After 11 years of litigation, Judge Thomas Moukawsher issued a seismic decision in the CCJEF school finance lawsuit. In the decision, Moukawsher not only eviscerated Connecticut’s school finance system, he also detailed flaws in the state’s approach to teacher evaluation, teacher compensation, the lack of clear definitions of success in elementary and secondary education, and gave the state 180 days to come up with a solution to all of it.
A really neat concept that reminds me of my time tracking method: Jenny Bryan, developer of the google sheets R package, gave a talk at Use2015 about the package. One of the things that got me most excited about the package was an example she gave in her talk of using the Google Sheets package for data collection at ultimate frisbee tournaments. One reason is that I used to play a little ultimate back in the day.
If there’s one common thread between Robin Lake relating The Boys in the Boat to schools, Neerav Kingsland on a recent charter study, and Robert Pondiscio on Hillbilly Elegy, it’s that culture plays a huge role in education. A new NBER Working Paper provides powerful evidence that it may be even more critical than was previously understood. The authors examine the performance of first and second generation immigrant students in Florida to understand the relationship between the “long-term orientation” of the cultures they come from to their educational outcomes.
Chad Aldeman on the delegation of policy making in ESSA: Congress was able to reach broad bipartisan agreement on ESSA mainly because it punted on a number of key policy questions. Any reading of ESSA leaves one wondering what exactly Congress meant when it asked states to “meaningfully differentiate” among schools, when it required that states give “substantial weight” to each indicator, or when it stipulated that academic indicators count for “much greater weight” than non-academic ones.
Five years ago, Marc Andressen took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to describe how software was “eating the world”: “More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services—from movies to agriculture to national defense. Many of the winners are Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurial technology companies that are invading and overturning established industry structures. Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software, with new world-beating Silicon Valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than not.