A Sum Greater Than the Parts: What States Can Teach Each Other About Charter Schooling
Sara Mead and Andrew J. RotherhamEducation SectorSeptember 2007
Sara Mead and Andrew J. RotherhamEducation SectorSeptember 2007
Intercollegiate Studies Institute, American Civic Literacy ProgramSeptember 18, 2007
Carl F. Kaestle and Alyssa E. Lodewick, edsUniversity Press of Kansas2007
No Child Left Behind made many promises. One of the most important of them being a pledge to Mr. and Mrs. Smith that they would get an annual snapshot of how their little Susie is doing in school.
New Baltimore schools CEO Andres Alonso is already in trouble. He wants to require teachers to spend one, weekly 45-minute period engaged in collaborative planning with their colleagues. And for that, the city teachers union has gone on the attack, scheduling a no-confidence vote on the CEO. Upon hearing that the union planned such a vote, a perplexed Alonso asked, "Why?
Negar Azimi's New York Times Magazine piece about Teach For America might be new, but her criticisms of the program are not. Take, for example, the idea that TFA is for college graduates a "résumé-burnishing pit stop before moving on to bigger things." That may be partly true--but so what?
In Washington, D.C., school success is measured by the most basic of yardsticks. This year, for example, all 146 schools in the District opened on time, and almost all of them had the supplies they needed.
Bob Herbert can usually be counted on to dispense columns that are either off-base or banal. His latest piece is certainly banal (check out the title); but it's none too credible, either, because Herbert is calling for a "wholesale transformation of the public school system" that, were some politician to actually advance it, he, yes he, Herbert, would surely denounce.
We know that schools and school systems share a lot in common with businesses. Do they also resemble nations?
Gadfly now reads--courtesy of the Columbus Dispatch, a public-records request, and the Ohio Alliance of Public Charter Schools--that indeed Attorney General Marc Dann was doing the teacher union's bidding when he (a) settled out of court an ill-conceived NEA lawsuit against charter schools (that he likely would have won if it had gone to trial) and (b) tackled low-p