A perfect Friday paper by economists Daniel Hamermesh and Joel Slemrod. Here's the abstract from the Berkeley Electronic Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy :

A large literature examines the addictive properties of such behaviors as smoking, drinking alcohol, gambling and eating. We argue that for some people addictive behavior may apply to a much more central aspect of economic life: working. Although workaholism raises some of the same health-related concerns as other addictions, compared to most of the more familiar addictions it is more likely to be a problem of higher-income individuals and is more likely to generate negative spillovers onto individuals around the workaholic. Using the Retirement History Survey and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we show that high-income, highly educated people exhibit behavior that is consistent with workaholism with regard to retiring–they are more likely to postpone earlier plans for retirement. The theory and evidence suggest that the presence of workaholism calls for a more progressive income tax system than otherwise, although other more targeted policies may be part of optimal policy.

Image credit: sleepzine.com

Posted by eduwonkette at 2:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday's Principals Weekly (a weekly email sent to New York City principals) foreshadowed some possible changes to the NYC Progress Reports. (You can read earlier posts on progress reports here.) Some proposed changes include:

1) The new system may assign separate grades for each element of the progress report. In other words, schools could get an A for the overall proficiency category, a C based on their students' test score growth, and an F based on the learning environment surveys. This is a very positive step. (Diane Ravitch made a powerful argument for this change in the fall.)

2) The Progress Reports compare each school to a group of similar schools. In the fall, the elementary and K-8 "peer indices" were created using demographics; the new proposal is to use "the average ELA and math proficiency rating of students in the testing grades" instead.

3) To address ceiling effects, the new Progress Reports may count any level 4 student (the highest performance level) who remains at level 4 as making one year of progress.

4) A "progress adjustment" may be made for special education students who take the state ELA and math tests in consecutive years. I am not sure how DOE plans to adjust scores, but this appears to be a response to Leo Casey's special ed post on Edwize.

Read the full Principals Weekly excerpt on Progress Reports below, or see Elizabeth Green for more details.

From Principals Weekly:

Since the release of the Progress Reports in November, the Office of Accountability has gathered feedback from principals, teachers, parents, the UFT, the CSA, and others. Based on careful consideration of all suggestions received, we are considering the following changes to the elementary/middle/K-8 Progress Reports. Additional changes may be considered based on your feedback, and we will announce final decisions about the changes later this spring. If you have questions or comments about the proposed changes, please email PR_Support@schools.nyc.gov. We will announce proposed changes to the high school Progress Reports in March. The list of changes under consideration is as follows:

* Additional Credit – lower the minimum number of students required for additional credit eligibility from 20 to 15 so that more schools qualify

* Attendance - exclude Pre-K students from the attendance measure

* Elementary/K-8 Peer Index - calculate the peer index for elementary and K-8 schools using the average ELA and math proficiency rating of students in the testing grades. Student demographics would no longer be factored into the peer index.

* Letter grades by Progress Report category – add letter grades (A-F) for each section of the Progress Report (School Environment, Student Performance, and Student Progress)

* Level 4 students - any student who is a Level 4 in consecutive years qualifies as making one year of progress

* Regents Exams in Middle Schools - a middle school student can qualify as making one year of progress in Math either by a) maintaining or improving his/her proficiency rating on the state math test from one year to the next or b) scoring 85 or higher on the Math A Regents exam

* Special Education - reflect the additional challenge schools undertake when serving special education students by giving a progress adjustment for each such student who takes the state ELA and math tests in consecutive years

If adopted, the proposed changes would have the following effects on next year's Progress Report:

* Grade Cutoff Scores – grade cut-off scores would be adjusted to coincide with what the grade distribution would have been for 2007-08 using the 2006-07 Progress Report rules

* Peer Groups – elementary/K-8 schools would be assigned new peer groups for next year based on the new peer indexing methodology

* Peer and City Horizons – peer and city horizons would be updated to take into account the new peer groups, the revised metric definitions, and an additional year of data

* Targets – the 2006-07 rules would be used to determine whether a school met its pre-existing target; going forward, new targets would be based on the 2007-08 rules

Posted by eduwonkette at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

The Annual Meetings of the American Educational Research Association are coming up. This year, ~10,000 (?) people will converge on New York from March 24-28. Why do many researchers hate AERA?

1) AERA is too big and too long.

2) Because there are too many people on the program, the quality of the average paper is low.

3) Because the quality of the average paper is low, many scholars who do high quality work don't submit their work to AERA.

4) Because there are too many concurrent sessions, most sessions are sparsely attended, so the feedback quality is low unless you have an unusually insightful discussant.

5) As a result of the above, AERA continues to suck.

Can AERA become something more than a convenient punching bag that we pull out each spring? I'm pessimistic about the potential for fundamentally reshaping this meeting, but perhaps you aren't, or have ideas.

For more punching, see the Hessinator here and here.

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Sherman Dorn's got his Zen on about multiple deadlines. Me, not so much. In that spirit, here are some links:

1) Common Core & NCLB: The Common Core report out today found that kids don't know basic historical facts or literary references and argues that NCLB contributes to this problem. In my view, NCLB has little to do with the historical fact gap. (See Bush to World: NCLB Led to iPhone or Greatest Generation Struggled With History.) I haven't read the report yet, so correct me if it included longitudinal data - but did kids know these facts 10 or even 50 years ago? You know I'm troubled by the fact that reading and math have crowded out other subjects, but if there are any losses at all in historical fact knowledge, the shift in social studies teaching away from memorizing facts, the diversification of the curriculum, and a cultural ethos centered around Britney, Paris, and Miley are more likely culprits than NCLB.

2) Is There a "Right Age" To Talk to Kids About Sex?: Via the NY Times, check out this short documentary starring two girls, ages six and four, called, "Please Talk to Kids About AIDS." The young ladies attended the International AIDS conference and asked the bigwigs questions ranging from, "How does it get inside your body?" to “How come they want to have sex with each other?” Wherever you are on this issue, it will make you think about it more deeply. You can watch the movie here.

3) Ed Policy Dudes and Baseball: Will the baseball argument end by opening day? In reverse order: Kevin Carey, Leo Casey, Kevin Carey, Matthew Tabor, Leo Casey, Kevin Carey, Mike Klonsky, Ed Muir, Kevin Carey, Steve Koss, and the original Carey. I'm sure I've missed some posts or have that slightly out of order, so accept my apology in advance. But here's my real question: where are all of the ed policy women? Is it just my impression, or is the ed policy blogosphere dude dominated? (Note that Sara Mead recently improved the gender balance with her new early ed blog.)

Posted by eduwonkette at 10:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

In a talk last Thursday at Teachers College, Richard Rothstein proposed a "Report Card on Comprehensive Equity" that would broaden the set of measures we use to assess the achievement gap. Rothstein argued that accountability systems that focus only on basic academic skills distort the educational process as schools focus more on skills for which they’re held accountable. Because we want more out of schools that math and reading scores, Rothstein proposed extending the data we collect to include domains such as critical thinking and problem solving, social skills and work ethic, readiness for citizenship and community responsibility, foundation for lifelong physical health, foundation for lifelong emotional health, appreciation of the arts and literature, and preparation for skilled work.

How could we collect these data on a nationwide scale? Rothstein explained that NAEP was originally designed to collect data on a wider range of skills, including civic engagement and students' ability to work in a group. Rothstein and his co-authors, Rebecca Jacobsen and Tamara Wilder, plan to propose an expansion of NAEP's data collection activities to the National Assessment Governing Board. Rothstein provides a clear picture of what these measures could look like here.

What of the cream puff caper, you ask? After some discussion of public education's goal of promoting physical health, attendees were greeted with plates full of cookies and cream puffs. Cream puffs that, while delicious, had the unfortunate side effect of food poisoning. Hopefully only a handful of people learned of the perils of eating dessert the hard way.

What do you think about Rothstein's proposal? I think it's an important first step in accounting for the many goals of public education that we care about. It was a formidable task to pull these data together - kudos to Rothstein, Jacobsen, and Wilder.

Posted by eduwonkette at 10:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)

Dean Millot at edbizbuzz has picked up where we left off on the relationship between funders, service providers, policy advocates/researchers, and publications (see my posts here, here, and here, and Alexander Russo's post here). Here are links to Dean's first two posts in this series: Deconstructing a Social Keiretsu in Public Education Reform and Deconstructing Part II: Board of Directors. In his inimitably calm, thoughtful, and systematic style, Dean plans to lay out these funding, governance, and other relationships and notes that, "Readers can decide for themselves whether this is true and, if true, troubling." Head on over and join the conversation.

Posted by eduwonkette at 11:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Cool people you should know returns after a brief hiatus.

Annette Lareau is a sociologist who teaches at the University of Maryland. Lareau is an ethnographer, and in my opinion, one of the best ethnographers in the country. She has written two spectacular books, Home Advantage: Social Class and Parental Intervention in Elementary Education and Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life. You can read Chapter 1 of Unequal Childhoods here), so let me talk about Home Advantage.

We often hear that poor parents don’t "value" education. In Home Advantage, Lareau argues that teachers often misunderstand the meaning of and reasons behind poor parents’ lower involvement. According to the teachers in her study, parents who were involved wanted educational success for their children more than those who weren’t. But Lareau finds no evidence to suggest that working class parents value education less; rather, working and middle class parents may value education equally yet understand the range of possible actions that can flow forth from that value quite differently.

In Home Advantage, Lareau explored the mismatch between teachers’ and parents’ understanding of involvement, and found that poor parents did comply with their half of the educational bargain, as they understood it. Poor parents saw teachers as professionals, deferred to their judgment, and believed it was the role of the school to educate their children. But teachers’ definitions of what parents' role should be differed, and many interpreted their failure to fill this role as an issue of values.

On the other hand, middle-class parents saw themselves on equal or even superior footing with teachers. They walked in and out of classrooms with ease and entitlement, asked for their children to be included in programs, and in general, adroitly tried to shape the school experience of their children. Lareau argued that schools use particular linguistic structures, authority patterns, and types of curricula. That children from middle/upper class families enter school familiar with these patterns gives their kids a “home advantage.”

I'm sure you're thinking, "Isn't that obvious?" It seems so, until you listen to the current discussion on parental involvement. So much of that conversation assumes either a) if schools just give parents formal opportunities to be involved, everything else will follow, b) that a "good" school can get parents involved, or c) that poor parents just need to "care" more. Lareau's book makes clear that the parental involvement issue is much more complex, and is a must read if you want to better understand these challenges.

Posted by eduwonkette at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

For those interested in performance pay, the papers from the upcoming National Center on Performance Incentives conference in Nashville are posted here.

Update: My bad - Opryland apparently closed in 1997.

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Your hostess is temporarily tied down responding to anonymous peer reviews of one of her papers. I wonder how the editor would respond if I called Reviewer B a feckless defender of the status quo…in the meantime, check out these links:

1) Incentivists v. Organizationists: Dick Murnane has a new paper out related to the incentivist debate.

2) Boys of the Blogosphere (plus Jenny Medina) at AERA: A-Rus, eduwonk et al. are on tap at AERA in a session called, “Disseminating Education Research Through E-Media: Advice from E-Journalists.” Thursday, March 27th, 10:35am. Program up here.

3) Blogosphere and Education Research: Per Jeff Henig’s earlier post, Ed at AFT weighs in; Jeff Henig comments.

4) Hot for Education: Two exceptional journalists - Josh Benton and Elizabeth Green - get much deserved recognition. But the best line is about Roland Fryer, “Do you think he motivates himself to keep all GQ with cash incentives and cell phone ring tones? Who cares, as long as the results are this good.”

5) Carnival of Education: Is up at Sharp Brains. Alvaro did a great job organizing.

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On the heels of my small world post, many readers have written and asked for more discussion of the mega-education funders.

Who are they funding? How broad is their influence? Should the funding priorities of a small number of foundations drive local education policy? Is Bill Gates our national superintendent, as Diane Ravitch has suggested?

For those clamoring for disclosure, academic institutions where I have worked and studied have received grants from the Gates Foundation, and I have undoubtedly benefited from those grants. My intent is not to villainize these foundations, but to wonder out loud whether it is a good thing for American education when local reform strategies are shaped so strongly by a small number of private, uber-wealthy foundations.

To get us started, here's a link to a spreadsheet with the grantees of the Gates, Broad, and Walton Foundations. I pulled these from data from the Foundation Center's database; these are not real-time data, so grants from 2006-2007 are not exhaustively represented here. You can follow these links for a more up to date list of Gates, Broad, and Walton grantees. I'll hit this myself tomorrow, but in the meantime, may a thousand blog posts bloom...

P.S. Be sure to check out this A-Rus post about the growing role of foundations in American education.

Posted by eduwonkette at 12:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBacks (0)

I’ve never seen wonks so hot under the collar about something so obvious! Between here and eduwonk, we’re ~60 comments deep on my yawn of a post about interlocking directorates.

Had I plotted webs of union relationships, commenters like “duh” - who wrote, “Stop interpreting every web of relationships as some kind of evil empire” – would have me canonized. Consider this post at EIA, or how much was made of NEA’s contribution to Fair Test. If those relationships are important to uncover, so are these.

Let me take a preliminary swing at the “So What?” question:

In my view, what’s emerging is a new education policymaking configuration. This is not simply the well-researched “policy network” eduwonk writes about, but one that includes quasi-academic publications, service providers, and policy research/advocacy organizations, with a small group of foundations providing financial support to many network members. It is the overlap between different spheres – press, service providing, research, and philanthropists with deep pockets – that makes this network unique and important to watch. Readers did a bang up job of identifying the reasons we should care:

1) The Trouble with Self-Fulfilling Prophecies: As Policy Prof. wrote, “these organizations often give the impression of a grassroots groundswell of support for radical change in education. That may well be true, but this "small world" of interlocking advocacy groups should hardly be taken as evidence of this.” Dean Millot commented that the network can be understood as a strategic alliance, and observers of education policy making should recognize it as such. (Check out all of his comments on this debate here and here.) eduwonk is correct that there's nothing inherently sinister about these relationships, and I agree so long as we call it what it is - an alliance.

2) The Insider/Outsider Problem: Dean noted that “policy marketing shops are generally trying to create the impression of disinterested parties purely interested in the public interest.” Readers pointed out that it’s hard to distinguish policy research from policy advocacy when you’re not on the inside. For example, Kelsey, who may be the only blogospheric person to whom eduwonk has ever apologized, wrote, “Even with the noted transparency, it requires a certain amount of insider knowledge and a lot of time to make these connections.” Reader “duh, duh” likened this problem to the student loan issue, writing:

We shouldn't be surprised that college loan office personnel and lending companies "know each other." They have worked closely together for years, and one could charitably argue that they are both interested in seeing students get a good loan package at a low rate. But how can the public be assured of this? Not surprisingly, parents and students were outraged by the revelation of these close ties.

3) The Effect on Public Discourse: Readers noted the potential for a small reinforcing group to dominate the ed reform debate. As Dean wrote over at eduwonk, “We’re left with an unhealthy narrowing of public discourse in each group and across the spectrum.” Taking on the issue of democratic engagement and trust from a different perspective, reader “duh, duh” explained, “Relationships do matter. The public’s trust in its institutions is predicated in part on the separation of certain interested parties.”

In terms of organizational disclosure, eduwonk asks for specific suggestions for improving transparency. My view is that journalists are the ones who’ve dropped the ball here – after all, all of this information is available on these organizations’ websites and the key funders can be identified from their tax forms. Nonetheless, here are three easy ones: 1) Board biographies should include all of the other boards on which members sit, 2) Organizations’ 990 forms should be available on their websites, and 3) The specific amounts granted by each foundation should be listed prominently on their “about our funders” pages.

The larger issue is whether we should broaden conceptions of conflicts of interest to include not only material, but ideological, conflicts - readers, we need you to weigh in here.

Thank you to all of the readers who took the time to comment. The debate’s not over yet, folks - I’ll continue to explore this issue this week.

Posted by eduwonkette at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (14) | TrackBacks (0)

What should we make of the growing number of education policy think tanks and education reform/advocacy organizations? Weeks ago, A-Rus asked, and Dean Millot answered.

All of this chatter made me wonder how these organizations are connected. After all, there are a lot of them, and many of them are advancing similar reform proposals. Are these a million different points of light, or multiple organizational outposts for a small group of people?

To answer this question, I looked up the Boards of Directors, Advisory Boards, and senior staff of 16 big ticket education policy think tanks and advocacy organizations. The list is not comprehensive – for example, I did not include the large multipurpose tanks such as Brookings, Center on American Progress, Cato, etc. On the ed policy side, this is a work in progress, so please send me a list of other organizations you’d like to see included. (Also, if you notice an error of omission/commission in the graph, please let me know.)

I looked for “interlocking directorates” – in simple terms, I drew a line between the two organizations if:

a) two organizations share a board member, or

b) two organizations both include a board member representing the same organization (i.e. two different people representing the same foundation), or

c) a senior staff member from Organization A serves on the board of Organization B

The thumbnail image, which you should click on to enlarge, displays the relationships between the following organizations:

* Achieve
* Alliance for Excellent Education (Alliance)
* Broad Prize
* Center on Education Policy (CEP)
* Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights (CCCR)
* Ed Next
* Ed Sector
* Ed Trust
* Fordham
* KIPP
* National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS)
* National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ)
* New Leaders for New Schools (NLNS)
* New Schools Venture Fund (NSVF)
* New Teacher Project (NTP)
* Teach for America (TFA)

The education policy/advocacy world represented here looks a lot like a tangled spiderweb. Let me give a few examples. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) shares members with 10 of these organizations. Their board includes Jonathan Williams (Accelerated Charter School of Los Angeles), who also sits on the Education Sector board; Bruno Manno (Vice Chair, Annie E. Casey Foundation), who also sits on the Ed Sector board as well as the Fordham board; Mashea Ashton (of New Leaders for New Schools); Mike Feinberg (KIPP); Checker Finn, who also sits on the boards of Fordham and the National Council for Teacher Quality, and serves as the Senior Editor of Education Next; Ted Mitchell of the New Schools Venture Fund (NSVF is also represented on the Ed Sector board); Chris Nelson of the Don and Doris Fisher Fund, which is also represented on the Teach for America and KIPP boards; Andy Rotherham, who sits on the boards of Education Sector, the National Council for Teacher Quality, and served on the Broad Prize Selection Committee.

Education Trust trades with the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights (CCCR) (George Mason’s Roger Wilkins), the Center on Education Policy (UT-Austin’s Arturo Pacheco), the New Teacher Project (Ed Trust’s Kati Haycock), the Alliance for Excellent Education (Ed Trust’s Heather Peske sits on one of their advisory boards), and the Broad Prize Selection Committee (Ed Trust’s Russlyn Ali).

What does it mean? Some would contend that a small group of people are running the education policy show. Others would argue this type of coordination is no different than in Fortune 500 companies, where board interlocks are common. Moreover, they might argue that interlocks, particularly in the case of service providing organizations, serve a useful purpose. Still others might note that this is simply a picture that observers should have in the back of their head when they listen to education policy debates and evaluate the claims made by these groups, i.e. can a think tank claim to be an independent evaluator given these interlocks?

What do you think?

Posted by eduwonkette at 12:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (37) | TrackBacks (0)

Last year my slogan was "Cupid Must Die." This year I'm having a poetry contest. The valentine poems are a flowing - don't forget to write early and often below. Here's a sampling of submissions:

Some desire roses
or tickets to Paris
but if she’s an educrat,
just give her ARIS.
(Ms. Frizzle)

A mysterious man who calls himself Mr. Ette left:

Violets are blue
Roses are red
Education policy
Out of my bed!

Mike Bloomberg has received the most candygrams, including:

Roses are red,
I like them fine,
Mike buys votes,
but he won't buy mine.

skoolboy chimes in:

Candy is dandy
But liquor is quicker
'wonk and 'wonkette
Are destined to bicker.

Here's my latest:

Roses are red,
Eli Broad is naughty
We desperately need
An ed policy hottie.

Posted by eduwonkette at 9:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The latest NCLB splosion already has the blogosphere assigning battle names, i.e. Trail of Tears, Wonk Wars, or the I-95 Knockdown. I prefer Panic at the Disco, and you can watch eduwonk and I get down courtesy of David Bellel.

In his most recent post, eduwonk asks me to bring it:

My challenge for Eduwonkette is to offer up what sort of requirements for school accountability she'd support. How many kids, or what percent, should a school have to teach reading and math to, well, in order to make "adequate yearly progress?" What's the bar below which no school should be allowed to fall? Should less be expected in terms of performance from schools serving a lot of poor or minority kids because they are more challenging populations based on the data? How many other subjects should we test students in if we don't want to just focus on reading and math?

To which I say: Game on, week of February 24th. Until then, this site is running eduwonkette lite as I dropkick some deadlines.

In the meantime, readers and fellow bloggers, take the eduwonk challenge: What kind of requirements for accountability would you support?

Posted by eduwonkette at 11:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Jeff Henig is a Professor of Political Science and Education at Teachers College. He shares insights from his new book, Spin Cycle, published this month by The Russell Sage Foundation.

Public discussions about education research are often highly polarized. Advocates often wield their own studies and slam their opponents’ devious misuse of science. In my new book, Spin Cycle: How Research Is Used in Policy Debates: The Case of Charter Schools, I explore more the relationship between politics and research as it is - and as it might be.

My example: The 2004 AFT charter school report and its aftermath. The AFT report presented federal data indicating charter schools were not performing as well as traditional public schools serving similar populations. The New York Times covered it on page one (Charter Schools Trail in Results, U.S. Data Reveals.) The pro-school choice Center for Education Reform returned fire, enlisting a group of researchers to sign a full-page advertisement The New York Times ran eight days later. It read like a primer on proper methodology for conducting social science research. Rather than simply recap its pro-charter position, the Center for Education Reform took the The New York Times to task for failing to subject the AFT report to a more rigorous and skeptical review.

Was this evidence that education research had emerged from obscurity? Did it mean research coverage would observe the rules of good science, with attentive referees ready to throw flags at violations? Unfortunately, no. Ensuing rounds of give-and-take featured personalized attacks and an unwillingness to acknowledge the complexity of the phenomenon under review.

One chapter in Spin Cycle describes the media’s role in exacerbating polarization. I focus on mainstream print. The Web and blogosphere play a part, but in my story, the effects are largely negative.

Not so long ago, an article about research had to be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal, reviewed by outside reviewers who didn’t know the author’s identity, then revised according to the reviewers comments. It took six to twelve months from submission to final acceptance, then another nine months or more until publication. There was generally a reluctance to cite research until it had been vetted through this slow, usually meticulous peer review process.

New technologies compressed the time between initial results and public release. Researchers often feel pressure to get their results out there “now,” fearing being scooped and believing that the window of opportunity to influence policy debates is open for shorter and shorter intervals.

When speed becomes critical, processes for refining, checking, and simply deliberating about evidence can be short-circuited. But the pressure to be speedy is often manufactured: “political time” isn’t “policy time.” Politicians may clamor for instant access to new findings. But policy learning takes a slower arc. Sometimes, it makes more sense to slow down, to wait for evidence to accumulate rather than rush to judgment based on the latest study.

Don’t misunderstand me. While new technologies exacerbate the pressure to be speedy and hyper-reactive, I’m not looking to turn back the clock. Fortunately, the blogosphere has the potential to raise the level of public discourse about research in several ways the mainstream media can’t - or won’t:

1) Depth of knowledge and analysis. For journalists, education remains a relatively low- status, high-turnover beat; many who cover it lack the expertise to wrestle with quantitative studies and issues of research design. Others find it hard to convince their editors and producers to give them the time and space for greater depth.

Whether you agree with them, or they agree with one another, bloggers like Eduwonk, Edwize, edspresso, and my gracious host, eduwonkette, know what they’re talking about and are less constrained by space.

2) Breadth and context. The myth of the “killer study” — a single piece of research so strong and unassailable it sweeps the slate clean and triumphs once and for all — blinds us. Science is a collective undertaking. Enlightenment demands sifting through multiple studies conducted at different times and places, using an assortment of defensible measures and designs.

By archiving reports on earlier studies, linking discussions of new research to reports on similar topics, and adding judgment that comes from observing research debates over a number of years, education bloggers can help deflate the idea of the killer study. The education blogosphere could cultivate an atmosphere that acknowledges that, while some studies are certainly more convincing than others, we can and must learn from imperfect research. More than a “gold standard” is worthy of consideration.

3) Democratization. Many politicians, journalists, and researchers believe they must dramatically simplify discussion of evidence to find any traction. Should we shrink our expectations of democracy? Or should we hold to a high ideal of democratic decision-making and help develop a citizenry that is up to the challenge? Those aren’t easy questions. Dewy-eyed pronouncements about the natural wisdom that bubbles up from the grassroots should be greeted with healthy skepticism.

Yet democracy’s long-term health calls for raising the level of sophistication with which public issues are discussed and resolved, Fortunately, electronic media provide the open forums that can ensure that serious discussion of education research is not an elite, invitation-only event.

Posted by eduwonkette at 11:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Valentine's Day is on the horizon, folks. Given how much you liked writing haiku about NYC's Progress Reports and suggesting costumes for the Halloween Edu-Parade, we're due for a contest.

Fire up your amorous feelings for our education policy makers (or bloggers), and submit a "Roses are Red, Violets are Blue..." poem. As always: poking is awesome, nastiness is not. I'll get us started:

To Margaret Spellings:

Roses are blue,
Violets are red,
Sexy librarian glasses
Look swell on your head.

To Diane Ravitch and Debbie Meier:

Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Why aren't there men
As smart as you two?

To Charlie Barone:

Roses are red
George Miller is clever
Straight up now tell me
Are you really gonna love me forever?

Not sure who should be your Valentine? Here are some ideas:

*Joel Klein
*Mike Bloomberg
*Michelle Rhee
*Arne Duncan
*Alexander Russo
*Joanne Jacobs
*Kevin Carey
*Ted Kennedy
*George Miller
*Jim Liebman
*Eli Broad
*Bill Gates
*Randi Weingarten
*Your favorite edu-blogger (be sure to link to their site)
*Your favorite education reporter
*Your principal

If you're the shy type, you can use a pseudonym name and email to leave a poem as a comment.

Posted by eduwonkette at 1:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (32) | TrackBacks (0)

A wise woman once advised that name-calling is a poor substitute for a good argument. In my view, it is the feeble tool of last resort for desperate men who cannot win arguments on their own merits. It has no rightful place in policy debates.

Let me wrap up this debate over NCLB's unintended consequences by recapping my central argument:

1) By mandating an escalating series of sanctions for schools that fail to demonstrate adequate yearly progress in reading and mathematics, NCLB has created incentives for schools to focus on reading and math, rather than other subjects. As our fearless leader once noted, “What gets measured, gets done.”

2) NCLB does not mandate that educators focus on reading and math to the detriment of other subjects. But NCLB is a policy predicated on the idea that incentives can fundamentally change behavior. We should *expect* teachers to respond to NCLB's powerful incentives.

3) It therefore is not surprising that there is a growing body of evidence, both systematic and anecdotal, that many schools are devoting more instructional time to reading and math and less time on other school subjects, such as social studies, science, and the arts. This is particularly evident in schools most at risk of missing AYP.

4) If our national goals for public schools are to prepare young people to be competent, well-rounded and productive adults, we must assess how effective public policies such as NCLB are in achieving these goals.

There are a variety of revisions to NCLB that might be considered to enhance its ability to meet a broad set of goals for public education. Robert Pondiscio put it nicely when he wrote, "If the cure is worse than the disease, then find a better cure." We could, for example, create incentives for teaching additional subjects. Or we could seek to build the capacity of schools to teach subjects such as social studies and science more effectively alongside reading and math. But NCLB does neither of these.

Where do we go from here? We can continue to stand on the mountain and hand down outraged edicts to educators. But sternly lecturing our nation’s teachers will do little to change their behavior. If our goal is to ensure that children in all schools have access to a broad and deep education, we fail them by adopting this approach.

Bottom line: it's reckless public policy to ignore the evidence that NCLB’s incentives have resulted in more attention to reading and math, and less attention to other school subjects.

Posted by eduwonkette at 3:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

skoolboy wraps up his posts on Quality Reviews. His first two posts can be found here and here.

Do quality reviews lead to increased student achievement? There’s been surprisingly little research that addresses this question. Most research on quality reviews has examined the school inspection process in Great Britain managed by the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted), a national agency which reports to the Parliament. Since school inspections for primary and secondary schools were instituted in 1993, there have been several iterations in the school inspection process. But I haven’t found any persuasive evidence that inspections improve student achievement. Some teachers and administrators report that they intend to change their practices in response to the inspection report, but I’ve not seen studies which examine whether those intentions translate into improved practice.

You might get the impression from my postings this week that I think that quality reviews are a bad idea. Not necessarily! But there are some things that I think are essential for quality reviews to be a good idea. Here’s a brief list:

The purpose of the review must be clear. Sociologist Gary Natriello has written about four potential purposes for evaluations in schools: motivation, direction, certification and selection. The first two can contribute to school improvement, whereas the latter two are more concerned with regulation, accountability, and control; and it’s desirable to confront the tensions between improvement and control directly. If the purpose of a quality review is to improve how schools work, then all phases of the review process need to be oriented towards this purpose.

Definitions of quality must be clear and transparent. If there are clear criteria and standards for what constitutes school quality, then both educators and inspectors can orient their activities towards these criteria and standards. Unclear standards and definitions undermine the legitimacy of the quality review process. My impression is that the Ofsted criteria are a lot clearer than those that I’ve seen stateside. Quality teaching is a particularly challenging phenomenon to articulate; but if the goal is to improve teaching, we’ve got to be able to do it.

The quality review process must be designed to collect a sufficient amount of data on quality. If, for example, the purpose of the quality review is to improve teaching, then presumably there should be sustained collection of data on teaching quality, primarily through direct observation, but perhaps in other ways as well. Ms. Frizzle recently commented that in her New York City school, the quality reviewer was planning to observe 9 different classrooms in 30 minutes. Not much data on teaching quality will come from such a process. The intensity of data collection is a recurring challenge in evaluation research that involves site visits, because they are labor-intensive. “Drive-by” site-visits just aren’t very useful, even if conducted by well-trained observers, because they don’t gather enough data on the things that matter.

The frequency of quality reviews should be synchronized with a theory of how fast school quality is changing. This is Social Research 101: phenomena that change more quickly need to be measured more frequently to detect such changes, and phenomena that change more slowly don’t need to be measured as often. How frequently should we assess school quality? The school year is an arbitrary metric, and it may be wasteful and counterproductive to conduct school quality reviews on an annual basis. (In Great Britain, Ofsted inspects primary schools every three years.) Given a choice, I’d rather have less frequent, but more intensive, quality reviews.

Posted by eduwonkette at 12:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

skoolboy returns for part II on Quality Reviews. You can find his first post here.

The year is 1975. Coach John Wooden of UCLA has just won his 10th NCAA men’s basketball championship in 12 years, a record that will likely never be matched in collegiate sports. Cambridge Associates sends Clive Wingtip to conduct a Quality Review of the UCLA program. Over the course of a day and a half, Wingtip talks with Coach Wooden, his assistant coaches, the players, and other staff, and observes the team practices. He also observes a collaborative activity: a meeting between Coach Wooden and his assistant coaches. The program is evaluated on five quality statements, each scored as either underdeveloped; underdeveloped with proficient features; proficient; well developed; or outstanding. Here’s a summary of the report he filed:

Quality statement 1: “The coach and staff consistently gather and generate data and use it to understand what each player knows and is able to do, and to monitor the player’s progress over time.”

There is evidence that Coach Wooden studies each individual, and his strengths and weaknesses, very carefully. But he does not rely on statistics collected during practice sessions or games to inform his judgment, and his observations are subjective, not objective. He does not measure performance and progress based on comparisons to similar schools. Overall Score: Underdeveloped

Quality statement 2: “The coach and staff consistently use data to understand each player’s next learning steps and to set suitably high goals for accelerating each student’s learning.”

The Coach and staff convey consistently high expectations to the players, and set specific goals for the team and for individuals. But Coach Wooden regularly played only 7 of the team’s 12 in games, and these same 7 practiced as a unit, suggesting that the reserves were not as important as the regulars. Coach Wooden occasionally displays the soft bigotry of low expectations. He states, “There is nothing wrong with the other fellow being better than you are, as long as you did everything you possible could to prepare yourself for the competition. That is all you have control over. It may be that the other fellow’s level of competency is simply higher than yours. That doesn’t make you a loser.” Overall Score: Underdeveloped with Proficient Features

Quality statement 3: “The program aligns its work, strategic decisions and resources, and effectively engages players, around its goals and plans for accelerating players’ learning.”

Although there was evidence of individualized instruction, the Coach and staff did not use objective team and individual data to plan for and provide this instruction. Team members trusted and respected Coach Wooden. Overall Score: Proficient

Quality statement 4: “The program has structures for monitoring and evaluating each player’s progress throughout the year and for flexibly adapting plans and practices to meet its goals for accelerating learning.”

Coach Wooden relies heavily on repetition during the season. One player said, “He never talks about strategy, statistics, or plays but rather about people and character.” The program did not rely on objective measures to assess progress towards goals, such as the final score of games or written tests, and did not have a playbook. Coach Wooden frequently adjusted the plans for each practice, and made notes after each practice about adjustments; but these notes were based on subjective judgments, not hard data on performance. Overall Score: Underdeveloped with Proficient Features

What’s wrong with this picture? How does the man voted Coach of the Century by ESPN receive a quality review rating of “underdeveloped”? It’s all about the quality criteria, which privilege using data to make decisions about how to help student/athletes to learn and develop over simply making good decisions about teaching and learning. I refer to this as the “fetishization of data.” In the Quality Review game, quantitative performance data have become an end in themselves, rather than a means to an end. One of the most cutting insults that one social scientist can hurl at another is to label another’s research as a “data dump.” In some school districts which have embraced external quality reviews, compiling notebooks full of undigested data has become a substitute for thoughtful analysis of a reasonably small number of important themes and problems.

What’s the solution? I’d start by broadening the definition of data beyond quantitative performance measures. There’s no doubt in my mind that Coach John Wooden relied heavily on data to inform the design of his practices, and his approach to cultivating the talents of his players and his team. But those data took the form of the systematic observations and judgments of an expert practitioner. I’d also seek to evaluate schools on the basis of the quality of the teaching within them, not whether the educators in a school arrived at their teaching practices via the analysis of quantitative performance data.

“Don’t mistake activity for achievement…If you spend too much time learning the tricks of the trade, you may not learn the trade.” (John Wooden)

Posted by eduwonkette at 9:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Scott McLeod, a professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at Iowa State, blogs at Dangerously Irrelevant. Many thanks to Scott for this guest post!

When eduwonkette asked me to guest blog about data-driven decision-making in schools, I eagerly agreed. Why? Because in my work with numerous school organizations in multiple states, I have seen the power of data firsthand. When done right, data-driven education can have powerful impacts on the learning outcomes of students.

Unfortunately, most school districts still are struggling with their data-driven practice. Much of this is because they continue to think about using data from a compliance mindset rather than using data for meaningful school improvement. An uninformed model of data-driven decision-making looks something like this:



This is the NCLB model. Schools are expected to collect data once a year, slice and dice them in various ways, set some goals based on the analyses, do some things differently, and then wait another whole year to see if their efforts were successful. Somehow, this model is supposed to get schools to 100% proficiency on key learning outcomes. This is dumb. It's like trying to lose weight but only weighing yourself once a year to see if you're making progress. Compounding the problem is the fact that student learning data often are collected near the end of the year and given back to educators months later, which of course is helpful to no one.

A better model looks something like this:



The key difference in this model is an emphasis on ongoing progress monitoring and continuous, useful data flow to teachers. Under this approach, schools have good baseline data available to them, which means that the data are useful for diagnostic purposes in the classroom and thus relevant to instruction. The data also are timely, meaning that teachers rarely have to wait more than a few days to get results. In an effective data-driven school, educators also are very clear about what essential instructional outcomes they are trying to achieve (this is actually much rarer than one would suppose) and set both short and long-term measurable instructional goals from their data.

Armed with clarity of purpose and clarity of goals, effective data-driven educators then monitor student progress during the year on those essential outcomes by checking in periodically with short, strategic formative assessments. They get together with role-alike peers on a regular basis to go over the data from those formative assessments, and they work as a team, not as isolated individuals, to formulate instructional interventions for the students who are still struggling to achieve mastery on those essential outcomes. After a short period of time, typically three to six weeks, they check in again with new assessments to see if their interventions have worked and to see which students still need help. The more this part of the model occurs during the year, the more chances teachers have to make changes for the benefit of students.

It is this middle part of the model that often is missing in school organizations. When it is in place and functioning well, schools are much more likely to achieve their short and long-term instructional goals and students are much more likely to achieve proficiency on accountability-oriented standardized tests. Teachers in schools that have this part of the model mastered rarely, if ever, complain about assessment because the data they are getting are helpful to their classroom practice.

NCLB did us no favors. It could've stressed powerful formative assessment, which is the driving engine for student learning and growth on whatever outcomes one chooses. Instead, it went another direction and we lost an opportunity to truly understand the power of data-driven practice. There are hundreds, and probably thousands, of schools across the country that have figured out the middle part of the model despite NCLB. It is these schools that are profiled in books such as Whatever It Takes and It's Being Done (both recommended reads) and by organizations such as The Education Trust.

When done right, data-driven decision-making is about helping educators make informed decisions to benefit students. It is about helping schools know whether what they are doing is working or not. I have seen effective data-driven practice take root and it is empowering for both teachers and students. We shouldn't unilaterally reject the idea of data-driven education just because we hate NCLB. If we do, we lose out on the potential of informed practice.



Thanks for the guest spot, eduwonkette!

Posted by eduwonkette at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Thank you, Scott, for providing insight into how schools are using data to improve learning, not just test scores. Unfortunately, I’ve witnessed less cheerful data-driven decision making. Some schools are using benchmark tests and other newly available data to play the system and up their numbers. Let me mention a few of these bad and the ugly uses of data.

When I was teaching, my school ran a Saturday program for kids who were close to passing state tests. At the time, I patted myself on the back and thought we were helping our students. Now I understand that our principal was simply trying to increase our passing rates the fastest way she knew how. Other students were nowhere close to passing, and we didn’t roll the red carpet out for them.

The practice of focusing on kids who are close to passing has been well-documented by now. A RAND report on D3M identified this practice as one of the most common forms of data-driven decision making. In one of their studies, more than 75% of principals reported that their school or district encourages teachers to focus on these students, and between one-quarter and one-third of teachers said they actually do focus on these students.

A more expedient way to use data is to select out lower performing students before they even enter your school. In a system like New York City, where all students must apply to high school, even unscreened schools – schools that are prohibited from selecting students based on their test scores, prior grades, etc - have used data to screen out students. Until last year, all unscreened schools had access to individual students’ prior attendance, grades, their test scores, their date of birth, their address, their sending junior high schools, and their special education and English language learner status.

Interestingly, the Department of Education stopped providing this information beginning with admission for the 9th grade class of 2007. Why? One can imagine that the Dept of Ed finally figured out what many of us already knew – that some unscreened schools were using these data to pick off the best students. (For more info on the issue of creaming in NYC, see here, here, and here.)

Certainly data-driven decision making has a bright side, but it has a dark side as well, especially when schools feel intense pressure to quickly improve their scores. Scott makes the important point that we shouldn't throw out the baby with the bath water, and I agree. But as more schools implement D3M-based approaches, we should be aware that its uses are not uniformly positive.

Posted by eduwonkette at 9:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

To my lovely readers,

Here's a more effective way to procrastinate - subscribe to the RSS feed on the right or enter your email to have posts sent directly to your inbox.

Why bother? I wasn't sold on blog subscriptions until I took the Google Reader plunge last week. Yes, I'm the last to know - but it rules. Check it out.

Posted by eduwonkette at 8:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I teach at a college that periodically commissions external reviews of the institution and its academic programs. Sometimes these external institutional reviews are "high stakes," such as regional accreditation reviews (e.g., North Central Association, Middle States, etc.) or professional accreditation reviews (such as the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education). Out of the corner of my eye, I've been seeing an increase in the reliance of large urban school districts, such as New York City and Washington, DC, on external reviews (sometimes labeled "quality reviews.") I'm intrigued by the similarities and differences I'm observing.

Most external reviews begin with a self-study, which typically has three major dimensions: (a) What are your unit's goals? (b) How well are you meeting these goals, and what's the evidence? (c) What are you going to do about it? This is then followed by the proverbial "site visit," in which an individual or team from outside of the institution reviews the self-study, comes to the campus for a day or two, pokes around and asks questions, and retreats to write a report which is shared with the institution and its leaders. Often, the institution then will write a response to the report. Then the report goes on the shelf.

The composition of the site visit team can arouse some passion. In postsecondary institutions, site visitors typically are conceived of as peers of the faculty; but who counts as a peer is a matter of debate. How can someone from Eastern Podunk College ever understand how we at Elite University do business? Is a site visitor who studies 18th-century English literature really a peer of the faculty in an English department that focuses on contemporary American fiction?

I'm intrigued by the fact that in New York City and Washington, DC, the site visitors are external management consultants who are not educators within the system, and in fact may not be teachers or administrators in other systems. Consultants such as these would be laughed out of the room in a review of a college department; but nobody's laughing in large urban districts. I think this is because college faculty are assumed to have stronger claims to disciplinary knowledge and expertise than do K-12 teachers and administrators, and because the shared governance model in colleges and universities give faculty more control over academic decision-making than K-12 educators are typically granted.

Scholars of organizations make sense of external reviews by drawing on institutional theory. Institutional theory focuses on the relationship between organizations and their external environments, including the ways in which organizations are perceived to be legitimate by their external environments. An organization (e.g., school, district, or college) that is perceived to be high-performing generally doesn't have to worry about its legitimacy. But many educational organizations are not seen as high performers. In this case, they have to rely on some other way to be seen as legitimate than a demonstration of good outcomes. A common strategy is to imitate the practices of other social institutions that are seen as legitimate, in the hopes that the legitimacy will "rub off."

Many cases of education imitating the business world can be explained in this way. (Not that the business world has such a great track record to warrant serving as the ideal standard.) So, for example, because it's seen as rational for organizations to set goals and measure progress towards them, this is an integral part of most external review processes-much more so than direct inspection of what the organization is actually doing to meet those goals. This would account for the use of management consultants as external reviewers in New York City and Washington. In this sense, external reviews are mostly symbolic, rather than substantive.

This is, of course, a highly cynical view of external reviews-perhaps more than is warranted. I'd like to pose a couple of questions to eduwonkette's readers: (1) What are some legitimate purposes of external reviews of K-12 schools? (2) Based on these purposes, what should the composition of an external review team look like? The purpose in asking these questions is not to play whack-a-mole with consultants (although that may be a consequence), but rather to introduce a topic that I hope to post a bit more about over the next couple of days. I'm also curious if readers know of any evidence of external reviews actually improving teaching and learning in K-12 schools. Please feel free to e-mail me at skoolboy2 (at) gmail (dot) com to point me in a fruitful direction.

Posted by eduwonkette at 8:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I had to excerpt this passionate comment on teacher performance pay. Rather than asking what its implications are for student achievement, this reader focused on what it means for teachers' personal and professional identities. This is an angle I'd never considered before - thank you, anonymous reader. You can read the full comment here.

Look at places where teachers have been lured into these plans with money. The experiment always begins with apprehension, a sort of reluctance. The policy wonks explain that this fear is because the teachers have been brainwashed by the unions and don’t understand the science at work. Perhaps. It is also possible that experienced professionals know in their gut when something just feels wrong, even if they can’t explain why.

But they participate anyway because the pull of the money is just so strong, the promise of some financial reward for years of hard work seems so right, and, in some cases, “leadership” has promised them that the results will be fair. Once the decision is made to participate, initial reluctance is replaced with a sense of excitement and teachers soon forget many of their worries. After all, teachers are human: Who could pass on a free lottery ticket, especially when you think you will win, especially when you think you will win because you deserve it.

But the morning after, teachers invariably wake up to regret and shame, at least when they know the outcome. They learn that teachers they know work hard did not get a reward. They see less deserving teachers rewarded. No one can explain why. The fairness of the experiment becomes less clear when they see who is left out and how the money is divided. Some winners become ashamed of the money they got and will not even admit to winning; some of the very people who don’t want bonuses published are the ones who got one. Other winners wonder secretly if they may actually be that much better than their peers; after all of those years of playing a supporting role, maybe they should have played the lead? How does that feel?

The losers feel duped. They review in their minds everything they thought they were doing right. They must, as the system is intended to do, start to question everything about what they do. What was working, what wasn’t? But in many of these experiments, they don’t get any feedback, no explanation, no guidelines for improvement, just a report card with a big red “F.” How does that feel?

And after the checks are cashed, the teachers are in the awful situation of having to admit that, despite everything they have ever believed about themselves, they may be doing what they do for the money. Not the kids. Not the community. Just for the money. At that point, they are stuck with the realization that they have been kidding themselves for 5, 10, or 20 years by saying they were in it because they cared about teaching and kids and learning. Even worse, in some places, teachers will have to reconcile that they choose to participate when their peers living nearby said “No, no thanks,” despite the money.

And then… the final twist. The teachers find out that real, objective researchers believe the results were statistically unsound or there was an error in the calculation or the analyses can’t be used to tell most good teachers from bad ones. Millions of dollars were rewarded, winners and losers chosen, and even the people in charge can’t say if the results were correct. The winners had no right to brag and the losers had no need to apologize. How does that feel then?

Posted by eduwonkette at 1:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the most stable findings in the management literature is that measuring a narrow subset of organizational goals results in employees ignoring non-measured tasks that are no less critical to the overall mission of the organization. When lawyers are rewarded for billable hours, they focus on increasing hours rather than quality. When case workers are measured by the number of job placements, they push job seekers into positions that are poorly suited for them. Management wonks call this "goal distortion" (see Richard Rothstein here; see also Timely Tidbits on Unintended Consequences). The take home point is that the facile use of quantitative indicators can cause as many problems as it solves.

Let's revisit a very old debate on NCLB's effect on science and social studies teaching in the schools most likely to struggle with AYP. My Valentine Charlie Barone followed up on my original post by asking:

Why did 56% of all districts not narrow down their curricula?

What we're quibbling about is who's responsible for cutting social studies and science - NCLB or teachers/schools. According to Barone, it's the schools, stupid. Because all schools don't narrow their curriculum post-NCLB, NCLB does not provide incentives to narrow the curriculum.

How would we know if NCLB creates an "incentive problem?" Let's consider a non-education example. Suppose we attempted to get drivers to slow down by tripling the price of speeding tickets. Drivers now have a much stronger financial incentive to ease up on the pedal. How do we evaluate this policy? We want to know if a driver living in the "crazy expensive ticket world" is more likely to slow down than he would be if he inhabited the old world. Imagine we observe that after this policy change takes effect, 50% of drivers slow down. By any standard, a 50% reduction would be considered a huge policy effect. While we might be interested in learning more about the other 50% of drivers, our ticket increase had a powerful effect on driver behavior.

Now, back to education: are more schools cutting social studies and science in a NCLB world than would be in a non-NCLB world? I think so. One could argue, as many accountability proponents certainly do, that reading and math are more important than science and social studies, or that the test score "gains" that accountability policies yield make these other losses acceptable. I don't agree with those arguments, but at least they acknowledge what is happening on the ground.

eduwonk also argued that the problem is schools, not NCLB:

I don't buy the argument that cutting other subjects, especially social studies, is an incentive problem here. Rather, it's a capacity problem. Too few schools are able to deliver a really powerful instructional program today and in the absence of that they do a lot of counterproductive things.

Low capacity schools may be more likely to cut social studies and science than high capacity schools, but NCLB, not low capacity, is the cause of the cuts. After all, low capacity schools taught more social studies and science pre-NCLB than they do now. Even higher capacity schools are affected by incentives - to use the driving parallel, wealthy drivers can handle a more expensive ticket, but many will slow down anyway.

My proposal for a reauthorization bumper sticker? "NCLB doesn't narrow curriculum. Schools narrow curriculum."

Posted by eduwonkette at 9:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Happy Superbowl, everyone. Here's what we've got on tap for this week:

Monday: Social studies, science, and NCLB

Tuesday: skoolboy reviews external "Quality Reviews," Part I

Wednesday: Data-Driven Decision Making: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly - Guest blogger Scott McLeod and I will talk about how schools are currently using data.

Thursday: skoolboy reviews external Quality Reviews, Part II

Friday: The Bu$iness of D3M: Data Warehouses and Data Tools

Posted by eduwonkette at 9:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

1) Elizabeth Green drops the H-Bomb: Now NYC's private schools get grades, too, based on the number of kids going to Harvard and the schools' assets (here and here). Had we rated schools by the number of Starbucks in the neighborhood, what would the grades look like?

2) Poetic Justice: Joanne Jacobs recites Econometric Verse. Over at Campaign K-12, Michele McNeil argues that the single most important thing the next Prez can do for schools has nothing to do with education. And at the AFT blog, Ed wants you to dispense some blog-ilante justice by solving his riddle.

3) xoxo: Last week, Charlie Barone wanted me (dead) on a platter, but now he's gone and written on the blogospheric bathroom wall about us. I thought that was embargoed until Valentine's Day, C.

4) Big Q's from A-Rus: Next week, I'll swing at some of these:What Impact (or Benefit) From Surge of Education Think Tanks?, Do Funders Sink Educational Research, Too?, and Are Foundations Taking Over Yet? If you've got specific teaching questions, head over to So You Want To Teach? and ask Joel.

Enjoy the weekend, everyone!

Posted by eduwonkette at 3:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)