Education by the Numbers: The Fiscal Effect of School Choice Programs, 1990-2006
Susan L. AudMilton & Rose D. Friedman FoundationApril 2007
Susan L. AudMilton & Rose D. Friedman FoundationApril 2007
Diane RavitchAssociation for Supervision and Curriculum DevelopmentAugust 2007
As if Messrs. Coombs and Shaffer (see above) didn't fill our weekly quota of musings from the Ivory Tower, ex-Harvard Ed School dean Ellen Condliffe Lagemann took to the pages of Education Week to voice her dissatisfaction with the rhetoric surrounding our K-12 system.
Put this one in the "idea whose time has come" file: high school end-of-course exams. A decade back, when states such as Virginia started requiring them for graduation, it appeared the practice would take the nation by storm. Instead, it stalled for some reason (NCLB?)--until now.
It's no secret that public education contains vast funding inequities: between districts, within districts, and between district and charter schools, to name just a few. There are lots of potential solutions, too, but when money is at stake, reform is never simple.
Los Angeles Superintendent (and former Navy admiral) David Brewer III wrote in a recent Los Angeles Times op-ed that anyone reading about the city's schools probably thinks "not a single thing is going right and that nothing is happening to fix what's wrong." Some things are indeed going right, including charter schools, which are trying to gain a bigger role in the C
The venue selected for the release of the 2006 NAEP results in U.S. history and civics was Boston's Old State House. Delicious, I thought.
Perhaps inspired by Chrysler's success in staving off ruin, Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick called for 25 new charter schools this week in a push to revitalize the city's troubled public-education system.
Paulette Strong, a former school bus driver, worked for less than 30 years and retired before she turned sixty. Nonetheless, Strong still received lifetime health insurance from Michigan's Office of Retirement Services. Thanks to a loophole, all Paulette had to do was re-enter the system at age 60 as a "school aide," work 102 hours, "retire," and then reap the benefits.