Stand by Me: What Teachers Really Think about Unions, Merit Pay, and Other Professional Matters
Chester E. Finn, Jr.Steve Farkas, Ann Duffett, and Jean Johnson, Public AgendaMay 3, 2003
Who is Leading Our Schools? An Overview of School Administrators and Their Careers
Eric OsbergSusan M. Gates, Jeanne S. Ringel, Lucrecia Santibanez, Karen M. Ross, and Catherine H. Chung, RAND Education2003
Boys, interrupted
"It may still be a man's world," writes Michelle Conlin of Business Week. "But it is no longer, in any way, a boy's." Conlin runs through an increasingly familiar counter argument to the 1990s social science focus on how girls were supposedly being shortchanged by education.
The Nuts & Bolts of Charter Districts
Chester E. Finn, Jr.Education Commission of the StatesMay 2003
Factors Affecting Mathematics Achievement for Students in Rural Schools
Kathleen Porter-MageeGene Bottoms and Kathleen Carpenter, Southern Regional Education BoardMay 2003
The least-known side of charter schools
Chester E. Finn, Jr.Plenty has been written about charter schools and how they are (and aren't) doing, but practically nobody has looked carefully at the organizations that give birth to them, raise them, oversee them, hold them accountable, and decide whether or not they will get their charters renewed.
Students speak up on education reform
In March, a group of five education reform-minded Yale undergrads, who had won first prize and $25,000 in cash in the Yale Entrepreneurial Society's 50K competition, published the inaugural edition of Our Education, a journal of education reform put out by the student-led nonprofit "Students for Teachers." [For the Gadfly's review of this journal, go to
Hear ye the facts: schools win in court
In contrast to the general sense among school administrators that they are besieged by lawsuits, it turns out that courts tend to rule in favor of schools over both parents and teachers, the two groups most like to sue schools or districts. Since the 1985 Supreme Court case New Jersey v.
Law would align teacher training with NCLB
Last week, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce took up the Ready to Teach Act (H.R. 2211), the first of any number of bills that will feed into reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. This one seeks to align teacher-training programs with the high standards for accountability and results mandated by No Child Left Behind.
Tough time for charters
Kathleen Porter-MageeIn recent weeks, opportunistic charter school adversaries have been having a field day - using state budget crunches and low test scores to fuel the anti-charter fire. In Massachusetts, for example, the state Senate passed a three-year moratorium on the creation or expansion of charter schools, claiming that they are "draining" limited funds from the public school system.
What's on TAP
The Milken Family Foundation has created a new (electronic) newsletter tied to its pathbreaking Teacher Advancement Program, but also addressing broader issues of teacher quality. The inaugural issue contains an interesting overview of teacher "pay for performance": where it's been tried, what's happened, what can be learned.