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Here are news and opinion stories educators, advocates, policy wonks and makers are talking about today:
News and Analysis
In the past decade, two overarching trends have had an outsize effect on America’s education landscape. The first is the shift in teacher-evaluation policy whereby states are creating new models for measuring the effectiveness of teachers based on standardized-test scores and other objective measures of student outcomes. The second is how entrepreneurial school leaders are rethinking the design and organization of schools and leveraging instructional technology. (Education Week)
False claims and misstatements aren’t rare on television; but usually when “experts” get something completely wrong, it’s something so arcane that few of us recognize the error amidst the din of “Crossfire” cable cacophony: ‘The growth rate in grain exports to China last year was what? Okay, if you say so.’ (Daily Caller)
New York
Jose Luis Vilson has been blogging for years about his experiences in the classroom and writing poetry. Now, the 32-year-old math teacher at an Inwood middle school has written a book, “This is Not a Test” (Haymarket Books). Vilson discussed his inspirations, and his hopes for changing education, with Schoolbook. Here are excerpts from the conversation. (WNYC)
I’ll have what she’s having. New York’s latest round of state test results were released last week and the biggest news is the scores posted by Success Academy, the network of twenty-two charter schools throughout New York City run by Eva Moskowitz. Only 29 percent of New York’s kids met the new higher English standards under Common Core. Success more than doubled it with 64 percent meeting the standards. Wait. It gets better. One in three New York City students scored proficient in math, but at Success it was better than nine out of ten. (Education Next)
The two recently filed New York lawsuits claiming that teacher tenure laws violate children’s constitutional right to a “sound basic education” are finally dragging the long-obscure section 3020-a of the state’s education law into the spotlight. (NY Daily News)