GreatBigBlog

Here's what educators, advocates, wonks and policymakers are talking about today:

News & analysis

Failure rate of schools overstated, study says
When the Obama administration was seeking to drum up support for its education initiatives last spring, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told Congress that the federal law known as No Child Left Behind would label 82 percent of all the nation’s public schools as failing this year. Skeptics questioned that projection, but Mr. Duncan insisted it was based on careful analysis. Now a new study, scheduled for release on Thursday, says the administration’s numbers were wildly overstated. The study, by the Center on Education Policy, a Washington research group headed by a Democratic lawyer who endorses most of the administration’s education policies, says that 48 percent of the nation’s 100,000 public schools were la...

The Washington Post reported last week that parents and community activists  in Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia have will have new access to vital figures like test-score growth over time, graduation rates, and evidence that schools are preparing students for college and career.

This is great news. For me, “data” means much more than a set of numbers for reporting to the government or complying with regulations. I think of data as information that teams of dedicated educators can use to make their efforts more effective. Not data use for data’s sake, but for students’ sake. One school at a time, sometimes even one student at a time.

Let me offer an example from my own kids’ school district.  Washington-Lee High School, in Arlington, Va., is widely seen as a good school. It has a robust offering of advanced courses, including both Advanced Placement and Internat...