There is a small community that closely watches the various school finance court cases that are always creating background noise for education policy discussions. This community was rewarded last week with a new decision from the Kansas Supreme Court. Importantly, its decision in Gannon v. Kansas potentially signals a new direction for these cases. Instead of deciding whether or not the Kansas legislature had dedicated sufficient funds to its local schools, it chose to highlight the importance of student outcomes. Virtually all court cases have a long history, and this is no exception.

Policymakers and reform advocates alike have rallied around introducing a set of national content standards, suggesting that this will jump start the stagnating achievement of U.S. students. As history clearly indicates, simply calling for students to know more is not the same as students actually knowing more.

A little more than a decade ago we embarked on what is arguably the most significant change in educational policy of the past half century – the introduction of No Child Left Behind. While many states had already introduced some form of test-based accountability by 2001, NCLB both made this mandatory for all states and introduced a very specific structure to accountability that importantly included consequences for schools that did not perform well. I always viewed this as an experiment representing the best guesses of President George Bush and the U.S.

Over a five week period in early 2013, there were a series of exchanges with Deborah Meier about accountability, testing, personnel evaluation, and salaries. The sequence of posts is provided here, along with a link to the responses by Deborah Meier. February 26, 2013Is It 2007 Yet? While many states had already introduced some form of test-based accountability by 2001, NCLB made this mandatory for all states and introduced a very specific structure to accountability that importantly included consequences for schools that did not perform well.

For almost 50 years, the United States and a number of other countries have periodically participated in international math and science assessments. Until quite recently, little attention has been given to the fact that U.S. students have never performed very well on these tests. With, however, attention from Secretary Duncan and others, awareness has been elevated, leading to broader discussions not only of how to interpret the apparently mediocre scores of U.S.

Are Video Games the Learning Tools They’re Cracked Up To Be? Three facts about educational video games—and educational technology more generally—are important to consider as we look at their current use and impact. First, video games, educational and otherwise, show that clever technologies can attract and hold the attention of users and can teach them a variety of sophisticated thinking patterns. Second, educational games have made little dent in education.

Recent school reform talk has focused importantly on teacher evaluations and on using evaluations for personnel decisions – both positive and negative. But this discussion is almost always too narrow. We should never focus exclusively on teacher evaluations without also including administrator evaluations. Parallel attention to administrator evaluations is essential for two reasons. First, it appears that principals have a very significant impact on student outcomes that cannot be ignored as we attempt to improve our schools.

When asked to propose ways to deal with budget cuts, the National Park Service famously proposed closing the Washington Monument, and this tactic of choosing the most egregious conceivable action as a way of forestalling budget cuts is enshrined in budgeting lore. But now California is moving rapidly to displace this symbol of governmental malfeasance with a much more harmful ploy: If you will not give the money we want for schools, we will close them down.

The importance of economic growth for the economic well-being of countries is well-recognized throughout Latin America, but the long term history of development in the region has been almost uniformly disappointing. Moreover, while the causes of this lagging growth have been the subject of dispute with various economists pointing to such factors as political instability, international trade policy, monetary instability, and the like, recent analysis by Ludger Woessmann and me suggests a very straightforward explanation.

International Benchmarking of Student Achievement Eric Hanushek There has been considerable discussion about the advantages of benchmarking the performance of American students in various states and localities to international tests. In simplest terms, this is something we should support because it would provide new and important information to both states and localities. This new information would also provide added impetus to the imperative to improve our schools. The U.S.