Welcome to Ohio Education Gadfly’s newest section, “Editor’s Extras,” where you can catch up on important education news that you might have missed over the past two weeks.
Editor’s Extras
- The Ohio School Funding Advisory Council, the 28-member panel tasked with recommending how to improve the evidence-based funding model, met for the first time last week. See Gongwer’s coverage of its first meeting, and a Columbus Dispatch editorial exploring who’s on the panel and why they might be inclined to spend more.
- The U.S. Department of Education is challenging states to develop a “common assessments” model that can be used to evaluate student performance in alignment with common standards. Be sure to check out Fordham President Chester E. Finn, Jr.’s National Review Online piece describing how federal dollars could accelerate the development of a mandatory, national-scale test.
- How do grit and perseverance measure up as predictors of teacher success? This piece from The Atlantic explores Teach For America’s efforts to evaluate teachers and to determine which attributes (education level, experience with low-income students, or even “grit and perseverance”) best explain some teachers’ ability to lead students to dramatic gains in test scores over the course of a single year.