June 6, 2019

Weekend Edu-Reads

By Bellwether

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There’s a new cohort of inspiring Pahara-Aspan Education Fellows.

“Put simply, LAUSD needs to stop spending more than it receives from the state and federal government,” warns the Los Angeles County of Education in the wake of a failed parcel tax. Reminder: This is the long-term fiscal picture LAUSD is facing.

We already knew there were large teacher quality gaps. On average, disadvantaged students get the worst teachers, no matter how you define “quality” or “disadvantage.” A new paper from Jason Grissom, Brendan Bartanen, and Hajime Mitani finds similar gaps in principal quality. They conclude that, “by virtually every quality measure, we find that schools serving larger fractions of low-income students, students of color, and low-achieving students are led by less qualified, less effective principals.”

When states give low ratings to early childhood programs, parents respond by voting with their feet, and the programs respond by making improvements. That’s exactly how things are supposed to work, yet we’re still debating whether “summative ratings” are a good idea or not.

This EdNext piece digging into the data on summer learning loss is really worth your time. Paul von Hippel found that the common narrative about summer learning loss is based on a test administered to 883 Baltimore first graders in 1982. Needless to say, things have changed since then, and newer, better tests don’t show the same summer slide.

In case anyone is curious, no one in my unscientific poll thought Joe Biden had the “the most energetically liberal presidential agenda in American history.” See here for context.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman 

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