Mathematical Proficiency for All Students: Toward a Strategic Research and Development Program in Mathematics Education
RAND Mathematics Study Panel2003
RAND Mathematics Study Panel2003
The American Institutes for Research and SRI InternationalApril 2003
Paul Gagnon, Albert Shanker Institute2003
David N. Plank and Gary Sykes, editors, Teachers College PressApril 2003
In January, Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty announced his plan to kill the five year old "Profile of Learning" standards, which focus on measuring "higher-order thinking" based on projects and reports instead of traditional pencil and paper tests, and replace them with new, more rigorous content-based academic standards.
The Hoover Institution's Eric Hanushek seeks a silver lining to California's budgetary clouds. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, he contends that this could be the time to free California from the costly "straitjacket" of class-size reduction and thereby free some resources for more effective achievement-boosting strategies.
On Tuesday, the Princeton Review released its second annual ranking of the states' testing and accountability systems - rendered all the more timely by the requirements of NCLB.
Readers of these columns know that I've been a wee bit ambivalent about the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act. So when I was asked to discuss it at the recent educator awards ceremony of the Milken Family Foundation, the likeliest - and most boring - approach was to give an equivocal speech, full of buts, howevers and maybes. Yawn.
In his New York Times column this week, the curmudgeonly Michael Winerip attempts to discredit the voucher movement by questioning Harvard scholar Paul Peterson's findings from a 2000 study of a New York City voucher experiment - a study that, according to Peterson's team, showed vouchers significantly improving achievement for black students.
Last week, District of Columbia Mayor Anthony Williams shocked both voucher friends and foes when he came out publicly in support of an experimental D.C. voucher program. In February, when the White House released its 2004 budget proposal, which included funding for the D.C. voucher program, Mayor Williams, along with D.C. school board president Peggy Cooper Cafritz and D.C.