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Education
January 23, 2015

Is it Time to Rethink State Boards of Education?

Some political officials (Governor Sandoval of Nevada) and self-described policy wonks (Fordham Institute staff) are calling into question the usefulness of locally elected local school boards.  Governor Sandoval suggested replacing them with governor-appointed boards, while Fordham has argued for years against locally...
Education
January 9, 2015

Don’t Waste the Crisis over Common Core

The entire Common Core project is rapidly going south, and within two years may be no more than a dim memory of a nightmare in the minds of a growing army of angry parents and teachers from coast to coast. Before this...
Education
January 7, 2015

Arne Duncan, fiction writer

News flash for Washington watchers!  Now we know what Arne Duncan will do once his service as US Education Secretary comes to an end.  In the Boston Globe on Monday, he demonstrated a flair for fiction, with a panegyric to Gov. Patrick’s stewardship...
Education
December 29, 2014

Thoughts on what everyone hates talking about (testing)

No one wants to talk about testing except the people that want to get rid of it.  Which leaves the field of debate on a critical aspect of education reform in pretty partial hands. Above all other states, Massachusetts should understand the important role of standardized testing....
Education
December 28, 2014

Steps for States to Follow to Replace Common Core

To help out governors and state legislatures that really want to get state-tailored standards close to the quality of the pre-2010 Massachusetts and California standards–or the Indiana 2006 standards–I have provided an outline of the steps or procedures a state legislature could...
Education
December 26, 2014

Common Core’s standards can be replaced by first-rate standards overnight

In a funny story in the Washington Post on December 24, 2014, Mike Petrilli and Michael Brickman (experts on nothing at all) claim that it will not be easy to replace Common Core’s standards with something better. They even go so far...
Education
December 26, 2014

How to Make Common Core Useful?

What could be done to make the idea of a common core across 50 states make sense in this country?  I finally have come up with what could be the solution that Governor Huckabee simply missed.  We need to relabel them high...
Education
December 23, 2014

How to Maintain the Massachusetts “Education Miracle”

Not by using Common Core-based standards and tests, for sure, or anything that looks like them. The English language arts and mathematics standards dumped by the Governor Patrick-appointed Board of Elementary and Secondary Education in July 2010 are nothing like Common Core’s...
Education
November 20, 2014

Jeb Bush's Rhetoric and Reality on Common Core

Pioneer Institute respects Governor Jeb Bush’s education reform accomplishments in Florida and even honored him at a 2010 event.  Unfortunately, at today’s opening of the Foundation for Excellence in Education National Summit on Education Reform, held in Washington, D.C., Governor Bush continues...
Education
November 3, 2014

How Colleges Are Dumbing Our Kids Down, Too, and What We Can Do About It

It’s not just Common Core’s standards and the curriculum teachers are putting into place to address those standards that are dumbing our kids down.  Our colleges are contributing in their own way to the problem by the books they assign incoming freshmen...