […]
psmag: After a century of insisting that the secure, benefits-laden job was the frictionless meritocratic means of rewarding society’s truly valuable work and workers, today we find that half the remaining jobs are in danger of being automated out of existence. Of the 10 fastest-growing job categories, eight require less than a college degree. Over […]
Mark W. Lipsey, Dale C. Farran & Kerry G. Hofer: The third question we addressed involved the sustainability of effects on achievement and behavior beyond kindergarten entry. Children in both groups were followed and reassessed in the spring every year with over 90% of the initial sample located tested on each wave. By the end […]
Kimberly Beltran: , according to a new analysis of scores from this year’s Common Core-aligned assessments. In a brief report that underscores large achievement gaps between student subgroups on the state’s new standardized tests, the non-profit Education Trust-West study revealed that on lists of the top 10 highest performing schools in English language arts and […]
Will Fitzhugh: The College Board and Atlantic Magazine, recently joined their forces to lower standards for academic expository writing in the English-speaking world. Although their efforts did not match in scope and daring those of groups like InBloom, Amplify, and others, they persuaded 3,000 secondary students to meet their contest guidelines. They asked for papers […]
Molly Beck: According to the Department of Administration, bids were sought for a Web-based exam testing third- through eighth-graders in English and fourth-, eighth- and 10th-graders in math and science. A separate bidding process was set up for a new exam to test students in social studies. Daniel Wilson of the DOA said the process […]
Jim Epstein: New York released its annual test scores this week, and Success Academy, the city’s rapidly expanding charter school network, posted remarkable results. Again. Success Academy schools did well in English—68 percent of students were proficient, compared with 30 percent in the city over all—but in math, the scores were astonishing. Ninety-three percent of […]
Hannah Somerville: ACADEMICS, family members and fans gathered in Oxford yesterday to celebrate 100 years since the death of James Murray, chief editor of the first Oxford English Dictionary. Wreaths were laid at the lexicographer’s grave in Wolvercote Cemetery, Banbury Road, at 11am, led by his great-grandson Oswyn Murray. One special offering was provided by […]
What can or should be done? Jagler is a Republican member of the state Assembly from Watertown. He said he got interested in this when he heard about students who graduated from high school in good standing, enrolled at a UW campus, took placement tests and were assigned to remedial courses. He said one parent […]