Author
Jay P. Greene
Articles
Best Practices Are the Worst
Picking the anecdotes you want to believe: A book review of Marc Tucker’s “Surpassing Shanghai”
When the Best is Mediocre
Developed countries far outperform our most affluent suburbs
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View the Global Report Card
View the Methodological Appendix
The Case for Special Education Vouchers
Parents should decide when their disabled child needs a private placement
The Business Model
Value-added analysis is a crucial tool in the accountability toolbox–despite its flaws
Blog Posts/Multimedia
Charter Benefits Are Proven by the Best Evidence
Supporters of charter schools have four gold-standard randomized control trials on their side. Opponents of charter schools have no equally rigorous evidence on their side.
My Response to Marc Tucker’s Defense of Surpassing Shanghai
The “best practices” method that is gaining popularity among more-impressionable education policy wonks and that Tucker used in Surpassing Shanghai simply cannot support causal claims about “what works.”
More Perspective on McKay
Late last year there was a big brouhaha about misconduct in Florida’s McKay Scholarship program, which allows disabled students to use public funds to choose a private school if they prefer.
Head Start, A Case Study in the Unreliability of Government Research
The Department of Health and Human Resources is up to its old tricks of delaying research whose results are likely to undermine their darling program, Head Start.
What Victory Looks Like
Now the issues of choice, tenure, merit pay, testing, and accountability are a normal part of the discussion.
New Milwaukee Choice Results
Patrick Wolf and John Witte and a team of researchers have released their final round of reports on the Milwaukee school choice program.
Common Core Quality Debated
If they agree that Common Core is sort of mediocre, why does Wilson support them while Wurman oppose them?
Are Charter Schools Models of Reform for Traditional Public Schools?
Yes, answers Roland Fryer in an amazing study released this month.
Nationalization Train Starts Going Off the Tracks
Supporters of digital learning, many of whom were among the strongest supporters of national standards, have organized in opposition to the imposition of a single test on the nation’s schools.
Checker’s Case for World Government (and Common Core)
National standards will fail because it is not possible to have a centrally determined set of meaningful standards that can accommodate the legitimate diversity of needs, goals, and values of all of our nation’s school children.
Perspective on McKay
Ed Week, Ed Sector, and others are picking up on a hyperventilating story from the free weekly Miami New Times about misconduct in Florida’s McKay Scholarship voucher program for disabled students. The stories were embarrassing, but the reaction by the New Times and others has been completely lacking in perspective.
National Standards Shows Cracks
Last week the education task force of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) endorsed measures urging states to oppose adoption and implementation of the federally “incentivized” Common Core standards.
Teacher Union Blues
The problem with teacher unions and public sector collective bargaining is that the checks and balances provided by market competition are absent.
What’s Going Right in Waconda?
According to the Global Report Card that Josh McGee and I developed, tiny Waconda, Kansas is one of the top-performing school districts in the United States. Other than being the home to what residents claim is the world’s largest ball of twine, one might not think that there was anything exceptional about this rural, farm community in north central Kansas.
Steve Jobs on Education
Steve Jobs embodied the entrepreneur as humanitarian — not because he gave away his wealth as if to cleanse himself of the sin of having earned it, but because he created and promoted consumer items that significantly improved our lives while justly generating enormous wealth for himself, his employees, and shareholders. Jobs also had quite a lot of smart things to say about education reform.
Reporting on the Global Report Card
Coverage of the new Global Report Card (GRC) that Josh McGee and I developed is gaining steam. The GRC allows users to compare student achievement in virtually every one of the nearly 14,000 school districts in the United States against the achievement in a set of 25 developed countries.
It’s Not All About Poor Kids
Our nearly exclusive focus on improving the education of the poor has concealed the sub-par education being provided in many of our most affluent school districts.
Students in Affluent School Districts Post Mediocre Results
Podcast: Jay Greene discusses his new study, which examines student achievement in virtually every school district in the United States and compares the performance of U.S. districts with the performance of students in 25 developed countries.
Global Report Card Released Tomorrow
Keep your eyes out for tomorrow’s release of the Global Report Card. This is a project conducted by Josh McGee and me in which we measure student achievement in virtually every school district in the U.S. against the performance of students in an international comparison group consisting of 25 developed countries.
The Solyndra of Digital Learning
Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, and Netflix CEO, Reed Hasting, have an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal that starts out great but then goes dramatically downhill.
Barriers to Digital Learning
Digital learning has significant potential but it also faces significant political barriers. Existing regulations, such as seat-time requirements, teacher certification requirements, and the immobility of student funding all stand in the way of rapid expansion of digital learning in K-12 education. Notice that I did not include the lack of a national set of standards as a significant barrier to the expansion of digital learning.
Build New, Don’t Reform Old
Philanthropists with billions of dollars to devote to education reform should build new institutions and stop trying to fix old ones.
Gates Foundation Follies (Part 1)
The Gates interview in the Wall Street Journal confirmed two things about the Foundation’s education efforts: 1) they’ve realized that the focus of their efforts has to be on the political control of schools and 2) they are uninterested in using that political influence to advance market forces in education
The Army of Angry Teachers — When Success Breeds Failure
The unions succeed by intimidating politicians with their raw power while convincing the public that teacher unions love their children almost as much as the parents do. But when the public face of the teacher unions is the Army of Angry Teachers, they no longer seem like Mary Poppins.
Flawed Comparison from OECD
The OECD has a report, Education at a Glance 2010, that provides a shockingly flawed comparison of the amount of time U.S. teachers work relative to teachers in other countries.
The Limits and Dangers of Philanthropy in Education
A common pitfall for foundations is to fantasize that they know what works and what doesn’t rather than encouraging market forces to sort that out. This point is nicely illustrated by a new report released by Andrew Coulson at Cato.
Creative Destruction in Education
Let’s stop trying to fix Detroit, LA, or Chicago public schools. They need to be replaced with new organizations with new missions and new methods of education. That’s how we can reform schools — by replacing them.
U.S. Dept. of Ed. is Breaking the Law
It is now clear, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s own description, that the Department is in violation of the law by which it was created.
Fordham and the Use of Passive Voice
Charles Miller observed the extensive use of passive voice in the Fordham reply to the criticism over a nationalized set of standards, curriculum, and assessments, which serves to conceal who is supposed to be doing the described actions.
Nationalization Weasels
If advocates of the nationalization of education had greater intellectual integrity, they would openly declare that they favor nationally uniform standards, curriculum, and assessments. But “intellectual” and “integrity” are not the first things that come to mind when thinking of the U.S. Department of Education-Gates-AFT-Fordham coalition pushing nationalization.
Closing the Door on Innovation
Today a Manifesto was released opposing the effort by the U.S. Department of Education-Gates-AFT-Fordham to develop a set of national curriculum and assessments based on the already promulgated Common Core national standards.
Verdict in the WSJ: “School Vouchers Work”
Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley has a must-read piece in the WSJ today.
Mandating Betamax
Once the Gates-Fordham-AFT-USDOE coalition settles on the details of nationalizing standards, curriculum, and testing, it will become extremely difficult to change anything about education.
MPINO
Most people are familiar with RhINOs (Republicans in Name Only), which is a pejorative for Republican officials who differ from other Republicans on certain key issues. Stuart Buck and I would like to introduce to the policy lexicon the term MPINO — Merit Pay in Name Only.
Gloom and Gloomier
The editors at Education Next have two essays on the state of education reform. I don’t really disagree with much of what either essay has to say. It is all just a matter of emphasis and framing. They see a greater danger in over-confidence and I see a greater danger in burnout.
The Dead End of Scientific Progressivism
In Education Myths I argued that we needed to rely on science rather than our direct experience to identify effective policies. Our eyes can mislead us, while scientific evidence has the systematic rigor to guide us more accurately. That’s true, but I am now more aware of the opposite failing — believing that we can resolve all policy disputes and identify the “right way” to educate all children solely by relying on science.
Rankings Revised
Rick Hess along with Daniel Lautzenheiser have devised a ranking of the “public presence” of education academics. One of the problems with the ranking is that it combines some measures that accumulate over one’s career with other measures that only count accomplishments in the last year. In a lightly revised ranking I have tried to standardize the measures so that those with longer careers would have no particular advantage.
Drill and Kill Kerfuffle
The reaction of New York Times reporter, Sam Dillon, and LA Times reporter, Jason Felch, to my post on Monday about erroneous claims in their coverage of a new Gates report could not have been more different.
False Claim on Drill and Kill
The Gates Foundation is funding a $45 million project to improve measures of teacher effectiveness. As part of that project, researchers are collecting information from two standardized tests as well as surveys administered to students and classroom observations captured by video cameras in the classrooms.
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