Five Best Blogs: Doing The "SIG Shuffle"

Teacher turnover and the stress of reform LAT (editorial page): It's unlikely that we can build large-scale school reform on a platform of continual new demands on teachers-- even if schools find ways to pay them better. 

Pa. Joins States Facing a School Cheating Scandal NYT (Winerip): A large data file contains evidence that suggests cheating on state exams at 89 Pennsylvania schools.

Inexcusable Inequalities! SF101: I’m sick of those who would so absurdly argue that districts serving low-income and minority children really have more than enough money to deliver good programs. 

SIGnificant Concerns Title I-Derland: In my opinion, the biggest problem with SIG is not capacity, but buy-in. 

Shuffle has no love from us Quick & Ed: Central High, the school that received the "lemons", saw its achievement nearly double.

Comments

[Bruce]

A major problem with the Gates-Duncan argument resides in how they define "success" in school systems. One frequently finds reference to the combination of high test scores and large classes in Asian countries such as Korea and Japan. But PISA, the source of the most oft-cited tests, doesn't test writing, and the students there don't learn to write in any way that we would regard as admirable in the United States. So the strategy of eliminating the jobs of weak teachers and pouring more students into the classrooms of purported highly achieving teachers won't work in this respect; instead, the result might be higher education classrooms extremely overcrowded with students who have never learned to write or to argue in a way resembling that expected in college.