Latest Blog Posts

It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's... Supersecretary!

July 30, 2010 at 9:28 am

Every time our earnest Secretary of Education speaks of late, he seems to unearth new things that Washington can and should do to schools. Earlier this month, he promised the NAACP that the administration would see that NCLB reauthorization required turnaround schools to obtain parent and community input as well as lead an "honest, open discussion." Of course, Duncan is ardently pushing "state-led" national standards and watching his Department of Education flag 19 (!) states as impressive enough to merit being Race to the Top finalists. Earlier in the year he promised Congress a billion dollar bonus if they reauthorized NCLB this year (though this one kind of ran afoul of the U.S. Constitution).

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Tackling That Stubborn Research-Policy Divide

July 29, 2010 at 9:56 am

Just spent the past couple days with a top-shelf group of young researchers that I hosted in a partnership with my good friends at the Fordham Institute. Together, we held the first gathering of the Emerging Education Policy Scholars (EEPS), which brought to D.C. about two dozen young scholars and thinkers to discuss how research does and should impact ed policy. Visiting with the fellows was a pretty neat roster of policy mavens, ed journalists, and reformers that included USA Today's Greg Toppo, Bellwether's Andy Rotherham, DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, Ed Week's Deb Viadero, ace Hill staffer David Cleary, former IES chief Russ Whitehurst, Department of Ed's Judy Wurtzel, ConnCAN's Marc Porter-Magee, and the Gates Foundation's Ebony Lee.

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Book Review: Bringing School Reform to Scale

July 28, 2010 at 4:43 pm

If you haven't yet read Heather Zavadsky's savvy 2009 Harvard Education Press book Bringing School Reform to Scale, it deserves a careful look. Zavadsky, who helped build out the Broad Prize methodology and spent several years elbow-deep in these districts, has penned a volume that offers up lessons from some of today's most admired systems. (Full disclosure: I've conflicts of interest all over the place here, as the book is part of my HEP series and I sit on the advisory board for the Broad Prize.)

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Should Conservatives Cuddle Up to the Common Core? My Take on the Finn-Petrilli v. Greene Debate

July 27, 2010 at 8:52 am

During the past week, my pals Checker Finn, Mike Petrilli, and Jay Greene have been sparring over the question of whether conservatives ought to embrace the Common Core standards. Petrilli and Finn have argued in a thoughtful National Review Online column that No Child Left Behind fueled an explosion of mediocre state standards, undermining accountability and reform. Greene has responded that there's good reason to believe that the Common Core won't deliver on its promises and that it will impose real costs. As usual, Joanne Jacobs and Alexander Russo have been all over this.

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Michelle Rhee Walks the Walk

July 26, 2010 at 9:42 am

On Saturday, the Washington Post's Bill Turque reported that D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee used the district's IMPACT evaluation system to terminate 165 teachers based on performance and identified another 737 as "minimally effective," giving them one year to improve. The usual carping is already evident and the Washington Teachers Union is grieving the firings.

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Books by Frederick M. Hess