Charlie DePascale

Public Education as a Metaphor for Opening Day

Opening Day of the 2025 baseball season is upon us. Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack, I don’t care if I never get back! But we do have to come back; and when we do, there’s a lot of work to be done in public education. Put me in coach. I’m ready to play today!

The Fair, Reliable, & Valid Sex

In the midst of all of the current chaos and disrupted careers, I thought this a good time to step back and reflect on the question that LinkedIn has been posing at the top of my feed in honor of International Women’s Day and National Women’s History Month: Who are the women who have influenced your career?

What Do We Want From AI?

In this week’s behind the scenes look at how Charlie’s mind works, we consider the question what is it that we want from the use of AI technology to support educational assessment and accountability, and to improve education, in general.

Are Personalization and Generalization Compatible?

At the risk of overgeneralizing, I am beginning to think that unless we are very careful the current emphasis on personalization is likely to have a negative effect on generalization – long a goal of K-12 education. How can the two concepts coexist, can we achieve better generalization through personalization, or are personalization and generalization, in fact, incompatible?

Running In Circles, Chasing Our Tales

What is our story? What is it that we hope to accomplish with assessment and accountability? What makes instruction or schools effective? Why do we have such a difficult time answering fundamental questions and crafting a compelling narrative?

It’s Socioeconomic Status, Stupid

I thought that I was done writing about the 2024 NAEP results. I had nothing to add to all of the thoughtful recommendations for improving student achievement. But then after spending an afternoon playing with the Watershed Advisors NAEP analysis tool, it hit me that there was still one more thing to say. The problem, as we all know, is bigger than us and the solution must be as well.

What Is The State’s Role In High School Graduation?

With its MCAS graduation requirement repealed, Massachusetts faces the task of determining the proper balance between the state and local districts in setting graduation requirements and certifying that students have met those requirements. The question is not new. In this post Jeff Nellhaus and I discuss how it has been addressed since the state’s Education Reform law established the test-based requirement in 1993. We also caution the state to not conflate this question with other graduation-related questions it is attempting to answer.

misReading Our Mathematics Problem

All too often we consider test results separately by content area. We’ve started to think of English language arts and literacy skills as interdisciplinary, but until I started thinking about the 2024 NAEP results, I don’t think that I fully grasped the connection between student performance in reading and mathematics.

Are We Dumber Or Just Different?

In a preemptive shot ahead of the 2024 NAEP results we were told that Americans have been getting dumber. Perhaps, but I’m not sure that’s a conclusion we can reach based on an average scaled score – even on NAEP. And I’m fairly certain it’s not the best question to be asking tomorrow when those scores are released.

NAEP, Why Must You Vex Me So?

We are one week away from NAEP Day and the release of the 2024 NAEP Reading and Mathematics results! It’s a day portrayed as our Super Bowl, Christmas morning, and release of the Orange Crop report all rolled into one. So why, once again, am I not excited?