minahkaypoh

In a recent post on Education Week 's Inside School Research blog, Debra Viadero offers a caution about President Obama's support for community colleges. Pointing to her recent article on community college research that indicated how much more we need to know about how best to improve completion rates in that sector, she questions whether the president would be wiser to place his bets on career colleges. She says that a recent study by the Educational Policy Institute (EPI) and an ongoing program of research by James Rosenbaum and colleagues support her contention that community colleges ought to take cues from career colleges. In my opinion, this talented reporter is jumping to conclusions. Yes, the graduation rates at two-year for-profit colleges exceed those at two-year public colleges. No one disputes that. That does not necessarily mean, however, that career colleges are outperforming community colleges, or that community colleges should take steps to become more like ...

I'm sure glad that Kate Walsh and company weren't my professors in college. Damn! They are tough graders! With the exception of eight southern states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas) that received a 'C' and three northern states (Maine, Montana, Vermont) that received a 'F', every U.S. state received some version of a 'D' in the latest edition of the National Council on Teacher Quality's State Teacher Policy Yearbook . In grading the states, the authors look at five broad teacher quality areas (and numerous metrics within them): teacher preparation, expanding the pool of teachers, identifying effective teachers, retaining effective teachers, and exiting ineffective teachers. While it is easy to poke holes at some of the National Council on Teacher Quality's seemingly ideologically-driven work (such as, I believe, its excessive focus on teacher pensions), much of its state policy analysis has a st...

The end of last year was a busy time for me as I waited out the birth of my daughter who decided to spend an extra 10 days lounging in utero before emerging into the Wisconsin winter. I was so focused on strategies to promote her exit (sidenote: talk about an area in need of better research-give gobs of data on live births for hundreds of years, docs still refuse to hazard a prediction of labor occurring on any given night!), I virtually shut out the world of higher education policy. Imagine! Thankfully, others were hard at work around and over the holidays, thinking about ways to make sure that the substantial, timely, and hard-won investment which will (fingers crossed) soon come to higher education via the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA) are most effective. Evidence of that work is contained in a December Lumina Foundation memorandum to the U.S. Department of Education, awkwardly (but accurately) titled "Structuring the Distribution of New Federal Higher Educ...

The Consortium for Chicago School Research just named a new Executive Director to replace John Easton who left to become director of the Institute for Education Sciences. CCSR made a wise choice in selecting Paul Goren , until now a senior VP at the Spencer Foundation. I've done a lot of work with CCSR over the last few years, and been enormously impressed with their staff. I've also had the chance to interact with Paul, and believe he'll fit right in. He's firmly committed to improving urban education, and is willing to ask the hard, insightful questions required to make that happen. Bravo, CCSR!

It's not often I agree with the Wall Street Journal editorial page, but I guess pigs are flying today. The WSJ 's take, in today's editorial (" Race To The Middle? "), on how the Race to the Top selection process should occur is on the mark: To qualify, Mr. Duncan said states had to, among other things, lift caps on charter schools and remove barriers to using student records to identify good teachers and reward them. He's also said that "there will be a lot more losers than winners." That's a good sign, but Mr. Duncan will be tempted to give more states less money in order to minimize political blow back and in the name of getting all states to make at least some, minimal progress. This is the Lake Wobegon school of education reform, where every state is above average.... But Race to the Top shouldn't be about rewarding a state for its grant-writing. It should use federal leverage to help remove barriers that stand in the way of state and l...

Today is the deadline for state applications in the first round of the Race to the Top grant competition. The easy prognostication to make is that the vast majority of the 39 states (and DC) that apply will have their initial applications rejected and all will reapply in round two, due in June. Most will fail then, too. Despite the publicly released application scoring rubric , it is difficult to know exactly how the application scoring will play out, based upon who the reviewers are, whether Gates Foundation consultant funding helped certain states frame more compelling applications, stated or implicit pressures to fund only a certain number of applications (especially in round one), the importance lent to district and union buy-in from an implementation and sustainability perspective, and the strength of big-state applications versus small-state applications. To the latter point, there's ONLY $4 billion to be spread around, and the largest states could suck up as much as $700 mi...

Sara and I were talking in the car yesterday on the way to a very good children's museum in Rockford, Ilinois and bemoaning the fact that our blog doesn't have much thoughtful or updated content. Now, we have a ready excuse for that: Annie . All I've been able to muster lately are some cursory Race to the Top updates . Nonetheless, our recent inclusion among the "Best Education Blogs for 2010" by the Washington Post 's Jay Mathews and Valerie Strauss puts us in the mindset of wanting to live up to our billing. Give us some time - and we'll deliver. -Liam