Tagk-12

Opportunity Scholarship voucher program is popular among NC voters

I’m interested in the OS, having coauthored an evaluation of the program. Support for the program is very strong, as is expansion of the program, even to families making less than $100,000 a year (data are from a February 2021 survey):

Source: Carolina Partnership for Reform

Please consider contributing to my legal fund for my free speech lawsuit against NC State.

Student passes 3 classes in four years, ranks near top half of class with 0.13 GPA!

Nope, public education isn’t broken at all. If this were a charter school, the Left would be screaming bloody murder about how the state should shut it down. But it’s a regular public school, so there is nothing to see here, just move along. A shocking discovery out of a Baltimore City high school, where Project Baltimore has found hundreds of students are failing. It’s a school where...

Almost a quarter-million teachers physically attacked in public schools

A record 220,300 public school teachers reported that they were physically attacked by a student during the 2015-2016 school year, according to a report jointly published this month by the National Center for Education Statistics and the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The data for 2015-16 comes from the NCES’s National Teacher and Principal Survey (NTPS). The data for previous school years going...

Restorative justice doesn’t seem to work

I’m amazed this is the first RCT for something so popular: Last week, the first randomized control trial study of “restorative justice” in a major urban district, Pittsburgh Public Schools, was published by the RAND Corporation. The results were curiously mixed. Suspensions went down in elementary but not middle schools. Teachers reported improved school safety, professional environment...

Genes explain as much variation in educational attainment as income

Over the past five years, Benjamin has been part of an international team of researchers identifying variations in the human genome that are associated with how many years of education people get. In 2013, after analyzing the DNA of 101,000 people, the team found just three of these genetic variants. In 2016, they identified 71 more after tripling the size of their study. Now, after scanning the...

More states opting to ‘robo-grade’ student essays by computer

“I’ve been working on this now for about 25 years, and I feel that … the time is right and it’s really starting to be used now,” says Peter Foltz, a research professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He’s also vice president for research for Pearson, the company whose automated scoring program graded some 34 million student essays on state and national...

If monopolies are bad, what about traditional public ed?

Many of my friends who defend public education are also the political type who are very worried about monopolies. They often point to the damage that companies with large market shares—think Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Google—can do. These friends point out how these companies’ large market presence allows them to squeeze out competitors, exploit employees, and hold customers captive. Those points, of...

Elon Musk also runs his own K-12 school

Ad Astra encompasses students, not employees. For the past four years, this experimental non-profit school has been quietly educating Musk’s sons, the children of select SpaceX employees, and a few high-achievers from nearby Los Angeles. It started back in 2014, when Musk pulled his five young sons out of one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious private schools for gifted children. Hiring one of his...

British students can no longer read a clock

Schools are removing analogue clocks from examination halls because teenagers are unable to tell the time, a head teachers’ union has said. Teachers are now installing digital devices after pupils sitting their GCSE and A-level exams complained that they were struggling to read the correct time on an analogue clock. Malcolm Trobe, deputy general secretary at the Association of School and College...

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Professor and quant guy. Libertarian turned populist Republican. Trying to learn Japanese and play Spanish Baroque music on the ukulele.

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