Tag Archives: Research

I hope that I get smarter as I go through school some day. Likewise, despite its success with advancing school choice and accountability so far, Colorado also needs to Get Smart(er) about education reform. At least that’s the premise behind a new group called Get Smart Schools Colorado. As the Rocky Mountain News reports: The idea behind Get Smart Schools is similar to school initiatives in Chicago and New York – one group pooling expertise and funding to help promising new school models get off the ground. That’s because research shows it’s typically more effective to start good new schools than it is to transform existing schools that are failing. In Colorado, the focus will be on importing quality school models that have been successful elsewhere and on helping promising new schools find facilities, an obstacle for many. Believe it or not, this sort of group really is needed. We know the importance of smaller schools, autonomy (big word!), strong leadership, high-quality instruction, research-based curricula, parental involvement (i.e., choice), and focus on student improvement. But with an experienced and qualified staff of its own, a group like Get Smart Schools Colorado can show new schools how to get it done […]

I haven’t really gotten into list-making yet. Learning to read and write has to come first. But for those of you who are interested in finding out what the research has to say about school choice, having all that information in one place in a list would be handy. Right? What about a list of all the different lists? Writing over at Jay Greene’s blog, Greg Forster has come up with “The Meta-List: An Incomplete List of Complete Lists” (now, that’s a mouthful). The lists are broken down into sections of research on: Effects of school choice on participants (for example, how much more is the voucher kid learning?) Effects of school choice on public schools (does competition bring improvements?) Racial segregation in voucher programs vs. public schools Tolerance and civic values of voucher students vs. public school students Of course, more lists might yet be added to the incomplete “meta-list.” But the next time you are bugged by a question about what the research really says about vouchers and education tax credits, you have a handy one-stop online resource (have you bookmarked it yet?). That’s pretty cool, isn’t it?

Okay, I think it’s a long and boring paper, but Ben in the Education Policy Center says the new report from the National Council on Teacher Quality is very important. What it boils down to is there are a lot of rules, mostly written by well-meaning people, that end up negatively affecting how well kids learn in the classroom. The NCTQ report Invisible Ink in Collective Bargaining proves the realization that more damage is often done by lawmakers at the state level than by the private union negotiations at the local level. The report’s authors say there are three major reasons this “preeminence of state authority” is so poorly misunderstood: The old media doesn’t much either understand or pay attention to the issues that govern education–namely, “few have focused on the outsized influence of the teachers union in the statehouse.” Neither school district or union officials have a vested interest in bringing public attention to their private bargaining sessions. Short of threats to strike, the media doesn’t get how the issues that are negotiated locally have an impact on education’s bottom line. Few scholars have researched the impact of collective bargaining on — or “the origin and history of state […]