By Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan Hassel; first published on Education Next. There’s been a lot of chatter about increasing teacher pay—even doubling it. With the release of TNTP’s The Irreplaceables, talk about paying teachers more and retaining the best will likely increase. Whether or not your political perspective leaves you thinking this is necessary, most […]
Redesigning Schools for Financially Sustainable Excellence: Infographic!
By Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan Hassel; first published on Education Next Everybody loves a good infographic (even you wonky researchers – just wait ‘til nobody’s looking), and we hope this one will change how you view education reform efforts. For word nerds, here’s a summary: Our nation is falling behind globally as other nations provide increasingly […]
Reformers: We Must Be Much Bolder to Reach Every Child with Excellent Teachers
By Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan Hassel; first published on Education Next. As ESEA talk heats up, reform groups are tossing ideas on the table (e.g., here). We can debate the details, but most have some merit. Here’s the problem: even if our nation fully implemented most of the recommended legislation in the next decade, we still […]
How digital learning can (and must) help excellent teachers reach more children
Blog post argues that digital tools should be used both to make teaching more manageable for the average teacher, and to give massively more students access to excellent teachers.
Khan Academy: Not Overhyped, Just Missing a Key Ingredient – Excellent Live Teachers
Rick Hess was right to question the simplistic hyping of Khan Academy’s online video lectures in this Straight Up post. But we think he’s only got it half-right: it’s less a matter of OVER-hyping than MIS-hyping the true potential of what Khan is doing. Just to summarize, Khan Academy offers short, engaging tutorials in math, science and other subjects and is experimenting with having kids use these during homework time, freeing up school time for problem solving and collaborative work – a concept commonly called “flipping.”
We’ve written here and here about the importance figuring out as a nation how to “extend the reach” of great teachers to more students, since great teachers accountable for student learning are the one “intervention” we know can close achievement gaps and raise the bar for all students.
The Big U-Turn How to bring schools from the brink of doom to stellar success
By Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan Hassel; first published in Education Next. In the 1990s Continental Airlines was struggling, even more than its troubled U.S. airline peers. As the company’s then-president Greg Brenneman explained in a 1998 article in the Harvard Business Review (HBR), “Continental ranked tenth out of the ten largest U.S. airlines in all key customer […]
Friendly Competition Does the presence of charters spur public schools to improve?
By Bryan Hassel; first published in Education Next. Everyone has read the ubiquitous feature story about a charter school–Jane and John Q. Public and their friends, sitting around somebody’s kitchen table, dream up a different kind of school for their kids. Putting in hours of sweat equity, charging start-up costs to their credit cards, maybe […]