- Teachers at “no-excuses” charter schools are widely thought to fit in a single, aggrieved category: twenty-two years old, working twenty-two hours a day, and earning $22,000 per year. It’s assumed that the exhausting daily schedule and prolonged school year, so crucial to the mission of lifting disadvantaged kids out of poverty, also ends up churning many depleted young educators out of the profession. But according to a new analysis from Education Week, that phenomenon may be overstated. The item, which builds on a more in-depth look published in the same outlet last month, points to Education Department data showing that charter teacher turnover dropped by 5.3 percent between the 2008–09 and 2012–13 school years—even while it ticked up slightly in traditional district schools. Imperfect collection methods and the sector’s rapid recent expansion make the signs hard to read, but this development certainly doesn’t qualify as bad news.
- And it’s not the only upbeat story this week. In an American nerd triumph worthy of the great Rick Moranis, Team American took gold in last week’s International Mathematical Olympiad for the first time since 1994. The scrappy team of adolescents who will someday employ us all edged out China’s juggernaut squad by the slimmest of margins. Sweet victory has already given rise to good old-fashioned jingoism (commentators have compared the magnitude of the upset to USA Hockey’s victory over the Soviets in the 1980 Olympics, which seems about right), but let’s not lose perspective when it comes to education: Gifted American kids are still being let down by slumping standards and insufficient attention in the classroom.
- Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the value-added debate, there’s been another flare-up of hostilities that will make you want to rate your entire life as “ineffective.” The three bad boys of teacher evaluation methodology—Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff, who gained a measure of notoriety testifying against California in the Vergara case and are commonly referred to as “CFR”—have released a new paper questioning the research assumptions of their frequent foil, Jesse Rothstein. In a nutshell, their response to Rothstein represents a defense of their earlier research on teacher switching, a phenomenon that they believe provides a quasi-randomized sample with which to compare one teacher’s performance to another’s. It’s a lot of information to parse, but 538’s Andrew Flowers does an excellent job elucidating the subject for all you non-social-scientists out there.
- Finally, in case you’ve still got an appetite for more recondite policy squabbles, we’ve got another one centered on the question of school finance and educational inequality. Over at Education Next, the Hoover Institute’s Erik Hanushek takes down the findings of a new paper that has concluded that a 22.7 percent spending increase would suffice to eliminate the average school attainment gap between poor and non-poor families. As Hanushek mentions, education funding has risen way higher than that since 1970, and we’re still stuck complaining about the gulf between the haves and have-nots. The paper’s authors have issued their own response to some of Hanushek’s critiques, but we’re hard-pressed to believe that simply throwing more money around will make much of a dent in what he rightly calls “a large and frustratingly-resilient average attainment gap” between the classes.
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