During his fifth State-of-the-Union address on Jan. 28, President Obama announced no major new educational initiatives. Instead, he spent the modest amount of time he dedicated to education highlighting and defending his existing record on education, Obama also announced several modest expansions of existing programs and encouraged Congress to takeRead More

For many of us, some of our fondest childhood memories are associated with the stories and books we learned from our parents, heard from our teachers, and discovered for ourselves. I, for one, get nostalgic at the mention of my friend’s dog Spot (for those who may not directly seizeRead More

The 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress Scores for math and reading are in, and the results for Houston are definitely mixed. Locally, the conventional wisdom is that Houston continues its steady improvement in math, but lags behind in reading. HISD Superintendent Terry Grier is working with administrators and (presumably)Read More

When the Houston Independent School District Board of Trustees tentatively voted to ban the use of racially based mascots and nicknames at its schools during its Dec. 15 meeting, its actions joined a several-decade old trend of American schools and sports franchises de-emphasizing or eliminating logos and nicknames associated withRead More

Recently, major national news sources covered topics which Thesis has been following for some time now: teacher evaluations and national standardized testing norms.  First, on December 18th,  Al Jazeera America drew its readership’s attention to how schools all over the country have had to postpone (or even sacrifice) designing andRead More

Continuing its widespread coverage of assessment tests, Thesis would like to share with its readers some results from the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), a test designed and administered by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) every three years which gauges the capacities of 510,000 fifteen-yearRead More

In the last year alone, Texas has doubled-down on efforts to blaze its own educational path. The state sought a waiver from No Child Left Behind, voted against joining the Common Core Standards, and approved a sweeping education bill designed to regulate how Texas schools are assessed (House Bill 5).Read More

On November 14th, Assistant Secretary of Education Deborah Delisle issued a letter which drastically reduces obligations for those states which previously sought and received waivers on implementing key tenets of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation. As Thesis previously reported, the national government absolved Texas, together with 41 other statesRead More

Teens grumbling about having to scrape themselves off their beds to slog off to school is irritatingly common, but despite their incessant complaining, there’s proof they actually do like being shuttled off to school. After all, we’ve seen what happens when children are outright denied their right to an education.Read More

Not one. The annual award which “…celebrates high-performing schools and schools with a high percentage of students from disadvantaged backgrounds that significantly improve whole-school test scores and student subgroup test scores,” according to the Department of Education website, did not select a single school in Texas out of 286 nationwideRead More

The concern about the quality of education is not unique to the states. East Asia is famous for parents pouring money into expensive cram schools and tutors to supplement their children’s education. This supplementary education has come to be both common and expected. In fact, students who aren’t enrolled inRead More

Ever since standardized test results became tied to school success and teacher performance, there has been a correlating rise of complaint that teachers are only teaching to the test. What exactly does teaching to the test mean and is it a bad thing? Teaching to the test means that curriculumRead More

According to a recent study from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), while pockets of adult populations across the world exhibit limited facility with literacy, numeracy, and ICT-based problem solving, American adults, on average, universally rank lower than their peers across all three categories.  A series of testsRead More

As of September 30, Texas public schools are no longer subject to provisions of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act that govern student performance on standardized tests.  Previously, legislation stipulated that if 90% of students in a given school or district did not meet established thresholds on statewideRead More

by: Erin Howland   In my junior year of high school, my AP European History teacher became demonically possessed by the idea that creating a restaurant would be the most fun and effective way to learn about Renaissance culture. The assignment was to use one 8.5x11in paper and to drawRead More

Three things are certain in life: death, taxes, and rapidly increasing tuition costs –or at least that’s probably how many college students and their parents feel.  According to long-term data gathered by the College Board Annual Survey of Colleges and the National Center of Education Statistics (NCES), college tuition costsRead More