EDUCATION NEWS

A vital investment: School advocates seek to change attitudes on education spending – Arizona Capitol Times, 10/24/11 (registration required)
Arizona women in a position to influence public policy in education are passionate about the programs they oversee and the students they guide, but inevitably it all comes down to money.  Three such women — Susan Carlson, Bobette Sylvester and LuAnn Leonard — come from varied backgrounds and approach the task of maintaining and improving classroom standards and results with somewhat different suggestions. Yet, they agree that adequately funding education must not be considered an expense, but an investment.  Read more>

The Steve Jobs Model for Education Reform – The Wall Street Journal | Opinion, 10/15/11
These days everyone is for education reform. The question is which approach is best. I favor the Steve Jobs model.  In 1984 Steve introduced the Mac with a Super Bowl ad. It ran only once. It ran for only one minute. And it shows a female athlete being chased by the helmeted police of some totalitarian regime.  Read more>

Revamped ratings surprising for many Arizona schools – The Arizona Republic, 10/12/11
Some of Arizona's best schools will be busy explaining to parents why they received only a B or C under Arizona's new letter grades for rating schools.  Read more>

Education advocates push for improved statewide database – The Arizona Capitol Times, 10/11/11 (registration required)
Even as initiatives to increase school accountability go into effect, Arizona lacks an effective database for tracking teacher performance and student achievement. And education officials say the state has a long way to go before it can even manage data in a meaningful way.  Read more>

Lawmakers, administrators consider new school assessment methods to save money – The Arizona Capitol Times, 10/6/11 (registration required)
With classroom spending in Arizona schools at a historic low, lawmakers and school administrators have turned their attention to standardizing student and teacher assessments as a way to cut expenses and improve student achievement.  Read more>

SPECIAL REPORTS

Our Future, Our Teachers: The Obama Administration’s Plan for Teacher Education Reform and Improvement – U.S. Dept of Education
In the next 10 years, 1.6 million new teachers will be needed to take the place of teachers who will retire. Many of these educators will pass through traditional teacher preparation programs. While there are many good teacher education programs in this country, far too many of the programs that prepare our teachers are inadequate. Improving these programs is essential to ensuring our nation's students receive the education they deserve.  Read the Obama Administration's plan for improving teacher recruitment and preparation. Download PDF report>

Estimating the Impact of the American Jobs Act – The Education Commission of the States (ECS)
An estimate on the impact of the American Jobs Act, including a state-by-state estimate;  for Arizona, the projected total funding would be $607 million, creating or saving over 10,000 jobs.  Download PDF report>

The Global Report Card:  Compares U.S. students against international counterparts - George W. Bush Institute's Education Reform Initiative
Ever wonder how your public school district stacks up when compared to the rest of the world? What about how your district compares to your state or even the nation?  The Global Report Card was designed to compare student achievement levels within the nearly 14,000 U.S. school districts against the achievement in 25 developed countries. The report card shows that in 2007, the 50 wealthiest school districts ranked behind nearly half of their international counterparts on average. Read more>

Roadmap For Reform: Digital Learning Now! – Foundation for Excellence in Education
This document provides Governors, lawmakers and policymakers with tangible steps to transform education into a model for the world, a system where every student graduates from high school with the skills and knowledge to succeed in college and careers.  Based on the framework established by the 10 Elements of High Quality Digital Learning, the roadmap defines 72 explicit measures that, when taken as a whole, will transform education for the digital age.  Read more>

STEM – Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce
This new report shows that 65 percent of Bachelor’s degrees in STEM (science, engineering, technology and mathematics) occupations earn more than Master’s degrees in non-STEM occupations. Similarly, 47 percent of Bachelor’s degrees in STEM occupations earn more than PhDs in non-STEM occupations. Furthermore, even people with only STEM certificates can earn more than people with non-STEM degrees; for instance certificate holders in engineering earn more than Associate’s degree-holders in business and more than Bachelor’s degree-holders in education. However, the report finds that of out of every 100 students with a Bachelor’s degree, 19 graduate with a STEM degree but only eight are working in STEM occupations ten years after graduation.  Read more>

The Effect of Charter Schools on Student Achievement: A Meta-Analysis Of The Literature – Center on Reinventing Public Education
Charter schools are largely viewed as a major innovation in the public school landscape, as they receive more independence from state laws and regulations than do traditional public schools, and are therefore more able to experiment with alternative curricula, pedagogical methods, and different ways of hiring and training teachers.  Assessing literature that uses either experimental (lottery) or student-level growth-based methods, this report infers the causal impact of attending a charter school on student performance. Focusing on math and reading scores, there is compelling evidence that charters under-perform traditional public schools in some locations, grades, and subjects, and out-perform traditional public schools in other locations, grades, and subjects.  Download PDF Report>