Month: December 2024

Education Exchange Replay: How to Reduce Chronic Absenteeism – by Education Next

On Aug. 12, 2019, Todd Rogers, Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, sat down with Paul E. Peterson to discuss a new study that looks to curb chronic absenteeism through randomized experiments. Rogers and Carly Robinson wrote the article “How to Tackle Student Absenteeism” for Education Next. Rogers and Avi Feller wrote the paper  “Reducing...

Where Did Charter Schools Come From? by Chester E. Finn, Jr.

Next month marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the enactment of America’s first charter school law, which Minnesota Governor Arne Carlson signed on June 4, 1991. This statute birthed a sector that has become not just a source of new schools for kids who need them, but also a structural reform of public education’s governance and delivery systems. It’s as close as K–12 schooli...

Carter’s Winning 1976 Platform for Education Backed “Parental Freedom in Choosing”

The education policy legacy for which President Jimmy Carter, who died yesterday at age 100, is best known is almost certainly the creation of the federal Department of Education. Congress created that department in 1979 after a push by Carter to fulfill a campaign promise to the National Education Association, which had helped to get him elected. Less well known, but ...

Test Score Gains Predict Long-Term Outcomes, So We Shouldn’t Be Too Shy About Using Them by Education Next

Editor’s note: This post is the sixth and final entry in an ongoing discussion between Fordham’s Michael Petrilli and the University of Arkansas’s Jay Greene that seeks to answer this question: Are math and reading test results strong enough indicators of school quality that regulators can rely on them to determine which schools should be closed and which shou...

The Don’t Do It Depository – by Morgan S. Polikoff

We have known for quite a while that schools engage in all manner of tricks to improve their performance under accountability systems. These behaviors range from the innocuous—teaching the content in state standards—to the likely harmful—outright cheating. A new study last week provided more evidence of the unintended consequences of another gaming behavior—reassigning teacher...