Whether they like it or not, many agree Missourians probably will have to raise taxes, as they’ve done in the past when shown specifics about how the money will be used.

I am not automatically opposed to that. There is something to be said for the residents of an area paying a larger share for transportation projects within that area. My main problem with the assertions in the story is they seem to totally discount or ignore the use of tolls and private financing for roads and bridges. Higher taxes, be they local sales taxes or state gas taxes, don’t have to be our only option. The voters and elected officials of the state could easily allow expanded tolling options if they chose to do so. It is an option that needs to continue to be included in these discussions.

Missouri’s only toll road has worked well for the Ozarks, and the option also needs to be considered elsewhere, as an alternative to higher taxes. Although I understand — and can sometimes support — the use of local sales taxes to fund local transportation improvements, a higher gas tax is preferable to a general transportation sales tax as statewide policy (if you don’t use tolling). I will never support any policy that makes walkers or bicyclists pay for highways at the same rate as SUV drivers with extended commutes.

Read more on Work and Western Civilization…

Eighty-six percent of doctors say they now regularly use the Internet on the job. Of that group, the majority start at Google, which they use as a springboard to look for general information about diseases and drugs.

The Bad:

In a 2006 study published in the British Medical Journal, researchers had physicians read the histories of 26 tricky cases published in the New England Journal of Medicine and enter search terms into Google to see if they could make the diagnosis. They nailed it 58% of the time. Not bad, but not much better than the flip of a coin, either…

The Ugly:

Researchers also found that Google Scholar brings older articles to the top of the results. This is fine if you want a history lesson but problematic if you’re looking for cutting-edge clinical data. (It turns out Google Scholar places more weight on studies that are cited more, regardless of their validity.)

Plus, the researchers concluded, users often don’t search more than five pages to answer a question, leaving knowledge susceptible to the most popular articles, not necessarily the best.

Full article on the growing number of physicians using Google to educate themselves.

The annual report looks at both student performance and inputs into the education system, evaluating what works and what doesn't. The report also includes model legislation for state lawmakers.

Reforms like improving teacher quality, expanding students' learning options, and measuring results and holding schools accountable have proved successful. Florida's pioneering reform efforts have shown that a reform strategy that accomplishes our "assignments" can lead to dramatic academic improvement, particularly among those children who are most at risk.

The question is no longer whether education reforms work, but whether reformers can succeed in overcoming the powerful opposition and changing the status quo. That is, can education reforms succeed in the political arena to deliver the kind of education system American students deserve and need for the 21st century?

You can purchase the book, or download a PDF version here.

Additionally, each state is profiled, with rankings on both educational performance and school reform. You can get the Pennsylvania profile here.

What is the deal?

The MCAS is different from most other state tests. It is a high-stakes test for all students; its being a graduation requirement underscored the seriousness of purpose, and its being for all students meant that we would not allow a good system for some and a less good system for others. After all, that is what we had before 1993.

Success on the MCAS test correlates very well with success on national and international assessments. The better you do on MCAS, the better you are likely to do in college and in your career. You can’t say that about most state tests, which are all over the place in terms of correlation. So the MCAS is a good test. (There are ways to improve it, but that’s for another day.)

Jamie Vaznis of the Boston Globe reports today on the leadership role that Massachusetts state ed officials are playing in developing new national tests. You might think having our state education officials in the lead is a good thing, given that this state’s success in education historically is based on the fact that it took a very different path from the “soft skills” crowd.

Well, it’s not good news.

The fact is that today’s state education leaders have always wanted to “evolve” (their words, not mine) the MCAS in a way that is less focused on academic excellence and more focused on “soft skills,” or what they called in a 2008 report “21st century skills.” None of their theorizing about new skills was new; it had been tried in many states before. And it did not work, meaning that there was no correlation to improvements on national and international assessments.

The fella currently serving as Massachusetts Commissioner of Education, Mitchell Chester, was in fact involved in Connecticut’s attempts in the 1990s to inject a skills approach into the Constitution State’s standards and assessments. After adopting the skills approach, Connecticut’s performance on the Nation’s Report Card, as you can see below, tanked. (Sorry about the quality of that image!)

The evidence from Connecticut and the lack of evidence from any other state that the skills approach works, taken together with Massachusetts’ impressive progress in student achievement, should have given our current education leaders pause. It didn’t.

• In 2008 the state put out a new MCAS contract incorporating “soft skills” into the tests. They did so without any Board of Education vote.
• State officials made commitment after commitment in their Race to the Top applications in January and June 2010 that tethered them to decisions and leadership from the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO). As EdWeek reported last month, the CCSSO, one of two organizations pushing national standards, “recently released a draft of professional teaching standards” that weaves “interdisciplinary themes of communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and technology use—sometimes called the 21st-century skills—throughout the standards.” In addition, we’ve recently learned that P21 is now going to be absorbed by the CCSSO.
  So now everything is clear: the national standards and assessments are to be fully integrated with the skills agenda–an unproven agenda at best, and a retrograde approach at worst–instead of working from Massachusetts’ playbook that led the nation and brought our students to be competitive internationally in math and science.

The announcement about Massachusetts’ leadership in one of the consortia developing national tests came from US Ed Secretary Arne Duncan — the new and improved, 21st Century Skills Arne Duncan. Consider these statements from Secretary Duncan:

… It’s for all these reasons that shortly after taking office, President Obama called on the nation’s governors and state education chiefs “to develop standards and assessments that don’t simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a test, but whether they possess 21st century skills like problem solving and critical thinking and entrepreneurship and creativity.”

… When the president issued that challenge in March of 2009, many experts questioned whether states could work together to set rigorous, globally competitive standards or collaborate to develop assessments of 21st century skills.

… Now, I sometimes get asked, how would a better generation of assessments really differ in practice from existing assessments? It is an excellent question—and one I especially hear from teachers, many of whom feel at times more like they are running test‐prep classes in basic skills, instead of educating the whole child for the 21st century.

Educate the whole child? Ring any bells?

So out the MCAS goes (see pages 44-49 of the state’s RTT application if you want to see the commitments Massachusetts has made to scrapping the MCAS), in the sense that we are giving up the proven approach of focusing on content and knowledge attainment.

Out goes the MCAS in the sense that there is no public commitment that the new assessments will be high-stakes for all students as is the case in Massachusetts (and even lots of hemming and hawing from Arne on this point).

Our current state leaders may talk about taking the Massachusetts “brand” of education reform country-wide, but the fact is that they are discarding the substance of the reform.

Who would have thought that Arne Duncan, reform crusader, has morphed into a mix of P21’s Ken Kay and the Whole Childers, who for so long opposed testing? You might call him Mr. Softy.

“They not only burned the books, but they sent monitors into the classroom to make sure there were no drawings of the human body on the blackboard,” said Valerie Walker, director of the Medical Alumni Association of the University of California, Los Angeles.

Full article on Operation Medical Libraries.