I’m taking a break from end-of-semester madness to offer this mini-rant, inspired by a passage in this WP article, “Leading mathematician debunks value-added”: When value-added models were first conceived, even their most ardent supporters cautioned about their use [Sanders 1995, abstract]. They were a new tool that allowed us to make sense of mountains of …
Tag Archives: education reform
a state guaranteed education?
The first comments that struck me while reading Harry Brighouse’s interesting article, “What’s Wrong With Privatising Education?,” were the following, made in response to some arguments made by James Tooley in favor of privatizing schools: “Tooley himself sometimes endorses a principle that we might call the ‘Adequacy Principle’, that everyone has a right to a sufficiently …
what is the significance of the Independent Project?
This New York Times article has been getting quite a bit of attention this week: “Let Kids Rule the School.” It’s about The Independent Project, a undertaking of 8 high schoolers in Massachusetts, who spent a semester successfully planning and working through their own individual and group curricula. You can read a fuller summary of …
abolishing schools of education, or MacIntyre on the non-practice of education
Recently, someone brought to my attention this article on abolishing schools of education. The Center for College Affordability and Productivity argues that we should doubt the value of schools of education: holders of degrees in education do not seem to be any more effective at teaching than non-education majors, because the schools sometimes try to …
on the non-normativity of value-added analysis
As you are likely to have heard by now, the Los Angeles Times recently conducted and published a value-added analysis of some of the city’s elementary school teachers, using data that had been collected by the school district but never previously analyzed in this way. There was a nice summary of the value-added analysis and …
