Blog
Learning never stops.
The UPD team is constantly looking for ways to learn more about our industry and, by extension, improve the results we achieve for our clients. Our blog is where we share our latest thinking.
Improving the Ground Game in Education
We know political campaigns are driven by numbers. Since long before we started talking about data-driven decision-making as a key driver in education reform, political strategists had sophisticated models for crunching numbers and using them…
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Will Data Quality Campaigns Stay in the Dark Ages?
Data about students that are high quality yield the best outcomes for students—this is the basis of nearly all education data quality campaigns. As education data systems mature across the nation due to investments from…
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Getting to “The Finals” with Education Technology
As the National Basketball Association (NBA) pre-season sets to open, I am excited about the thought of cheering the new franchise team in my hometown, the Brooklyn Nets. The Brooklyn Nets have energized the borough…
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Pure as the Driven Data
I like numbers. Numbers are facts. My weight scale reading for today: 165 lbs. Numbers are objective and free of emotion. My pedometer tells me that I ran for three miles today. However, as objective…
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Do States Lack the Capacity for Reform?
Michael Usdan and Arthur Sheekey just wrote a great commentary on the complex and evolving relationship between federal policy, the State Education Agency, and the human capacity to get it all done. In their essay,…
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You Can’t Comply Your Way to Common Core Implementation
Forty-five states plus the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands have adopted the new Common Core State Standards (CCSS). The CCSS, developed by a state-led initiative, are intended to align instructional expectations across…
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Managing for Mastery
We have blogged about the topic of that last video post before, including a reference to Herzberg’s classic “One more time, what motivates employees?” And just like Herzberg, Daniel Pink points out that the three…
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Motivation Animation
Every once and a while that friend that sends you three forwards a day hits on something interesting. The other day, I received a link to a YouTube video from RSA that is a very…
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Value-Added Data and Special Education
At a gala for the American Association of People with Disabilities in March, Education Secretary Arne Duncan affirmed the current administration’s commitment to maintaining high expectations for special education populations, noting that “students with disabilities…
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Why Naysayers on Teacher Pay for Performance are Missing the Mark
It seems simple, right? Offer bonuses to teachers that bring big gains in student achievement, and you’ll get better performance out of your teachers. But, a pack of studies over this past year seems to…
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