A victory for NCLB, at what cost?
Tuesday, President Bush announced that all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico now have federally approved accountability plans in place and thus are in formal compliance with the No Child Left Behind Act.
Vouchers for Special Education Students: An Evaluation of Florida's McKay Scholarship Program
Chester E. Finn, Jr.Jay Greene and Greg Forster, Manhattan Institute's Center for Civic InnovationJune 2003
Beyond the Pipeline: Getting The Principals We Need, Where They Are Needed Most
Chester E. Finn, Jr.Lee D. Mitgang, The Wallace Foundation2003
Efficiency, Bias, and Classification Schemes: Estimating Private-School Impacts on Test Scores in the New York City Voucher Experiment
Kathleen Porter-MageePaul E. Peterson and William G. Howell, Harvard UniversityJune 12, 2003
Resist Urge to "Refine" Graduation Testing
This month and last, as also happened during May-June 2002 in what threatens to become a new seasonal ritual, efforts to adopt state graduation testing are under fire. Nevada has announced that 12 percent of its 12th graders may not graduate. Florida reports that 13,000 students may be denied diplomas, while the number in Massachusetts is said to be 5,000. Parents are reportedly furious.
Sabotage in the certification fight
The level of combat in the teacher certification wars escalated this week as the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence (ABCTE) announced that the field test of its "Passport to Teaching" certification exam had been compromised by leaks to ABCTE opponents. (This new test is being developed as an alternative to traditional education school certification.
How Within-District Spending Inequalities Help Some Schools to Fail
One more area in which American schools and districts are less than transparent: the budget. In this working paper, presented at a recent Brookings conference on "The Teachers We Need," the University of Washington's Marguerite Roza and Paul Hill work from the bottom up to construct real school-by-school teacher salary figures in four districts, rather than relying on district-wide averages.
Must the statistics commissioner be lobotomized?
Controversy is brewing over President Bush's choice of sociologist Robert Lerner as the next Commissioner of Education Statistics and the Senate may well fuss about him during the confirmation process. He happens to be a first rate scholar with two decades of distinguished work under his belt, much of it in education and much of it relying on - believe it or not - federal education statistics.
New Head Start legislation: Now with 80 percent less reform!
Having introduced sweeping legislation to revamp the Head Start program on May 23 (the School Readiness Act of 2003), House Republicans have spent the past three weeks slowly rolling back its most important reforms.