Any new teacher contract signed in Indiana must now include a system for evaluating teachers — and school districts are holding their breath, worried the whole thing could turn into fiasco. Their fears aren’t unfounded. Implementations of teacher evaluation systems this year in Tennessee, New York, and Florida have been troublesome. But research released this week argues evaluations are important [...]
Teachers aren’t held to rigorous standards, judging from the grades prospective teachers receive in college and their evaluations once they enter the classroom. So argues a new report, sponsored by the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, which specifically singles out Indiana University’s education department for giving out an overwhelming majority of its students A’s. (Sound familiar? As [...]
Do allegations of systematic cheating on standardized tests by administrators and teachers shows national education policy is “on the wrong track”? Just as we’ve investigated allegations of teacher cheating in Indiana, The Washington Post‘s Answer Sheet blog has been keeping tabs on the scandals making national news. Recently, guest blogger and education policy analyst for FairTest Lisa Guisbond [...]
June M. Reinisch, director emeritus of IU’s Kinsey Institute, shared this remembrance of former IU president John Ryan, who died Saturday at age 81, in the comments section of our post: Following in the footsteps of his mentor, the legendary President Herman B Wells, [i]t was the greatest period of growth and accomplishment for the Institute [...]
For this first time this year, a national organization that advises states on how to track students’ education has listed Indiana as having all 10 “Essential Elements” of good education data. When the Data Quality Campaign started its effort in 2005, no state’s data collection policies comprised all 10 elements — and Indiana’s only covered [...]
Indiana lawmakers who supported last session’s education overhaul have billed charter schools as a better alternative than the state’s public schools for teaching low-income students. But state test scores from spring 2011, used as a measure of student performance, show the opposite: Public school students have outperformed their charter school counterparts. Charter schools tend to [...]
Educators who leave troubled districts often shy away from public bridge-burnings. But on Sunday, Bill Kerlina, who’s leaving his job as an elementary principal in the Washington, D.C., Public Schools, aired his frustrations to the Washington Post, giving the public new insights on a district in the throes of reform. He says he’s leaving education [...]
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