Chad Aldeman on pension spending. With apologies to the Stones it’s going up up up.
Kate Pennington with some stuff you might not have known about teachers unions. Probably good context for this week…
Karen Lewis is stepping down in Chicago – and not for reasons anyone should be happy about regardless of policy disagreements. She was highly effective there are arguably woke up teachers unions and changed the national debate as a result.
Lonely planet. Kate Walsh is not feeling guided by the intentional data.
Here’s the RAND eval of the Gates intensive sites.
The above proposal would achieve three goals: First, the state would empower the change-makers working inside local agencies, who currently struggle against status quo demands to get their ideas funded. Second, by assessing the impact of those ideas, the state could provide better evidence to guide decisions in districts around the state. Third, by setting aside a portion of state aid for interventions with proof of efficacy, taxpayers would know that their dollars are being used wisely.
This is the same process which has produced sustained progress in our biotech sector. In the pharmaceutical industry, 80 percent of new drugs fail phase II clinical trials designed to test their efficacy. It is just too hard to anticipate the many ways in which an intervention could fail. That simply means that, in order to make sustained progress, we need to test many ideas (not the favored policy initiative of the day), and allow local practitioners to scale up the few that work.
