education linkdump

[quarrel]

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/
Finland’s education system regularly scores best or near-best worldwide, yet the country has no private schools (period, at any level from preschool to doctorate), no government-created teacher evaluations, no uniform grading system, and no standardized tests except to graduate high school.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/blog/standard_tests_do_reveal_which.php
A Gates Foundation experiment finds a significant positive correlation between how good a teacher is at raising students’ standardized test scores and how much money that teacher’s students earn in their lifetimes, how likely they are to attend college, how likely they are to avoid teenage pregnancy, how well they perform at non-standardized and general comprehension tests (even if the teachers “taught to the test”), and how high the teacher scores in subjective teacher evaluations (even when the teacher is evaluated based on a self-made video of cherry-picked moments rather than being visited by surprise). And all after correcting for any chance that some teachers might just have gotten a priori better students than others.

(Gates himself talks about evaluating teachers in general, at http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/bill-gates-a-fairer-way-to-evaluate-teachers/2013/04/03/c99fd1bc-98c2-11e2-814b-063623d80a60_story.html)

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/27/no-rich-child-left-behind/
An op-ed piece reveals there is a strongly positive correlation between family wealth and student academic performance all the way from kindergarten to high school — one more extreme than ethnic variances, and which has grown rapidly in the last 35 years, and which is due almost exclusively to pre-kindergarten cognitive development and home life stability rather than affording better schooling.

http://www.isa-sociology.org/global-dialogue/2013/04/german-sociologists-boycott-academic-ranking/
The German Sociological Association urges universities to boycott Germany’s most prominent third-party university ranking system, claiming that its ratings are based on incomplete data and that they do nothing to improve the universities’ research.