WHAT TOMORROW'S SCHOOLS CAN LEARN FROM LEGO TODAY

Charters slightly better for special needs (in NYC, anyway)

New York City's Independent Budget Office has released a report finding children with disabilities stayed at charters at a slightly higher rate than at traditional public schools, contrary to the prevailing narrative, writes Elizabeth Harris for The New York Times. The report examined 3,000 students at charters and 7,200 students at nearby traditional public schools who started kindergarten in 2008. It found…

Hands off the Carnegie Unit

A new report from the Carnegie Foundation for Teaching looks at the Carnegie Unit -- or credit hour -- which it established over a century ago as a rough gauge of student readiness for college-level academics, standardizing student exposure to subject material by ensuring consistent amounts of instructional time. Reformers now argue that reliance on the Carnegie Unit has in fact slowed progress toward diplomas and degrees. Critics say that…

Why grade-span testing won't work

Despite a real possibility that, going forward, states will have to test students only once in each grade span (once in elementary, middle, and high school), a new paper from the Brookings Institution argues that annual testing is critical to judging school quality. Using a decade of data, the paper projects how schools would rate based only on average test scores in a solitary grade -- the situation under a grade-span testing regime…

The increasingly less-common Core

One hope of the Common Core was that states would discard the national patchwork of 50 sets of standards measured by 50 different tests, writes Emma Brown in The Washington Post. For the first time, parents and policymakers would directly compare student performance in one state to the rest of the nation, making it harder for lagging states to hide weak performance. The goal seemed easily within reach in 2011, as 45 states and the…

There is free lunch, but what does it signify?

"Free and reduced-price lunch" is generally used to indicate concentrations of poverty and how these affect learning, but is it the best yardstick? asks Will Huntsberry for NPR. Does qualifying for the program necessarily indicate risk of falling through the cracks of American education? To qualify for the federal lunch program, families must be at or below 185 percent of the federal poverty level -- about $44,000…

“Lifeworthy” Learning

In this Ed. Magazine article, editor Lory Hough reports on the recent thinking of David Perkins (Harvard Graduate School of Education) on what’s worth learning in school. Perkins says there’s often a skeptical student at the back of the class who asks, “Why do we need to know this?” Lots of teachers, including Perkins, find this an uncomfortable moment: “When that ballistic missile comes from the back of the room, it’s a good…