December 11, 2014
This opinion piece by Robert Slavin questions the effectiveness of how test-based accountability is currently been employed in the United States. Slavin doesn’t question the use of high stakes testing as a valuable tool for identification of poorly performing students and schools. Read More…
December 1, 2014
An article titled, New ESEA waiver guidance will sink schools where all boats are rising, questions the wisdom of new NCLB waiver guidelines. The author, Michael Petrilli, challenges the recent changes that would make it more Read More…
November 19, 2014
This commentary addresses concerns regarding the application of value-added modeling commonly used to evaluate teachers as well as implications for the use of these metrics to assess graduates of preparation programs. Read More…
November 18, 2014
Two recent opinion pieces, that appeared on the Thomas Fordham Institute web site, offer a look at issues regarding principal preparation. Read More…
November 10, 2014
The story of delayed gratification and its impact on socially important outcomes is told by the psychologist Walter Mischel in his newly published book, The Marshmallow Test: Read More…
October 29, 2014
A report by the Brown Center on Education Policy released in September 2014 finds that school superintendents are around for only a short time and have very little impact when it comes to improving student performance.
October 23, 2014
Since 2008, there has been a decrease in enrollment in teacher preparation programs especially in large states like California Read More…
October 2, 2014
West Ed has a new wed site to support educators cope with the demand for providing effective instruction under the guidelines of Common Core. Read More…
September 25, 2014
This op-ed piece by Daniel Willingham examines recent research conducted by Roland Fryer. The study, Injecting Charter School Best Practices into Traditional Public Schools: Evidence from Field Experiments, reviews attempts to implement in public schools the lessons that Fryer learned about what makes effective charter schools (Dobbie & Fryer, 2011). The study concluded that the interventions did not produce significant improvement in student performance.
Willingham’s article makes several very critical observations. The first is the importance of disseminating results of studies that fail to produce the projected effects. This is fundamental to a vibrant evidence-based model of education: understanding what works and, equally important, what does not work. Unfortunately, educators and universities do not place the same value on negative results as on positive results. Willingham makes this point when he asks the critical questions, what went wrong and why did the study fail to arrive at the hypothesized results? Too often, educators reject a practice out of hand as a consequence of a particular study when the important lesson might lie elsewhere, perhaps in a poorly designed practice or a failure to implement the practice as designed.
http://www.danielwillingham.com/daniel-willingham-science-and-education-blog
September 5, 2014
A recently published study on replication of research in education, “Facts Are More Important Than Novelty: Replication in the Education Sciences” finds that as few as 0.13 percentage of journal studies are were replications. Read More…