By John Thompson. Learning from the Federal Market-based Reforms: Lessons for the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), edited by William Mathis and Tina Trujillo, details the numerous “opportunity costs” that resulted from a generation of test-driven, competition-driven reform. The money and energy devoted to …
By John Thompson. As test-driven, competition-driven school reform gets closer to scrap heap of history (at least in terms of improving schools), we will see more great journalists, such as Dana Goldstein, Dale Russakoff, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and Paul Tough document its failures. We can expect more analyses where …
By John Thompson. In 2014, National Public Radio’s Freakonomics Radio gave almost all of its program on “America’s education problem,” to three high-profile reformers, Joel Klein, Dave Levin, and John Freidman, who believe – or act like they believe – that education …
By John Thompson. In 2008, Tom Toch’s “Rush to Judgment” reviewed science-based alternatives to value-added teacher evaluations. Toch explained that the District of Columbia’s test-heavy IMPACT teacher evaluation system cost $1000 per teacher. For that price, we could have invested in …
By John Thompson. The education sector is plagued by “astroturf” think tanks that issue “reports” that repeatedly conclude that (surprise!) reform is working. To do so, pro-reform scholars cherry-pick data in order to provide attractive, multi-colored graphics that show an upward trajectory, or at least …
By John Thompson. Paul Tough’s Helping Children Succeed is a great corrective to the hubris that undermined the contemporary school reform movement. Tough volunteers a modest statement about his methodology, and in doing so he offers an alternative to corporate reform and its grand vision of “disruptive …
By John Thompson. My first response to “The Push and Pull of Research: Lessons from a Multi-site Study of Research Use in Education Policy,” by Christopher Lubienski, Elizabeth Debray, Janelle Scott, was clichéd. Being an optimist, I’ve kept asking why education research is misused so badly, and when smart …
By Anthony Cody. In recent weeks we have heard President Obama talk about the value of tests – even as he acknowledges that they have become too pervasive. President Obama suggested we should have tests that “enhance instruction,” and “enhance teaching and learning.” Unfortunately, the standardized …
By John Thompson. The good news is that graduation rates are improving across the nation (see this announcement from a few days ago.) The best news is that social science points the way to even greater progress. Ironically, corporate school reformers, who have focused obsessively on improving student …
By John Thompson. When Dale Russakoff conceived of The Prize, she “viewed education reform from a distance but as a movement full of promise.” She was eager to follow the story of Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million matching gift to the Newark schools. The subtitle of this invaluable book is, …