Seeds of Change in the Big Apple: Chartering Schools in New York City
Robin J. Lake, Progressive Policy InstituteSeptember 2004
Robin J. Lake, Progressive Policy InstituteSeptember 2004
Bryan C. Hassel, Progressive Policy InstituteSeptember 21, 2004
Cheri Pierson Yecke, Ph.D., Center of the American ExperimentSeptember 22, 2004
The Mad, Mad World of Textbook Adoption, released today by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, is a splendid survey of what's wrong with textbooks today and how they went awry. The main problem besetting textbooks, we know, is their quality.
As any education researcher will tell you, conducting a "scientific" study of educational programs or practices is difficult at best, primarily because so many factors contribute to pupil achievement, including students' previous knowledge, teacher quality, the degree of parental and community support, etc.
Caroline Hoxby recaps the Great Charter Debate (or should we call it Ambush?) of 2004 in the Wall Street Journal this week.
The New York Times this week featured a column by Arthur Levine (often a sensible fellow, despite being president of Teachers College) outlining a "third way" on social promotion. Levine contends that "neither social promotion nor holding back students works. Leaving students back increases their dropout rate. . . .
You've watched Rotherham and Finn duke it out over the Bush administration's record on education. So let's hear from the administration, shall we? This week, the White House released a new "policy book" detailing its education successes and pointing toward future plans.
The British House of Commons education committee recently recommended greater flexibility in teacher pay as a way to combat specific teacher shortages. In particular, they recommend that "super teachers" be given bonuses for working in tough schools, and that schools that face persistent recruiting problems should be able to pay more to entice new teachers.
Last week, Gadfly editorialized that "Putting most of the available energy, political capital, brain power and money into 'helping' districts engage in chartering rather than devoting those (limited) assets to advancing the frontier of independent charter schools: removing caps on their numbers and enrollments, creating
Statewide textbook adoption, the process by which 21 states dictate the textbooks that schools and districts can use, is fundamentally flawed. It distorts the market, entices extremist groups to hijack the curriculum, enriches the textbook cartel, and papers the land with mediocre instructional materials that cannot fulfill their important education mission. Tinkering with it won't set it right, concludes this latest Fordham Institute report. Legislators and governors in adoption states should eliminate the process, letting individual schools, individual districts, or even individual teachers choose their own textbooks.