It’s happened hundreds of times. An audience of principals, superintendents and instructional coaches is shown a short videotape of a classroom lesson and asked to score it from 1 to 5. It would seem straightforward: The teacher is good, bad or somewhere in-between. But invariably, the scores come in all over the map, with high and low in fairly equal numbers. Having toured the United States with those videotapes, two leaders of the University of Washington’s Center for Educational Leadership conclude that most school leaders can’t identify or explain what constitutes good teaching, ... Read More
A’s and F’s for Charter Schools
October 23, 2010 • By •
The hope and the hype for a few charter schools, so grippingly portrayed in the new documentary, Waiting for Superman, are out of sync with national reports on the lackluster performance of charters overall. Recent studies across multiple states by Stanford University, the Rand Corporation and the U.S. Department of Education show that, on average, charter school students do no better or worse than their counterparts at traditional public schools in the same communities — unless they're poor. Low-income students generally learn more at charter schools, and higher-income students learn ... Read More
