The highly-controversial New York City teacher value-added scores released last week are being presented by the New York Times with substantial margins of error. And in the end, understanding and reacting to margins of error is the essential challenge of teacher evaluation. Teaching, learning, and the interaction between them are incredibly complicated. As such, there’s […]
Kevin Carey
Kevin Carey directs the education policy program at New America.
Kevin is on Bluesky @kevincarey1.bsky.social and X @kevincarey1.
Posted inEducation, Higher Education
Federal Regulations are Not Making College More Expensive
A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to testify at a U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee hearing on innovations in higher education affordability. You can watch the video here. It was an interesting morning marred by a long discussion of an essentially bogus idea: that college keeps getting more expensive […]
Posted inEducation, Higher Education
Tenured Radical’s Strange Ideas About Policy
In the State of the Union and again in a speech at the University of Michigan last Friday, President Obama laid out a new higher education agenda. As I wrote at The New Republic, it’s an ambitious and welcome plan that’s important less for what policies are likely to pass Congress in an election year […]
Posted inPolitics
What To Think About That Big New Teacher Value-Added Study
Nicholas Kristoff wrote yesterday about the “landmark” new teacher value-added study from Raj Chetty, John Friedman and Jonah Rockoff. It’s worth being clear about why the study has garnered so much attention. It’s not because it shows that teachers matter. Everyone knew or believed that already. It’s because it shows that teachers vary in how […]
Posted inPolitics
The Art of Fielding and the End of Student Loan Default
My new Chronicle of Higher Education column makes the case for converting the entire federal student loan system to income-contingent repayment, administered by the IRS. To illustrate why this is a good idea, consider the recent Vanity Fair article (now an e-book) about the Chad Harbach’s debut novel, The Art of Fielding. In a nutshell, […]
Posted inPolitics
Selling College Students Down the River
One of the principal differences between K-12 and higher education is that people representing elementary and secondary teachers often go to elaborate lengths in denying the extent to which they’re pursuing a narrow self-interested agenda at the expense of student welfare and the public good, whereas in college they’re completely upfront about it. Two recent […]
Posted inEducation, Higher Education, Magazine, September/October 2011
The End of College Admissions As We Know It
Everything you’ve heard about getting in is about to go out the window.
Posted inPolitics
Dispatch from the Save Our Schools Rally
I went to the Ellipse on Friday to attend the SOS Rally and while I’m going to write something longer and more coherent about it over the next couple of days, here are some semi-random thoughts (and one video) in the meantime: I should have worn sunscreen. If you’re Linda Darling-Hammond and you’re going to […]
Posted inPolitics
Teacher Evaluation and the Triumph of Empiricism
A year ago, Adrian Fenty was the mayor of Washington, DC and Michelle Rhee was the chancellor of DC Public Schools. Rhee had made overhauling the DC system of teacher evaluation the centerpiece of her controversial and widely noted reforms. Instead of the standard system of seniority-based raises and nobody ever being fired for bad […]
Posted inEducation, Higher Education, July/August 2011, Magazine
The Trinity Sisters
Many of America’s most powerful women
went to a college you’ve never heard of.
