"In the United States, education is mostly viewed as a private effort leading to individual good. The performances of individual students and teachers are therefore in the center of the ongoing school reform debate. By contrast, in Finland, education is viewed primarily as a public effort serving a public purpose. As a consequence, education reforms in Finland are judged more in terms of how equitable the system is for different learners. This helps to explain the difference between the American obsession with standardized testing and the Finnish fixation on each school’s ability to cope with individual differences and social inequality. The former is driven by excellence, the latter by equity."

"To begin, we hear continually that the ticket to prosperity is education; we will “educate ourselves into a better economy.” Yet there are a lot of educated people who are not prospering. The problem isn’t education, but the absence of jobs, or the cutting of jobs. And a huge category of job loss has been public sector employees as states slash budgets. Then there is the push to get people from non-education careers into teaching, something this fellow did. Yet there is also in educational reform and policymaking a valuing – though not explicitly stated – of youth over experience."

"Put yourself in an Eighth Grade geometry (a high level of mathematics for that age) teacher's shoes for a minute. Your kids will be taking a test that mostly covers content from last year. Your livelihood is on the line. Your ability to pay your mortgage is predicated not on your kids' abilities to pass a test in this year's content, but on last year's content.

What are you going to do? Push them ahead? Or make damn well sure they "grow" on a test based on what they did the previous year?"

"In any introductory statistics course, you learn that a graph like the one below is a textbook case of “no correlation”. I had Excel draw a line of best fit anyway, and calculate an r-squared correlation coefficient. Its value? 0.057 — once again, just about as close to zero correlation as you are ever going to find in the real world.

In plain English, what that means is that there is essentially no such thing as a teacher who is consistently wonderful (or awful) on this extremely complicated measurement scheme. How teacher X does one year in “value-added” in no way allows anybody to predict how teacher X will do the next year. They could do much worse, they could do much better, they could do about the same.

Even I find this to be an amazing revelation. What about you?

And to think that I’m not making any of this up. (unlike Michelle Rhee, who loves to invent statistics and “facts”.)"

"As a teacher of education research, I wasn’t so successful yesterday.  I failed at convincing my class (at least, a vocal group of students in my class) that there is some value in expert teaching, that it’s something to be developed and valued.  What I worry is that these are not just the thoughts of a few undergraduates.  How many more people think that it’s easy to learn to be a teacher?  How many other adults, voting citizens, even members of school boards agree with my students — that expert teaching is not that much better than effective teaching, so hiring a bunch of young, smart kids to teach is good enough?"

"In conducting the study, the researchers found more pronounced economic problems in cities most vulnerable to the rise of low-wage Chinese manufacturing; these include San Jose, Calif.; Providence, R.I.; Manchester, N.H.; and a raft of urban areas below the Mason-Dixon line — the leading example being Raleigh, N.C. “The areas that are most exposed to China trade are not the Rust Belt industries,” Autor says. “They are places like the South, where manufacturing was rising, not falling, through the 1980s.”

All told, as American imports from China grew more than tenfold between 1991 and 2007, roughly a million U.S. workers lost jobs due to increased low-wage competition from China — about a quarter of all U.S. job losses in manufacturing during the time period."

"One of the most annoying stances of the Sensible Centrist Very Serious People crowd is that even though they are dominant force in Washington, despite not having any real constituency, they imagine themselves to be an extremely brave oppressed minority speaking truths that nobody else dares. Except for every damn day on every page of every one of our national newspapers."

"To say “tread carefully” and “proceed with care” after three decades of steel-toed boots stomping of public schools, not to mention, the transfer of an audit culture soaked in high tech from the corporate sector to national educational policy is, well, almost funny. It is, at the least,  a disappointing end to  such a clear laying out of the assumptions embedded in the reigning “tough love” reform ideology in which Mike Petrilli has been a card-carrying member."