Last month I joined a team of UPD-ers and traveled around the state of Oklahoma training district-level trainers on Value-Added.  During one of the sessions, a participant raised his hand and asked our team how...
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The shooting last week at Sandy Hook Elementary School has prompted a great deal of debate across the country about gun control and access to mental health services.  The incident has also prompted increased scrutiny…
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I like numbers. Numbers are facts. My weight scale reading for today: 165 lbs. Numbers are objective and free of emotion. My pedometer tells me that I ran for three miles today. However, as objective…
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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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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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At a gala for the American Association of People with Disabilities in March, Education Secretary Arne Duncan affirmed the current administration’s commitment to maintaining high expectations for special education populations, noting that “students with disabilities…
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It seems simple, right?  Offer bonuses to teachers that bring big gains in student achievement, and you’ll get better performance out of your teachers.  But, a pack of studies over this past year seems to…
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In 2008, the Copenhagen Consensus Center asked a group of the world’s top economists to identify optimal social “investments” that could best help reduce malnutrition, broaden educational opportunity, slow global warming, cut air pollution, prevent…
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Analogies are important. While often imperfect, they help us make connections and better understand our world. That’s why I think it’s a shame the education field has yet to come up with good analogies for…
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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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