Here's a summary of the work we've done at FutureEd since the start of the new school year.
On September 18 we hosted a lively conversation between Andreas Schleicher, the director of education and skills at OECD in Paris, and a panel of U.S. education leaders. Schleicher, FutureEd's newest senior fellow, is out
with a valuable new book,
World Class: How to Build a 21stCentury School System. You can watch the
tape of the event and read excerpts from
World Class on
the teaching profession and the changing role of
education in a digitized world.
A week earlier we released
Revisiting SIG, a re-evaluation of the Obama administration's School Improvement Grant. The authors, U.S. Education Department veterans Alan Ginsburg and Mike Smith, challenge the conventional wisdom that the program failed to raise student achievement.
On the school governance front, Rebecca Haessig profiled
Atlanta's partnership schools, district-run public schools granted the kind of autonomy that charter schools have over budgets, staffing and curriculum.
September is Attendance Awareness Month, so we continued our work on chronic student absenteeism with a piece on
how to tap federal funding to improve school attendance. Suspensions are another piece of the absenteeism puzzle. We interviewed University of Pennsylvania researcher Matthew Steinberg about his
findings on the impact suspensions have on attendance and student achievement.
And of course, health plays a key role in ensuring student attend and achieve in school. Editorial Director Phyllis Jordan outlined the
educators' case for preserving Medicaid, based on a study about the impact to state budgets of cutting the federal-state health care partnership. And Research Director Raegen Miller looked at how
exemptions from vaccinations have left many communities and schools vulnerable to disease outbreaks.
Also take a look at several regular features on our website:
The Churn reports on leadership changes in the education sector.
The Horizon
gathers in one place a range of important upcoming events. And
FutureU
showcases the lively higher education podcast series produced by FutureEd Senior Fellow Jeff Selingo and Michael Horn.
