Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

I suppose it’s premature to get excited about this, but I was happy to see this small victory for evidence-based research come out of Colorado:

In a “ripped from the headlines” manner, two lawmakers, one a Democrat and the other a Republican, unveiled a measure Friday that would pay children to read, replicating a program profiled recently in Time magazine that has met with controversy but also success.
Dubbed “Earn to Learn,” the measure would give low-income kids a financial incentive to improve their reading skills by reading more outside…

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EVERY YEAR, TIME MAGAZINE PUBLISHES A LIST OF THE 100 most influential people in the world. The new list came out today, and there are people you would expect (Steve Jobs) and people you could debate (Ashton Kutcher). Then there are people you’ve never heard of.

Introducing…

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I recently had a nice chat with William Taylor, the DC teacher featured in my Atlantic piece a few months ago. It’s always fascinating to hear about the weirdness that descends on people after they are profiled in a long magazine story.

Mr. Taylor has taken it all very well, marveling at the weirdness rather than joining it. After the piece came out, he got a call from the BBC, which followed him around for a World News America segment that ran this month. You can watch the video here.…

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I just finished up a week-long fellowship in Palo Alto (Thank You Stanford!). The university is so beautiful and the weather so ridiculous that you wonder how it can possibly qualify as a school—let alone one of the best schools in the world.

But OK, let’s accept that it is. So one of the things that struck me while I was out there was how cavalier people are with their most valuable asset. Everyone out there rides a bike, which is cool. It is actually a challenge to drive or walk on campus and not collide with a bike.…

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I’ve been doing some TV interviews about this week’s TIME cover story on paying kids to learn in school. People keep asking me: “What will happen as a result of these findings?” If we know that paying kids to perform in school can work if it’s done right (and studied carefully), are more schools going to do it?

Well, you’d think so, wouldn’t you? It’s a no brainer—especially since this kind of program costs literally 1/10th of what other reforms with similar results cost. But the truth is, I really don’t know…

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I have a story in today’s TIME Magazine about what happens when you pay kids to work hard in school. I got interested in this because, most of the time, schools operate in the dark—through trial and error, hunches and theories, year after year. The practices and assumptions have never been tested in a rigorous way. So I was intrigued to learn about this latest project of Roland Fryer, a Harvard economist who is dedicated to the radical notion of doing education research…

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Check out this quote from today’s Wall Street Journal story about the painful teacher layoffs occurring around the country due to budget shortfalls. Let me know if you see anything strange about it. Mr. Bafia is defending the seniority system, which is used in most school districts to determine who gets let go. Last hired, first fired, in other words. As opposed to an alternative, which NYC Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and others have proposed—which is to consider teachers’ performance as one relevant factor when figuring out whom to let go (another way of saying, hey, this…

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Today at noon on the Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC.

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