She’s starting a charter school, Alhambra College Prep, that will aim to give students a chance to earn college credits while in high school.

The decision stopped short of dismissing the case but could hand back to Arizona lawmakers the power to determine how much is spent on English instruction and how such students are taught.

The majority decision quoted research by Hoover fellow Eric Hanushek and school finance lawyer Alfred Lindseth, authors of the just-published Schoolhouses, Courthouses and Statehouses, which argues that court-ordered funding hasn’t boosted achievement.  The minority opinion quoted the opposing views of Michael Rebell of Teachers’ College Columbia.  

Education Next asks Hanushek and Rebell to discuss: Is there a link between school spending and student achievement? What’s the court’s role?

Hanushek and Lindseth argue for more effective use of education dollars:

Since about 1970, the achievement levels of U.S. students on the reading and math tests of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) have remained largely flat despite massive financial and other efforts to improve them. The problem is particularly acute for poor and minority students, with the average black and the average Hispanic student lagging three or four grade levels behind the average white student.

The solution we need lies in performance-based funding: a system of integrated education policies and funding mechanisms designed to drive and reward better performance by teachers, administrators, students, and others involved in the education process.

Rebell responds that courts must ensure “meaningful educational opportunities for all children.”

 The evidence strongly indicates that money well spent does make a significant difference in student achievement.

What is most likely to fulfill the promise of improved student outcomes in the future is not any silver bullet remedy, but rather a pragmatic process that allows courts, legislatures, state education departments, and school districts to work collaboratively to focus on children’s needs and to implement meaningful reforms on a sustained basis.

How do we get “money well spent” vs. more money spent the same old way that hasn’t worked well before?

The science and geography maps provide educators with teacher-created models of how 21st century skills can be infused into instruction and highlight the critical connections between science, geography and 21st century skills such as critical thinking, problem solving and communication.

There’s no content, complains Common Core. Instead, P21 explains that learning skills is more important than “acquiring information” and “assessing to learn what students do not know.” 

So, under P21’s plan, students will learn less and their knowledge gaps will go undetected. 

Common Core also wonders how students can learn from the suggested activities if they haven’t acquired any information.

The fourth-grade science activity is light on science:

 Students in the class role-play citizens in a town meeting where members of the community express different points of view about a local issue, such as the location of a new school, building a bypass for traffic, or a re-zoning of downtown to be “pedestrian only” without vehicles, etc.

Eighth-grade science focuses on how a citizen evalutes scientific claims, not how to be a scientist. Most of us will be, at best, informed citizens, but what about the students who want to do science?

Students view video samples from a variety of sources of people speaking about a science-related topic (e.g., news reporters, news interviews of science experts, video podcasts of college lectures, segments from public television documentaries, or student-made videos of parents and professionals in their community). Students rate the videos on the degree to which the person sounded scientific…

A proposed 12th-grade geography activity asks students to conduct a survey to ”test the law of retail gravitation (i.e., the number of visits a resident makes to competing shopping centers is inversely proportional to the distances between residence and center and proportional to the size of the center).” That is, people will travel longer distances to visit a large shopping center with many choices than to go to a small shopping center.

Given the percentage of young Americans who can’t find Iraq and Iran on a map — much less tell the difference between them — mastery of retail geography seems a bit esoteric.

I wonder if Duncan had prepared his seemingly ad-libbed line for when the booing started: “You can boo, but don’t throw any shoes, please.” And I’m pretty sure most of the delegates had gotten their vocal chords ready, too.

. .  . Also, large parts of the speech seemed to key directly off of the stimulus legislation. When Duncan talked about seniority putting some teachers in schools and classrooms they’re not prepared for, well, that gets to the equitable-distribution-of-teachers language in the stimulus.When he talked about the poor state of evaluations, well, that lines up to the language that will require states and districts to report the number and percentage of teachers scoring at each performance level on local evaluation instruments.

On Flypaper, Andy Smarick gives the speech a good review, with special praise for this: 

A recent report from the New Teacher Project found that almost all teachers are rated the same. Who in their right mind really believes that?

 Test scores alone should never drive evaluation, compensation or tenure decisions. That would never make sense. But to remove student achievement entirely from evaluation is illogical and indefensible.

Teachers also booed a mention of Green Dot, says Eduwonk, who compares that to hating Santa Claus.

Education Sector is hosting an online discussion of teachers’ work and teachers’ unions. 

Liz Pulliam Weston, an MSN financial columnist, writes:

Graduate school has traditionally been a great place to wait out recessions while honing your skills for a better job. But sometimes, the payoff doesn’t justify the cost.

Community college significantly boosts earnings. Bachelor’s degrees also pay off, especially if earned at a lower-cost public university.  Medical and law degrees are expensive but lead to much higher earnings.

Not such a slam dunk: Master’s degrees.

In some fields, such as business or engineering, a graduate degree typically boosted income by more than enough to justify the cost. In others — the liberal arts and social sciences, in particular — master’s degrees didn’t appear to produce much if any earnings advantage.

Degree inflation makes the master’s more useful, writes Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, president emeritus and professor of public services at George Washington University.

In a bad job market does it make sense for students to seek a safe harbor and earn a master’s degree? Absolutely: if they can afford it; if the debt from their previous academic work is not too great; if someone else is paying; if they seek to reinvent themselves. If, if …

The consensus view: Look before you borrow money.

A portion of the grant goes toward paying teachers of Advanced Placement courses bonus money if they successfully recruit more students to take AP courses and if the students perform well on the end-of-the-year AP exam.

Students also would have received cash payments of $100 for every AP course they passed.

Bernadette Marso, outgoing president of the Leominster Education Association, said the union objected to “pay for performance.”

The grant also would have covered half of students’ costs for the AP exam and paid for professional development for teachers.

Via EIA Intercepts.

All we parents get to see on the website is fluff, peripheral material, and educational mumbo jumbo about “seeds“, “clarifications“, “sample assessments“, “thinking skills“, “Articulated Instruction Modules“, “Core Learning Goals toolkits“, “parent summaries” that don’t exist yet, and so on. And this comes in an Alice-in-Wonderland format that is impossible to skim in an efficient way.

Do other school districts make it hard for parents to access the curriculum?

In an interview, Balls told parents:

“If your child starts to fall behind, we should step in straight away and give one-to-one or small group tuition.”

 But there’s a kicker:

In return, parents will be under new obligations to support their child at school. They will have to sign stricter home school agreements and face fines of up to £1,000, enforced by the courts, if they fail to meet the conditions.

Like Core Knowledge Blog, I wonder about enforcement. What happens to the fines when the parents have no money? For that matter, can Britain really afford tutors for all students who fall behind?