Despite all the talk about improving inner-city schools, the greatest promise of the No Child Left Behind Act was always in America's leafy suburbs. Unfortunately, that promise is in danger of being squandered.
This year, the Georgia State Board of Education has revised its academic standards in reading, math, science, and social studies - the first major curriculum overhaul in the Peach State in nearly two decades. And last week, the board voted to adopt the new standards for K-12 science, middle school English, and K-8 math.
Let's call it failing upward: This year, a South Carolina middle school teacher charged with helping students cheat on the state's standardized test was inadvertently rewarded for her actions with a new job (and $5,000 stipend) teaching other educators how to be effective math instructors.
It won't do to be churlish about today's NAEP long-term trend results. But neither should we be gaga. Here are Gadfly's first reflections, with more to come in later editions.
In today's Wall Street Journal, Education Secretary Rod Paige gives a blistering critique of the NAACP leadership, accusing Julian Bond and Kweisi Mfume of taking "a proud, effective organization in a totally new direction: naked partisan politics, pure and simple." Specifically, Paige accuses the NAACP leaders of attacking NCLB - whose go
We're not sure whether to cheer or jeer. As the Wall Street Journal's June Kronholz reports, the tutoring industry is setting its sights on the Barney set. Sylvan expects to enroll four-year-olds in each of its learning centers by winter; Kaplan's SCORE! centers already teach over 15,000 children from ages four to six. It's a growth industry, but is it a good idea?
According to the Washington Post, Mexico's largest teachers' union (also the largest union period in Latin America) has created "a monstrous system of perks and patronage" that has basically made it impossible for teachers to be fired, even if they rarely show up for work.
What does it take to kill a damaging and misleading falsehood? For years, respectable researchers and advocacy groups from left and right have been trying to quash and correct the misleading high-school graduation rate figure put out annually by the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey (CPS).
Marilyn Cochran-Smith and Kenneth M. Zeichner, eds., American Educational Research Association June 2005
Committee for Economic Development2005
Daniel J. McGrath, Emily W. Holt, and Marilyn M. Seastrom, National Center for Education StatisticsJune 2005
As always, the National Education Association convention, recently concluded in Los Angeles, was quite a circus.
Gadfly mourns the passing of Ray Budde, an education professor at the University of Massachusetts who defined the term "charter school" and helped to spark the movement that continues to this day.
That was the question examined by last week's Senate hearing on "The American History Achievement Act," a bill proposed by Senators Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts.
Gadfly is certainly correct to be left cold by David Broder's (non)verdict on the differences between how teachers and the general public view education reform efforts. (See "Edu-commentary.") Broder's inconclusiveness is not, however, due to a paralyzingly subtle understanding of the issue.
