School shootings are terrifying, both in their suddenness and their level of violence. The age of the victims makes them tragedies that are hard to forget. The worst ones in recent years – Uvalde, Sandy Hook, Parkland – have inspired a host of strategies meant to stop future shooters. This impulse makes a lot of […]
In Part 1, we explored how we might ‘moneyball’ education — apply some of the systematic, data driven principles pioneered by the Oakland A’s baseball team to maximize their ability to win in the face of budget constraints. The system required using objective means rather than human perception and tradition to make decisions that improved […]
The 2003 book Moneyball, by Michael Lewis, was a deep dive into the system the Oakland A’s developed to select the best baseball players they could with their limited budget. It was a system that got a lot of pushback initially because it seemed to violate all the canons of player selection favored by scouts. […]
It’s taken a while, but data crunchers are finally quantifying how the Covid-19 pandemic affected student learning. The results are detailed in a recent article from NPR , which offers 6 takeaways about pandemic learning loss. Debating Terms This isn’t a finding, but one of the points made by the article is that what students […]
“We’ve tried: standardized tests, charter schools, smaller classes, longer school days, stricter discipline, looser discipline, tracking, differentiation. We’ve decided the problem is teachers. The problem is parents. What is true about almost all these reforms is that when we look for what’s broken we look at who they’re failing: poor kids, black kids, brown kids. […]
In Part 1, we talked about the impact SCOTUS is having on education; in Part 2, we saw how the private school setting didn’t produce higher achievement for students. In Part 3, we looked at how the effects of School Choice compounded with each other to produce schools segregated by race, income, and social status. […]
In Part 1, we talked about the impact SCOTUS is having on education; in Part 2, we saw how the private school setting didn’t produce higher achievement for students. In Part 3, we looked at how the effects of School Choice compounded with each other to produce schools segregated by race, income, and social status. […]
In Part 1, we discussed the recent SCOTUS decision in Maine. In Part 2, we looked at school choice’s inability to deliver on its most vaunted promise: higher achievement for students. Because the private school setting doesn’t confer higher achievement (that comes from parental income level and educational attainment), it begs the question of what […]
School choice is a term that’s been applied to a variety of programs in education. In one very large district in North Carolina, school choice allowed parents to tell the district which elementary, middle, or high school they wanted their children to attend among all the public school options in the district. In public school […]
Using taxpayer money to pay for faith-based private school used to be considered a direct violation of the separation of church and state. Many still believe it is because such a practice would force taxpayers of whatever faith (or no faith) to support faith-based instruction that they may not agree with. Some legislatures have lauded […]