President Obama has now succumbed to the firestorm in opposition to standardized and “high stakes” testing that has swept the country over the past several years, even picking up on the talking points–“Learning is about so much more than just filling in the right bubble”. So now he wants a cap on standardized testing at […]
A Duplicitous Tantrum by Texas Educators
Over the past three legislative sessions, the Texas public education accountability system, once rated by national organizations as the best in the country, has come under relentless attack by a firestorm of misguided opposition to standardized and so-called “high stakes” testing, so that by the end of the 2013 session, the system had essentially been […]
Reaping What We Sow
The recently released SAT exam results reflect a decline in both math and reading scores across the nation, but the declines were remarkably worse in Texas, where math scores dropped nine points to an average of 486 and reading scores fell six points to an average of 470. In both cases, these represent the worst […]
The Forbes Education Challenge
In a very interesting and ambitious project, last year Forbes magazine challenged experts in business and education philanthropy to single out five big ideas over the next 20 years that could make American students the most highly achieving in the world and had research and modeling specialists with no stake in the outcome analyze the […]
Obama’s Ill-Advised Community College Plan
The free community college plan introduced by President Obama was not the worst proposal he has made this year, but it’s bad enough, for a variety of reasons. It has already been well-covered by many, but I will mention a few that might have been missed: * In Texas, 51% of high school graduates must […]
A Big Win for California’s Kids
Substantially all knowledgeable public education reformers will tell you that the sine qua non of the mission to deliver a quality K-12 education for every child is an effective teacher in every classroom. These same people, if they are honest, will also tell you that this won’t happen until we break the mold that has […]
NAEP Scores are Instructive – Reform Works!
The results of student achievement in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the so-called “nations report card” released last November, were characterized as “encouraging” and “the strongest performance in the history of the NAEP” by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. What he conveniently overlooks is that substantially all of the progress in reading and […]
A Showdown on Texas High School Curriculum
The Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) is currently deliberating on the restructuring of the Texas high school curriculum. House Bill 5, adopted by the Texas Legislature in the 2013 session, provides multiple pathways to a Texas high school diploma that include routes to industry certification leading to meaningful 21st century jobs in addition […]
The Teacher College: End It, Don’t Mend It
We have prolonged the debate over teacher preparation and the primary nominal provider of it for too long, without any appreciable enhancement of the quality of preparation we desperately need for the advancement of student achievement. We need radical change, beginning with terminating undergraduate teacher preparation as we know it through colleges of education. […]
A Scathing Indictment of Teacher Preparation
In June, the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) released its long-awaited report on teacher preparation and, to the surprise of almost no one, it was a devastating critique of the nation’s colleges of education. The full report, which provides data on 1,130 institutions and ratings for 608 of them based on a rigorous […]
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