Millot: Ed Week's Story on Toch's Sweating v. EdSector's Growing

My series on Sweating v. Growing will proceed as planned for next week, but in the meanwhile.....

Debra Viadero's article in today's online edition of Education Week (Study Casts Doubt on Strength of Charter Managers) is worth reading if you are trying to determine the extent to which EdSector manipulated Tom Toch's Sweating draft, and whether it makes any difference. The gap was wide enough for Toch to disown EdSector's authorless Growing report, but Edsector argues that "the sort of editing process it went through would not be something out of the ordinary."

All I can say is that every research analyst should hope it is extraordinary, because if what has happened to EdSectors co-founder and co-director is the ordinary course of business in education policy research, the ordinary staff member is little more than an intellectual serf.

Millot: Read Toch's CMO Report Here

Education Sector’s November 24 report, Growing Pains: Scaling Up the Nation’s Best Charter Schools examines the problems CMOs face trying to replicate their various philosophies of teaching and learning in new public schools. Considering the source, the content and conclusion are predictable and deserve little attention: While each CMO faces operational problems, the concept’s success is more a matter of removing charter advocates’ longstanding list of government barriers – inadequate per pupil payments, a lack of access to facilities or financing, etc, etc.

Yet, the report demands close review - because it’s real author, content and conclusions have gone missing. Until now.

SPED: Insufficient Laws Governing School Restraints

Schools restrain disabled children all the time, according to this post from ProPublica, but the state laws governing what restraints are allowed and whether parents should be notified are uneven and often lacking -- and students have been hurt or even killed due to restraints in schools.  (Lack of Regs for Restraint of Disabled Children). 

Fewer than half the states even have laws addressing the use of restraints, and those that do are often full of gaps.  "About 40 percent of states have no law concerning restraint and seclusion in schools. Fewer than half of states ask schools to notify parents when children are restrained or placed in isolation, and 90 percent of states allow face-down restraints."

INTERNET: Do Online Search Tools Improve Research Or Just Narrow It?

Online research over-emphasizes a small set of recent popular research at the expense of older, more diverse studies, according to this Boston Globe article (Group think):  "Leafing through print journals or browsing the stacks can expose researchers to a context that is missing in the highly targeted searches of PubMed or PsychInfo...Social Science Research Network (SSRN), the widely used Internet resource, offers lists of "top papers," "top authors," and "top institutions."