A metric is only useful as a metric when it isn't used as a metric

What will happen when teachers are systematically rewarded or punished based on standardized tests? asks Eduardo Porter in The New York Times. The design of any system must be carefully thought through to avoid sending incentives astray, since people -- wittingly or unwittingly -- goose numbers once a measure is set up. The phenomenon is known as Goodhart's Law, though one economist calls it…

Coming soon: A larger gap in achievement scores

The Common Core was rolled out with promises of closing learning and achievement gaps, but in the short term, gaps will almost certainly grow wider, writes Tara García Mathewson for The Hechinger Report. The gap in scores between disadvantaged students and peers has already ballooned in Illinois, New York, and Kentucky, all of which launched early versions of aligned exams. In Illinois, the achievement gap…

The Common Core: promises, promises

In 2010, plans for Common Core-aligned tests were introduced with fanfare and promises they'd end dumbed-down, multiple-choice tests and weeks of mindless prepping, writes Emmanuel Felton for McClatchy. They'd bring coherence to a mishmash of state exams and allow states for the first time to compare local students to peers elsewhere. Their online format would make testing more efficient, accurate, and relevant to the…

The absurd insistence on a four-year degree

It's an absurdity that a four-year college degree has become the only gateway into the American middle class, writes Robert Reich for The Christian Science Monitor. Not every young person is suited to four years of college: They may be bright and ambitious, but would get little out of it and would rather be doing something else, like making money or painting murals. Yet they feel compelled since they've been told…

Can We Talk About Change Without Hurting Feelings?

by Will Richardson

Fareed Zakaria: America's obsession with STEM education dangerous

• Tulsa World…

Are teachers allowed enough freedom to take risks with curriculum?

How Can Successful School Improvement Ideas Be Taken to Scale?

In this article in Educational Researcher, Catherine Lewis (Mills College School of Education) asks why a number of good ideas for improving student achievement are not “scaling up” – that is, having an impact beyond a small number of successful classrooms and schools. Other fields (including health care and automobile manufacturing) have brought about major gains in quality by…

How Schools Can Help Push Back the Age of Childbearing

In this article in Education Next, Michael Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute asks what U.S. schools can do about the growing number of out-of-wedlock births and the well-documented travails of children raised in single-parent homes. “This may seem like a ridiculous question,” he concedes. How can schools possibly affect a problem with such deep roots? Shouldn’t schools limit…

The Power of Reading Aloud

In this article in The Reading Teacher, Illinois teacher JeanaLe Ann Marshall describes how her fourth graders react when she wraps up her daily 10-minute readaloud: “Nooooo! Read more! Don’t stop! Why do you always do this to us?” Among their favorite books:

• Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made by Stephan Pastis (2013)
• The One and Only Ivan by Katherine…

TEST PREP: Junk Food Instruction

Steve Peha

Testing is the most misunderstood element of education reform.

Ignoring decades of research that shows that testing actually helps kids learn, we assume it doesn’t. Ignoring more recent…

Can we fix elitist public high school admissions?

Only 5,000 kids are offered admission to the nine prestigious college-prep high schools in New York City, and they are predominantly male, and white or Asian, reports Alia Wong in The Atlantic. In 2013, just four percent of incoming freshman were black, and five percent Latino, to the three most prominent schools: Stuyvesant, Bronx School of Science, and Brooklyn Tech. Admission to a specialized school hinges…