Great English teachers improve students’ math scores
Better English teachers not only boost a student’s reading and writing performance in the short term, but they also raise their students math and English achievement in future years. That’s according to a working paper, “Learning that Lasts: Unpacking Variation in Teachers’ Effects on Students’ Long-Term Knowledge,” by a team of Stanford University and University of […]
Teacher and school workplace injuries decline in 2012, but violent injuries increase
Teaching is not a particularly dangerous or injury-prone occupation, especially when compared with, say, nursing, policing or driving. But it is still interesting to see just how many workplace injuries teachers do suffer in the Bureau of Labor Statistics annual report on the nation’s workplace injuries. And people employed in education in public schools seem […]
Paying good teachers $20K to move to bad elementary schools works and is cheaper than reducing class sizes
A November 2013 Mathematica study conducted for the Institute of Education Sciences within the U.S. Department of Education shows that paying good teachers $20,000 to transfer to a low performing elementary school raised the test scores of students by 4 to 10 percentile points. No positive effect was found at the middle school level. Mathematica […]
Teach for America teachers found to be at least as effective as other math teachers
A new Institute of Education Sciences study conducted by Mathematica found that middle and high school math teachers from Teach For America and the TNTP Teaching Fellows programs were as effective as, and in some cases more effective than, other math teachers in the same schools. It’s a note-worthy finding because TFA teachers are often criticized […]
Education not as “pink” in the media as it is in the classroom
I was surprised to read on Jessica Bennett’s tumblr blog that male sources outnumber female sources on the front page of the New York Times, even on the subject of education. Technology, politics, sure. But shocking that there are 8 male sources for every 3 female ones, when 76 percent of teachers are female. As […]
More college degrees and higher pay among daycare workers, nannies and early childhood educators, says study.
The people who take care of our littlest children are better educated than they used to be and are seeing their paychecks rise. They’re also staying in the profession longer than childcare workers had in the past. That’s according to a paper, “The early childhood care and education workforce from 1990 through 2010: Changing dynamics […]
Low and incomplete marks for most prestigious teacher training programs
I was just starting to poke through the National Council on Teacher Quality’s first Teacher Prep Review, published June 2013, which makes a data-rich argument that the nation’s teacher training programs are admitting some of the weakest students in the nation and spewing out unprepared teachers at the end. I was struck by how few […]
New data on Australians who go into teaching
The Australian teaching system has long been revered in the United States. Even today Aussie is the biggest professional development consultancy in New York City. Back in Australia, the government is trying to use data to track the teaching profession more closely. A first annual data report on the teaching profession was recently released in […]
Not much educational data is yet improving classroom instruction
A May 28, 2013 blog post from the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation by Micah Sagebiel notes that after a decade of collecting and analyzing education data, since the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, that classroom instruction is no better for it. So far, all this education data has mostly been used for “accountability” purposes, […]
Data on teacher absenses, sick days and substitutes
On May 16, 2013, Choice Media, an online education news service that is critical of teachers unions, posted a provocative story, What’s Making Asbury Park Teachers Sick?. They collected data from a few New Jersey towns, through a Freedom of Information Act request, and found that Asbury Park’s teachers averaged more than 18 absences a […]
