School reform advocate Derrell Bradford and policy writer Andy Rotherham hit on it. Illinois education writer Tracy Dell’Angela has a blog focused on it. Teacher/education writer Robert Pondiscio said it was a factor in the anti-charter vote in Massachusetts last fall. And former Education Secretary Arne Duncan famously broached the subject in 2013. “It” is the long overdue conversation about… Read more →
Young people go to college to search for themselves, explore, experiment, discover a passion . . . Or perhaps to retake algebra, stumble through classes that won’t fulfill a major, go into debt and drop out without a credential. Flexibility leads to failure for most students at unselective two- and four-year colleges, writes Tina Rosenberg in the New York Times.… Read more →
I know we’re all supposed to be on the “local control” bandwagon when it comes to setting school accountability standards, but a recent report made it crystal clear why this is going to be a hot mess. Achieve–an independent education nonprofit focused on high standards and raising graduation standards–set out to measure how well students are doing nationwide when it… Read more →
The School Improvement Grants program poured $7 billion down the drain between 2010 and 2015, as a recent Washington Post article pointed out. One of the Obama Administration’s signature efforts in education, which pumped billions of federal dollars into overhauling the nation’s worst schools, failed to produce meaningful results, according to a federal analysis. Test scores, graduation rates and college… Read more →
Nearly 500 people — all college graduates — applied for a communications job at Marc Tucker’s organization. Candidates were asked to write a one-page summary of a report published last year. “Only one could produce a satisfactory summary,” writes Tucker. The kids can’t write, he concludes. . . . we do not build our curriculum around the assumption that we… Read more →
Factoring polynomials is sometimes the one obstacle that stands between a community college student and the chance of earning a degree. And it looks like California is trying to do something to change that. It’s no secret that when students get tracked into college remedial courses–typically math, but also English and writing courses–they get discouraged by having to pay for material… Read more →
Online credit recovery courses are raising graduation rates and failing students, writes Jeremy Noonan, a science teacher who runs Citizens for Excellence in Public Schools. In October, President Obama announced that the national high school graduation rate had reached an all-time high in 2015. Yet that same year, the percentage of high school seniors ready for college-level reading and math declined… Read more →
I know from experience that parents generally don’t tune into news about state test results until they get that personalized report about their own child’s performance on the state exams. And unfortunately, those reports tend to arrive in the backpack or by snail mail many months after the exam–so it can feel a little beside-the-point when your kid has already… Read more →
Another research organization took a fresh look at the issue of remedial education, confirming once again that yes, our nation’s college goers are spending more than $1 billion to learn in college what they should have learned in high school. But what really jumped out from the Center for American Progress’ new report was just how widely states varied when it came… Read more →
Sam Radford’s daughter got straight As in school. That should be the gold standard for being in good shape to go to college, right? Wrong. We travelled to Buffalo, New York to talk to Sam and get his story. Watch Sam’s clip below (the full video is here). Sam’s story shows how hard it is for families to pony up money… Read more →