Jill Barshay

This Inside Higher Ed piece by Libby Nelson explains the new push in Washington to create a national student database that would track students through college and into the work force. The idea, sometimes referred to as a “unit record data,” was originally proposed by the Bush Administration in 2005, but critics, citing student privacy concerns, were… Read more »

Preliminary findings from a two-year study of new charter schools that were given extra funds to combine computer-based learning with teacher instruction  show that schools quickly ran into budget shortfalls and pulled back on their technology plans. The study was written by the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington and published… Read more »

The most recent data on how Americans pay for college show that parents are taking on more of the debt burden for their kids. In 1999 about 13 percent of parents took out PLUS loans. The average loan amount was $19,700 in inflation-adjusted dollars. By 2011, the numbers had increased to 21 percent of parents… Read more »

On May 7, 2014 I argued that the stagnation of U.S. high school seniors’ test scores can’t be blamed on demographic changes because the scores of top students, the 90th percentile, have been flat too. Fredrik deBoer wrote on his website that we should never be surprised by stagnant performance at the top because “there are… Read more »

School systems around the country are trying to use objective, quantifiable measures to identify which are the good teachers and which are the bad ones. One popular approach used in New York, Chicago and other cities, is to calculate a value-added performance measure (VAM). Essentially, you create a model that begins by calculating how much… Read more »