minahkaypoh

The following is a guest post from Robert Kelchen , doctoral candidate in Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The Washington Post’s Campus Overload blog recently featured a guest post, “ Getting Rejected from Your Dream School(s) isn’t a Bad Thing ” by Eric Harris, a junior who attended the University of Maryland after being deferred by his first choice (Duke) and rejected by six of the other eight colleges to which he applied. (He was also accepted by Emory.) Eric’s story is hardly unique, as numerous blogs and websites feature stories of students who were rejected by their first choice college. Most of the popular media accounts of students rejected by their first choice college are from students like Eric—those who applied to a large number of highly selective (and very expensive) colleges and universities and still attended a prestigious institution. The kinds of students who are typically featured in the media are very likely to enjoy college and ...

On Friday, I wrote a blog item ( 'Misleading Manifesto' ) chiding a group of urban superintendents for misstating educational research in a 'manifesto' published in Sunday's Washington Post . Teacher quality *is* important -- but it does not matter MORE THAN family income and concentrated poverty. I am convinced that too many educational reformers are happy to 'spin' the truth for rhetorical purposes. I think this is exactly what we saw in this manifesto. While this may help to simplify messaging, target solutions at a more narrowly construed problem, and focus in on what education leaders have direct control over, it carries an inherent policy danger along with it. That danger is two-fold: (1) teacher policy reforms may be set up for failure by overstating their potential impact; and (2) more comprehensive strategies desperately needed to combat rising income inequality and growing poverty in our nation may be discounted and ignored. For me, this isn't...

The problem with Jay Mathews' defense ( "Measuring Progress At Shaw With More Than Numbers" ) of a Washington, DC school principal who did not demonstrate student learning gains at his school after one year is that the principal operates within an accountability system that demands such a result. In this case, both Mathews -- and DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, as described in Mathews' WP column -- are right not to have lowered the boom on Brian Betts, principal of the DC's Shaw Middle School at Garnet-Patterson, based on a single year's worth of test scores. The state superintendent of education's Web site says Shaw dropped from 38.6 to 30.5 in the percentage of students scoring at least proficient in reading, and from 32.7 to 29.2 in math. But those were not the numbers Rhee read to Betts over the phone. Only 17 percent of Shaw's 2009 students had attended the school in 2008, distorting the official test score comparisons. Rhee instead recit...