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Showing posts from November, 2010

Diane Ravitch Responds to Bill Gates' Questions

Bill Gates has increasingly come to articulate the dominant narrative on education reform in the US. In this week's Newsweek he takes on Diane Ravitch and terms her his main adversary. Ravitch responds today in Valarie Strauss' Post Column to the questions Gates poses to her in Newsweek. Its a thought provoking interchange, particularly Ravitch's response.

Is DCPS's new IMPACT Evaluation System Rigged?

On November 1, Valarie Strauss invited Columbia Teachers College professor, Aaron Pallas to analyze just how the new IMPACT teacher evaluation system works and his simple description (here) is a shocker. It turns out that teachers are not being evaluated against a standard of good teaching, but rather against the student test score achievement of similarly situated teachers in DCPS. So half the