Monthly Archives: September 2015

New Orleans Video Underscores the Power of Reform

What a week! My mom and dad moved me to a new house last weekend. This one is a long way from the Capitol, which they say is to keep me from sneaking in there and playing edu-politics when I should be doing my homework. On top of that, I attended an awesome student-based budgeting event yesterday with my Education Policy Center friends. So did a whole bunch of other people from around the state who are interested in empowering school-level decision-making. All of which is to say that yours truly is a bit tired today. Fortunately for me, I ran across an awesome Heritage Foundation video this morning about New Orleans’ (nearly) all-charter system and the results it has achieved since Katrina. The video offers a very human side of the story through interviews with school leaders and students in the city. I bet you’ll love it as much as I did.

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Despite Union Statements, National Polls Show Public Support for Testing

About this time last year, I was puzzling over the presence of a strange phantom statistic quoted by NEA in the wake of the annual PDK/Gallup national education poll. The statistic was eventually released weeks after the rest of the poll, which means NEA didn’t lie about it. They did, however, get special access to an unverifiable number that happened to support their very strong push against evaluation systems that include student growth. No one can easily refute poll results without, you know, having the poll results, so NEA got some good mileage out of that one. But there’s no use crying over spilled statistics. Besides, the main reason I was interested in that number in the first place was the fact that it stood in stark contrast with data gathered by another nationally representative poll conducted by Education Next—data showing clear public support for the use of student performance when making teacher tenure decisions. This year, though, the polls appear to mostly agree with one another on testing issues. Not that NEA or AFT are very keen on sharing that fact. The 2015 version of the annual Education Next poll and its associated report have been in the wild […]

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