Even under the best of circumstances, turnarounds fail
There's plenty of sobering news in Fordham's new report, Are Bad Schools Immortal? The Scarcity of Turnarounds and Shutdowns in Both Charter and District Sectors.
There's plenty of sobering news in Fordham's new report, Are Bad Schools Immortal? The Scarcity of Turnarounds and Shutdowns in Both Charter and District Sectors.
Politicians clearly revel in class warfare. Democrats?always rage at the well-to-do and try to present themselves as champions of the less prosperous. (See current goings-on in Congress regarding federal income and estate taxes.)
In case you missed it, Obama signed the Child Nutrition Bill into law on Monday?click here to see the ?before & after? school lunch menu.?
?I think we have schizophrenia in the U.S. that we believe all U.S. schools are lousy except the schools we send our kids to.? * Larry Cuban, Professor Emeritus of Education at Stanford University
?Until we start seeing assessments that ask kids to write research papers, ask them to solve unfamiliar problems, ask them to defend their ideas, ask them to engage with both fiction and nonfiction texts; until those kinds of assessments are our state assessments, all we're measuring are basic skills.'' *
In my other life (as a Hoover Institution fellow and chairman of the Koret Task Force on K-12 education), I've lately?had the pleasure of joining Bill Evers and other task force members in distilling the most important education events of the past year and sorting them into ?best? and ?worst? columns.
Last week the mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa, while speaking in front of?loads of legislators?at a public forum of the Public Policy Institute of California, said this: ?At every step of the way, when Los Angeles was coming together to effect real change in our public schools, UTL
During the Florida gubernatorial campaign, most voters were paying attention to then-candidate Rick Scott's past?as head of a hospital chain that paid $1.7 billion in fines in the largest Medicare fraud case in history. Now that Scott is the governor-elect, those voters (and?the press)?are turning their focus to the policy plans he released several months ago.
I am still recovering from last Sunday's 60 Minutes tear-jerker.
This may or may not be the answer to eternally bad schools, but a little parent revolution surely can't be any worse than any of the other attempts at getting poor kids a good educati