Contributor
Kevin Carey, Policy Director, Education Sector
Related Link:
http://www.quickanded.com
Biography provided by participant
Kevin Carey is the policy director of Education Sector, a non-partisan think tank founded in 2006. Carey's recent publications include studies of minority college graduation rates, K-12 school funding, No Child Left Behind implementation, the use of technology in higher education, and high-performing community colleges. He previously worked at DC-based research and advocacy organizations including the Education Trust and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. He lived in Indiana from 1995 to 2001, serving as the Indiana Assistant State Budget Director for Education under Governor Frank O'Bannon and as a senior analyst for the Indiana Senate Finance Committee.
Carey has published magazine articles and op-eds in publications including Washington Monthly, The American Prospect, Phi Delta Kappan, Change, Education Week, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Daily News, and Christian Science Monitor. He has also provided analysis and commentary for CNN, C-SPAN, PBS and National Public Radio. Carey writes a monthly column for The Chronicle of Higher Education and blogs regularly at The Quick and the ED and Brainstorm. He has an M.P.A from the Ohio State University, and a B.A. in political science from Binghamton University.
Recent Responses
November 2, 2009 12:29 PM
In the course of cutting and pasting a standard list of arguments against standardized testing, Richard Rothstein seems to have lost track of the topic at hand. If it is, in fact, true that test scores are "increasingly inflated," then it seems fair to assume that schools reporting rock-bottom test scores despite that inflation are likely to be low-performing. There are public schools, open today, that have been identified as low-performing by three or four successive accountability regimes dating back to the mid-1990s, schools where the majority of children fail to graduate or advance, schools with depleted enrollment, crumbling facilities,…
Read moreOctober 5, 2009 10:01 AM
It's a very good idea. There's no way to craft smart, fair policy without good information, and there are currently huge holes in our knowledge about K-12 schools, colleges and universities, and the transitions students make between them. Current graduation rate measures, for example, are limited because we can't give colleges credit for students who start at one college and then transfer (as many do) and finish at another. Data systems would also allow for much more robust and multi-dimensional measures of high school success. Everyone seems to agree we should be preparing high schooler graduates to succeed in college…
Read moreSeptember 14, 2009 09:46 AM
There are traditionally two answers to this question, and both are correct. But it's the absence of the third answer that's perhaps the biggest problem. Answer number one is that we need to do a better job of preparing students to succeed in college. Even though 75 percent of high school graduates go on to some form of post-secondary education, far fewer get the rigorous curriculum and high-quality teaching they need to succeed there. Answer number two is affordability: Crossing the Finish Line found an inverse relationship between college costs and the odds of completion. This is crucial: affordability isn't…
Read moreAugust 24, 2009 10:35 AM
Checker Finn correctly notes that No Child Left Behind does virtually nothing to hold high schools accountable for helping students attain legitimate college-ready standards. Yet both Monty Neil and Diane Ravitch see the ACT results as an indictment of the NCLB test-based accountability approach generally. If NCLB had actually identified high schools where students aren't fully prepared for college and responded with labels, interventions, etc., that would be one thing. But it's strange to denounce the law for failing to reach a goal it never tried to achieve. NCLB has been primarily focused on improving elementary reading and math. And to the…
Read moreJuly 13, 2009 10:18 AM
One way colleges can help graduates pursue a career is to help more college students become graduates in the first place. It's clear from the jobs data that the fallout from the current economic downturn is disproportionately hurting workers with the least amount of education. The dividing line of opportunity in the modern economy is the college degree, now more than ever. Yet many colleges and universities have shockingly low graduation rates--worse, in many cases, than the high school graduation rates we're so rightly worried about. A significant number of institutinos graduate fewer than 40 percent of their students. Rates…
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