Month: December 2019

The Don’t Do It Depository – by Morgan S. Polikoff

We have known for quite a while that schools engage in all manner of tricks to improve their performance under accountability systems. These behaviors range from the innocuous—teaching the content in state standards—to the likely harmful—outright cheating. A new study last week provided more evidence of the unintended consequences of another gaming behavior—reassigning teacher...

Learn to read english

Since written English is a symbolic representation of the speech sounds of the language, an understanding of the individual speech sounds of language (phonemic awareness) helps children to understand the relationship between spoken and written language, making learning to read and spell easier.…

Next Big Thing in Education Reform May Be Practice, Not Policy – by Michael J. Petrilli

The era of hyperactive education policymaking is about to come to an end. That might be hard to believe, given this summer’s high-decibel policy disputes, both in Washington and in the states. The implementation of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA); debates about a potential large-scale federal school-choice initiative; and deep disagreements about civil rights enforcement ...

Using Blended Learning to Design Schools that Motivate Students by Michael B. Horn

  In the book Blended: Using Disruptive Innovation to Improve Schools, Michael B. Horn and Heather Staker offer a practical guide to implementing blended learning techniques in K-12 classrooms. In this excerpt, they explain how blended learning makes it possible to organize schools around the things students care most about: accomplishing something and having fun with the...

Should Congress Take a Page from the Gainful Employment Playbook? – by Erica Blom

The US Department of Education’s decision to revisit the gainful employment regulations that would cut off federal aid to career training programs where students take on large debts relative to their income has been generally cheered by the right and criticized by the left. But if policymakers can look beyond the politics, the gainful employment data provide evidence that Cong...

Louisiana Threads the Needle on Ed Reform – by Robert Pondiscio

“It was one of the most powerful visits I’ve ever taken,” says Sheila Briggs, an assistant state superintendent with the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. She is describing a visit last fall to Lake Pontchartrain Elementary School, a low-income school in St. John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana, about 30 miles northwest of New Orleans. “The ability to hear what the stat...