StickWithANose

As I’ve noted previously, one of the primary functions of a think tank troll is to not only promote the agenda of the organization and its funders but to also attack its perceived enemies. Yesterday, the Education Sector’s Bill Tucker offered us yet another example of this dynamic in action. Noted educator and critic Alfie [...]

One moment that will forever stick in my mind is the night that “Shock & Awe” was unleashed upon Iraq. Our fearless leader stood before the camera in the White House and announced that we were, in effect, going to war to ensure peace. It was a moment of both clarity and cognitive dissonance that [...]

Earlier in the week, I pointed readers to the dust-up between Aaron Pallas and Frederick Hess over the scoring procedures used by DCPS to determine the value-added scores for teacher evaluations used to fire a large number of teachers in the District. If you’ll recall, Pallas used the only publicly available documentation provided by DCPS [...]

Kevin Carey over at the Quick and the Ed points readers toward this screed by noted hack and think-tank troll Frederick Hess attacking Aaron Pallas’ critique of the Washington D.C. IMPACT teacher evaluation system. I’ll readily admit that I have no expertise in psychometrics beyond the quantitative courses I took in graduate school, so I’m [...]

In a classic example of projection, EduWonk serves up two points of critique which tell us more about the ol’ Wonkster than the relationship between teacher credentials and student outcomes. The first point relates to what the Wonkster calls the piling up of weak studies that he counters with his own… conveniently provided for him [...]

One of the frustrating narratives now common in policy circles is that traditional teacher training is ineffective and does not make a positive contribution to student learning. As I’ve noted previously, this is one of the key narratives behind the Teach for America program and other alternative credentialing programs, however it is a narrative that [...]

It looks like Team Obama stands a good chance of getting its extension of Race to the Top funding for next year. EdWeek reports that the extension cleared the House Appropriations committee chaired by the same Rep. Obey who helped to pass the current EduJobs bill that acquires a good deal of its funding from [...]

I noted earlier in the week that the machine had kicked into gear to discredit Diane Ravitch after her very public conversion from being a big supporter of NCLB and charters to a critic. To her credit, Ravitch’s conversion was one based on the growing body of evidence that the accountability-charter juggernaut is both destructive [...]

One of the current elements of today’s political dynamic that is most disturbing from a democratic perspective is the slickly packaged media techniques being employed by political actors both private and public. An entire knowledge industry has emerged over the past 35 years funded primarily by the business sector with the express purpose of naturalizing [...]

Yesterday, I pointed readers toward yet more evidence that charter schools are not the education miracles that their advocates would have us believe and [most importantly] are not scalable as viable alternatives to traditional public schooling. On the very day that this data is released good ol’ Billy Gates was scheduled to speak at the [...]