A reader-friendly version of the study, “Great Teaching: Measuring its effects on students’ future earnings,” by Friedman, Chetty and Rockoff, appears in the Summer 2012 edition of Education Next.

Because the study generated a great deal of attention, Education Next asked four experts to comment on the study’s implications for public policy. Here are their responses:

Low-Performing Teachers Have High Costs - By Eric A. Hanushek

Profound Implications for State Policy - By Chris Cerf and Peter Shulman

More Evidence Would Be Welcome - By Dale Ballou

Implications for Policy Are Not So Clear - By Douglas Harris

HT: Jay Greene

In 2005, Education Next sent Mark Zanger, a restaurant critic, to Boston schools to report on the state of school lunches. Read “What’s For Lunch” to get the inside scoop. Ron Haskins wrote about the federal school lunch program in “The School Lunch Lobby: A charmed federal program that no longer just feeds the hungry,” in the same issue.

The questions addressed by the panel included:

Is digital learning education’s latest fad or its future?
What fundamental changes to the ways we fund, staff, and govern American schools are necessary to fulfill the technology’s potential?
Will policy tweaks suffice or do we need a total system overhaul—and a big change in the reform priorities that can bring this about?
Who will resist—and do their objections have merit?

If you missed the event, you can watch it above or read more about it here.

For more on this topic from Ed Next, please see

“Bright Spots Shine in Blended, Online Learning,” by Michael Horn

“Can Khan Move the Bell Curve to the Right?” by June Kronholz

“The Flipped Classroom,” by Bill Tucker

Is digital learning education’s latest fad or its future? What fundamental changes to the ways we fund, staff, and govern American schools are necessary to fulfill the technology’s potential? Will policy tweaks suffice or do we need a total system overhaul—and a big change in the reform priorities that can bring this about? Who will resist—and do their objections have merit? Fordham is bringing together experts on all aspects of education policy—from governance to finance to human capital—to examine how policymakers can make digital learning a transformative tool to improve American education…and weigh the dangers that lie ahead.

More information on the events and the panelists can be found here.

This Fordham Foundation documentary  provides a look at the challenges and successes of a rural Appalachian charter school in southeast Ohio, the Sciotoville Community School.

In the video, leaders from Rocketship and School of One discuss the advantages of digital learning while sharing their concerns about California laws and union regulations that have limited the role of online learning.

More about the book is available here.

HT: Joanne Jacobs

-Chester E. Finn, Jr., in the Fordham Institute’s Rejected Superbowl Ad “Lunchtime in America”

In this video, members of the VIVA Project Chicago Teachers Writing Collaborative talk about the empowering experience of working together and having their voices heard by the massive Chicago Public Schools system. CPS CEO Jean-Claude Brizard says The VIVA Project, as a neutral third party, made it possible for him to hear from teachers, the real experts on how to use time in school to better serve students.

The VIVA (Voices, Ideas, Vision, Action) Project brought Chicago teachers into the education policy discussion by providing not only a platform to share their ideas, but also guidance to build on each other’s ideas and create a report of recommendations that was ultimately shared with the Chicago Public Schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizard.

You can find out more about The Viva Project here.

In this PBS interview, the  co-chairs of the task force, Condoleezza Rice and Joel Klein, discuss the dangers of a poor education system.

According to Rice:

“When it comes to the very tangible assets that the United States needs to defend itself, the education of people who can be soldiers, too many people can’t qualify for military service….Then, of course, there’s the matter of the competitiveness of our economy, people who can fill the jobs and be the innovators of the future, so that the United States maintains its economic edge, and then finally the matter of our social cohesion. The United States, we’ve always been held together by the belief that it doesn’t matter where you came from. It matters where you’re going… [and] without education, we cannot maintain that cohesion.”

Of the current state of education in the nation, Rice says:

“Today, the sad fact is that, for the children who have the fewest options, the educational system is not delivering. If I can look at your zip code and I can tell whether you’re going to get a good education, we’ve got a real problem.”

The transcript of the interview can be found here.

Read the Council on Foreign Relations task force report here.

Deming found that high-risk middle- and high-school students who attend a school of choice are less likely to be arrested and spend less time incarcerated.

Please read “Does School Choice Reduce Crime: Evidence from North Carolina” in the Spring 2012 issue of Ed Next.

For more on Khan Academy read ” Can Khan Move the Bell Curve to the Right?“, by June Kronholz, in the Spring 2012 issue of Education Next.

He has more to say about a larger strategy for boosting teacher quality in “An Effective Teacher in Every Classroom,” which appeared in the Summer 2010 issue of Ed Next.

He also authored “Valuing Teachers: How Much is a Good Teacher Worth?” which appeared in the Summer 2011 issue of Ed Next.

On Friday, March 2 from 9:00-10:30 am we’ll be watching a live webcast of the Fordham Institute’s forum on No Child Left Behind, starring Michele McNeil, Carmel Martin, Jeremy Ayers, Michael Petrilli, and moderated by Checker Finn. As described on the event page:

After a decade of living with the No Child Left Behind Act, there is wide, bipartisan consensus that this law governing so much of the federal role in education needs to change. With reauthorization still stalled in Congress, however, the Obama Administration offered states a deal—freedom from some of NCLB’s prescriptions in return for alignment with the Education Department’s current reform priorities. Already this month, eleven states were freed from some of the strictures of NCLB; dozens more must decide by February 28 whether the benefits of Duncan-style ESEA flexibility are worth it. You’re invited to join us at the Fordham Institute on March 2 as experts with varying perspectives on this issue weigh the merits of NCLB waivers, whether the Administration struck a sound balance between “flexibility” and “reform,” and what this all means for federal education policy going forward.

More information about the event and the panelists can be found on the Fordham Institute website.

An article about Teach for America from the Summer 2011 issue of Ed Next looks at what TFA alumni do after they leave the program. “While much of the debate around Teach For America (TFA) in recent years has focused on the effectiveness of its nontraditional recruits in the classroom,” the authors write,  “the real story is the degree to which TFA has succeeded in producing dynamic, impassioned, and entrepreneurial education leaders.” See Creating a Corps of Change Agents” by Monica Higgins, Wendy Robison, Jennie Weiner, and Frederick Hess.

The interview with David Gergen was filmed during one of the breaks in the Education Next-PEPG conference “Learning from the International Experience,”where Gergen was moderating a panel.

You can read more about the Education Next-PEPG conference on Learning from the International Experience here.

An Ed Next article based on the conference, summarizing what the U.S. can and cannot learn from other countries, can be found here.

Education Next today published an interview by Peter Meyer with Cerf, “a guy who has an astute appreciation for the challenges of education reform, and relishes them.”

Peter Meyer has done  other feature-length interviews for Ed Next with Whitney Tilson and John White.

The 2012 election cycle is off and running, with big implications for America’s schools. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) awaits reauthorization. The Obama administration is implementing new regulations targeted at for-profit colleges. Standoffs between the GOP-controlled House and the Obama administration have yielded budget brinksmanship, while domestic spending has been squeezed by massive deficits. President Obama, following in the footsteps of the Bush administration, has aggressively championed federal education initiatives like Race to the Top and the Investing in Innovation fund. Meanwhile, the Republican primaries have been marked by candidates’ rejection of an active federal role in education, as several have pledged to “turn out the lights” at the U.S. Department of Education.

In a discussion hosted by Ed Next editor Frederick Hess, the panelists included:

PETER CUNNINGHAM, U.S. Department of Education
KATHERINE HALEY, Office of Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio)
ALYSON KLEIN, Education Week
JOE WILLIAMS, Democrats for Education Reform
DAVID WINSTON, The Winston Group

More information about the event is available on the AEI website.

In the Spring 2012 issue of Ed Next, June June Kronholz looks at two school districts working with Khan Academy to boost math achievement.

On Thursday, Jan. 5 from 8:30-10:00 am we’ll be watching a live webcast of the Fordham Institute’s forum on accountability, starring Eric Hanushek, Charles Barone, Sandy Kress, and Mark Schneider. The event is described as follows:

Ten years ago, George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act, the law that has dominated U.S. education—and the education policy debate—for the entire decade. While lawmakers are struggling to update that measure, experts across the political spectrum are struggling to make sense of its impact and legacy. Did NCLB, and the consequential accountability movement it embodied, succeed? And with near-stagnant national test scores of late, is there reason to think that this approach to school reform is exhausted? If not “consequential accountability,” what could take the U.S. to the next level of student achievement?

More information about the event and the panelists can be found on the Fordham Institute website.

Terry Moe was interviewed by Mike Petrilli for the Education Next book club podcast here.

Research by Hanushek which appeared in Ed Next in 2008 found strong relationships between achievement on accountability-based tests and economic growth. (See: “Education and Economic Growth,” Education Next, Spring 2008)

In this video, Eric Hanushek of the Hoover Institution discusses the shortcomings of the NRC report with Terry Moe, also of the Hoover Institution.

The Winter 2012 issue of Education Next includes a full critique of the NRC report by Eric Hanushek, “Grinding the Antitesting Ax: More bias than evidence behind NRC panel’s conclusions”

As Hanushek explains, the NRC report neglected the scientific evidence when it concluded that NCLB and high school exit exams were not good policies.  By the NRC’s own evidence, test-based accountability is very valuable, and investing in these programs has a rate of return that dwarfs that of virtually all governmental programs.

Research by Hanushek which appeared in Ed Next in 2008 found strong relationships between achievement on accountability-based tests and economic growth. (See: “Education and Economic Growth,” Education Next, Spring 2008)

Kipp shares her experience teaching 11th and 12th grade English online while she resides with her family in rural Colorado. Though not physically in a classroom, Kipp has been able to successfully engage students through live class sessions, emails, instant messaging, and texting. Kipp used to teach in a traditional classroom setting but says that despite some of the unique challenges teaching virtually presents, she finds the online teaching experience more rewarding and in many instances more effective.

Today (Thursday), tune in to a live webcast of an all-day conference on education governance sponsored by The Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the Center for American Progress.

School reforms abound today, yet even the boldest and most imaginative among them have produced—at best—marginal gains in student achievement. What America needs in the twenty-first century is a far more profound version of education reform. Instead of shoveling yet more policies, programs, and practices into our current system, we must deepen our understanding of the obstacles to reform that are posed by existing structures, governance arrangements, and power relationships. Yet few education reformers—or public officials—have been willing to delve into this touchy territory.

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the Center for American Progress have teamed up to tackle these tough issues and ask how our mostly nineteenth-century system of K-12 governance might be modernized and made more receptive to the innumerable changes that have occurred—and need to occur—in the education realm.

More information is available here.

This video highlights some of the strategies being pursued by the Partnership, which include identifying students for Gifted and Talented Education (GATE), parent engagement, professional development for teachers and principals, school accountability, use of new education technologies, protecting schools from the disruption of disproportionate teacher layoffs, and fostering inviting learning environments.

More information is available at http://www.partnershipla.org

The Georgia’s governor, state charter school commissioners, and parents all react to the May 16th decision.

Visit Education Next’s Charter School and Vouchers Archive to read more opinion, research, and news pieces on charter schools.

More videos in this series by NewSchools can be found here.

Are America’s highest achieving students being left behind?

A trio of recent studies and articles raises troubling questions about America’s “Achievement-Gap Mania.” Are we leaving our highest performing students behind in the quest to raise the test scores of students at the bottom? If so, what will this mean for our future international competitiveness?

Learn about the recent studies–Fordham’s Do High Flyers Maintain their Altitude? and the George W. Bush Institute’s Global Report Card—as well as Frederick M. Hess’s new National Affairs essay, “Our Achievement-Gap Mania.” And join a conversation about whether our focus on raising the bottom is blinding us to trouble at the top.

Panelists:

• Ulrich Boser, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress
• John Cronin, Director of the Kingsbury Center for Research on Academic Growth at the Northwest Evaluation Association
• Frederick M. Hess, Resident Scholar and Director of Education Policy Studies at American Enterprise Institute
• Josh McGee, Vice President for Public Accountability Initiatives at the Laura and John Arnold Foundation

Moderator:

• Chester E. Finn, Jr., President, Thomas B. Fordham Institute

Find more information on student achievement and the global report card here.

More information is available on the conference’s main page, here.

The study on which the Global Report Card is based, “When the Best is Mediocre: Developed countries far outperform our most affluent suburbs,” by Jay Greene and Josh McGee, will appear in the Winter 2012 issue of Ed Next and is now available online.

The rankings of 13,636 U.S. school districts can be found in the Global Report Card, available on the website of the George W. Bush Institute, where readers can see how students in each school district compare to students in 25 other nations.

A detailed explanation of the methods used to conduct the analysis is available here.

The Education Next article on this report, “Are U.S. Students Ready to Compete?” can be found here. A PDF of the full report, “Globally Challenged,” can be found here.

Paul Peterson is editor-in-chief of Education Next, and Eric Hanushek serves on the editorial board.  Both are  senior fellows at the Hoover Institution and members of its Koret Task Force on K-12 Education

Panelists
Frederick M. Hess, Director, Education Policy Studies, American Enterprise Institute
Randi Weingarten, President, American Federation of Teachers

Moderator
Michael J. Petrilli, Executive Vice President, Thomas B. Fordham Institute

This event will be webcast. There is no need to register for the webcast – simply visit www.edexcellence.net at 10 a.m. on August 23 and watch the proceedings live.

Panelists:

Ted Mitchell, president and CEO of the NewSchools Venture Fund.

Fiona O’Carroll, executive vice president of the New Ventures/Innovation Group at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Panel moderated by Gary Huggins.

While physical education has been drastically cut back across the country — in response to budget concerns and test score pressures — Naperville Central High School, in the Chicago suburbs, has embraced a culture of fitness: PE is a daily, graded requirement. And for one group of struggling students, there’s an innovative program to schedule PE right before their most challenging classes. In the six years since that program started, students who signed up for PE directly before English read on average a half year ahead of those who didn’t, and students who took PE before math showed dramatic improvement in their standardized tests.

In 2010, an Ed Next video featured another innovative physical education program for high school students, the 25th Hour P.E. Class at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia. The program uses heart rate monitors to hold students accountable for how long and how hard they work out.

Veronica Nolan is executive director of the Urban Alliance, an organization which helps young people from under-resourced areas in the District of Columbia prepare for successful careers through internship and mentoring opportunities in professional settings.

Stephanie Saroki is co-founder of Seton Education Partners, a non-profit working to help struggling urban Catholic schools find alternatives to school closure.

Veronica and Stephanie describe their experiences as Teach for America corps members, explain what inspired them to lead entrepreneurial education organizations after teaching, and consider what it is about TFA that has made its alumni so successful as change agents in education.

This video accompanies a new study that attempts to determine which organizations are most effective in spawning leaders of entrepreneurial ventures in education. That study, “Creating a Corps of Change Agents: What explains the success of Teach for America?” by Monica Higgins, Jennie Weiner, Wendy Robison, and Frederick Hess, will appear in the Spring 2011 issue of Education Next, and is now available online.

HT: Gotham Schools

HT: Jay P Greene’s blog

For more on spelling bees, and other academic competitions, please see “Competition Makes a Comeback” by June Kronholz in the Summer 2010 issue of Education Next.

More information about the event is available here.

For more on this topic, see “Teachers Swap Recipes,” in the Summer 2011 issue of Education Next.