School Reform in Philadelphia: A Comparison of Student Achievement at Privately-Managed Schools with Student Achievement in Other District Schools
Paul E. PetersonKennedy School of Government, Harvard UniversityApril 2007
Paul E. PetersonKennedy School of Government, Harvard UniversityApril 2007
Four years back, Fordham teamed up with The Broad Foundation to publish Better Leaders for America's Schools: A Manifesto. This call to action depicted a role for the public school principal akin to that of a CEO.
Most elementary teachers seem to require intensive, expensive, and continuous professional development in mathematics. Even if current federal and state initiatives to train experienced teachers are successful, their costs are staggering.
It would be easy to berate 2nd grade teacher David Keyes for his recent op-ed in the Washington Post (as blogger Kevin Carey did here).
The American way of life changed last Monday when intrepid New York Times columnist Bob Herbert traveled to Avon Park, Florida (a "backward city," he writes), population 8,872, to document an emerging national pandemic. That's how Herbert would tell it, at least.
China is making headlines for more than trafficking pirated Lost DVDs. Some U.S. educators and employers envy that nation's success in teaching math and science (at least in producing scads of engineers and suchlike) but now China seems to be showing greater curiosity about American schools.
Though most public school principals believe that effective leadership of their schools requires authority over personnel decisions (e.g., staff selection, deployment, dismissal), they report having little such authority in practice. Based on a series of interviews with a small sample of district and charter-school principals, the report shows that most district principals encounter a sizable gap between the extent and kinds of authority that leaders need to be effective and the authority that they actually have.