Monthly Blog Archives: March 2012

Morale in the teaching profession is at a 20-year-low, and too many schools across that nation are failing kids. For the sake of both students and teachers, states and districts must adopt a holistic and pragmatic approach to achievement-oriented rather than test-oriented learning.

Greg Smith’s much tweeted New York Times op-ed, “Why I am Leaving Goldman Sachs,” reminded me, once again, of how critical it is to keep the client at the center of a finance company’s business.

Understanding the nuance behind charter schools' “mixed results” has allowed the California Charter School Association to put together meaningful standards and policy recommendations to help ensure that more schools perform at the highest levels.

Education leaders must ensure that they have the plumbing in place to handle powerful new data and content tools. Otherwise, they run the risk of investing in tools and data sets that can’t communicate or connect with one another.

In the face of new state laws requiring that educators be held accountable for student performance data, shouldn’t schools of education and policy makers make every effort to ensure teachers are trained to use data to close student learning gaps?

The Spencer Foundation's recent initiative to kick start research into teacher's use of data seeks to take the data-in-education discussion beyond the “here's-the-data-now-improve” line of thinking.

I had the opportunity to visit the LEAP Science & Maths School in Cape Town, South Africa last July. The school was founded in 2004 by educator John Gilmour to provide a low-cost, high-quality education to some of South Africa’s most impoverished communities. LEAP offers small classes and small schools, double class time in key subjects like math, English and science, and values-focused life orientation classes.

Just as having a bathroom scale does not automatically guarantee you will get thinner, collecting data does not ensure its use.

Since 2009, the DC Public Charter School Board has closed 14 low performers. The board is now moving on to the next frontier: Coupling closure with the creation of new, better schools, streamlining the process for high performing schools to replicate and expand, and ensuring those schools grow into the neighborhoods most in need.