Can Early Teacher Evaluation Findings Help Change the Debate?
Over the past few years, states and school districts across the country have devoted significant resources to the design and roll-out of new teacher evaluation systems. Driven at least in part by requirements attached to…
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Leading Change in Education Reform Efforts
“A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.” —Lao Tzu Leading people through a process of change is…
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Do States Lack the Capacity for Reform?
Michael Usdan and Arthur Sheekey just wrote a great commentary on the complex and evolving relationship between federal policy, the State Education Agency, and the human capacity to get it all done. In their essay,…
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You Can’t Comply Your Way to Common Core Implementation
Forty-five states plus the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands have adopted the new Common Core State Standards (CCSS). The CCSS, developed by a state-led initiative, are intended to align instructional expectations across…
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Managing for Mastery
We have blogged about the topic of that last video post before, including a reference to Herzberg’s classic “One more time, what motivates employees?” And just like Herzberg, Daniel Pink points out that the three…
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Motivation Animation
Every once and a while that friend that sends you three forwards a day hits on something interesting. The other day, I received a link to a YouTube video from RSA that is a very…
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Predicting Crime with CompStat?
A great article in Slate from Christopher Beam highlights a CompStat program in Los Angeles which will begin to use predictive statistics alongside traditional CompStat figures. CompStat traditionally tracks a slate of common crime stats…
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CompStat and Campbell’s Law
As you may have seen in the news, The New York City Police Department is conducting a comprehensive review of its crime stats. Over the past months, reports have emerged that Precinct Commanders felt pressured…
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Don’t Cross the Streams
A quick report from the trenches. We’ve been working these past weeks in Rhode Island helping stand up their more complex projects with Race to the Top and to help them performance manage the many…
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Education Reform and Counter Insurgency
Our good friend Justin Cohen over at the “Turnaround Challenge” hit it spot on the in an entry on the relationship between good policy and good execution. Justin mentions a Matt Yglesias quote on (of…
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