My recent piece for Brookings on school malpractice is here. I was not envisioning that having lawyers filing lots of lawsuits will help to improve education directly.  But having some suits be successful might improve education, and possibly by a lot. Having to meet standards for what it means to educate children successfully will […]

The Institute of Education Sciences released this second report on the impacts of the DC ‘Opportunity Scholarship Program.’  Little action in reading but a negative impact for math, echoing the finding from the first report. Students who were offered scholarships (about 60 percent used their scholarship to attend private schools for the full two years) […]

I posted this piece in the Brookings ‘Evidence Speaks’ series. The issue is whether the announced gains in high school graduation rates result from more students actually completing high school, or whether schools put diplomas in the hands of some students and pushed them out the door. What we are learning from investigations in […]

I posted this piece in the Brookings ‘Evidence Speaks’ series. The question is why so much accountability in K-12 education focuses on how teachers are performing–their students’ test scores, their classroom observations, their ratings–when most of the real decisions in K-12 education affecting classrooms are made by administrators.  The lack of balance means teachers […]

My post in the Brookings ‘Evidence Speaks’ series on accumulating evidence of negative effects of private school vouchers. Four recent studies in three states and DC, all with the same outcome. It’s rare when evidence is so unified.

I wrote this piece for a conference on ‘scaling up’ at Vanderbilt in October 2015. Scaling up essentially uses knowledge gained in one context or several related contexts and casts it more broadly to other and larger contexts. There’s more to it of course, but the question is whether what works in one locale, for […]

I posted this piece in March 2017 as part of the Brookings ‘Evidence Speaks’ series. The piece contrasts the negligible results of a massive Federal infusion of funds for school improvement and recent studies that have measured how equalizing spending within states affected student outcomes.

The upshot is that money does matter, but going […]

I posted this piece back in December 2016 as part of the ‘Evidence Speaks’ series for Brookings. Teacher observations take a lot of time and energy, but as I argue in the piece, what we’ve measured to date suggests we are observing teaching in ways that do not connect to student learning. Enjoy.

My recent post on comparability and Title I is here.  Researchers have cautioned that correlations at high levels of aggregation do not need to be true at lower levels of aggregation, and can even reverse, Simpson’s paradox. And so we found with spending on teachers. When data are analyzed in the aggregate, it appears […]

My post here on recent research showing private-school vouchers in Louisiana and Indiana had negative effects on test scores. We should pay attention to unexpected results like this.