The Education Pipeline in the United States 1970-2000
Walt Haney, George Madaus, Lisa Abrams, Anne Wheelock, Jing Miao, and Ileana GruiaBoston CollegeJanuary 2004
Walt Haney, George Madaus, Lisa Abrams, Anne Wheelock, Jing Miao, and Ileana GruiaBoston CollegeJanuary 2004
We have only one concern at the news that litigator Clint Bolick of the Institute for Justice will shortly leave that group to head the new School Choice Alliance (formed by the merger of the American Education Reform Council, the American Education Reform Foundation, and Children First America) - that the school choice movement may lose his incisive lawyerly mind in future court battles.
Meave O'Marah, Kenneth Klau, Theodor Rebarber, AccountabilityWorks and the Education Leaders CouncilFebruary 2004
Articles by Frederick M. Hess, Linda Nathan, Joe Nathan, Ray Bacchetti, and Evans Clinchy, Phi Delta KappanFebruary 2004
Good news and bad from Georgia, where the state's Professional Standards Commission recently announced that teachers needn't earn an education degree but can be certified if they pass both the state's certification exam and a standardized content knowledge test called the "principles of learning and teaching." While teachers certified through this alternative process will still have to undergo
The New York State Council for the Social Studies recently released the agenda for its annual conference, to be held in balmy Rochester in March.
In The Language Police, Diane Ravitch lifted the veil on the way "bias committees" at major publishing houses sanitize and censor the information presented in student tests and textbooks.
Last week, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and schools chief Joel Klein (two men who've been at the point of Gadfly's rapier wit more than once) declared that they would hold back third-graders who fail the state's standardized exam. But only after the second failure, and only after the students take summer school for six weeks - and an appeals process will be built in to the plan.
A small intellectual brush fire has broken out among American liberals concerning the No Child Left Behind act.
A notice in the Federal Register seldom elicits more than a yawn from anyone but a few affected bureaucrats and the special interests organized to hound them. But the Department of Education's regulations for educating and testing disabled students under NCLB deserve much wider attention.
Two bills now before the Tennessee General Assembly question the reliability and worth of the Tennessee Value Added Assessment System (TVAAS), which was implemented 14 years ago in a trailblazing effort to track student progress, measure whether students were making suitable yearly academic gains, and estimate the effectiveness of their teachers.
Sandra Thompson and Martha Thurlow, National Center on Educational OutcomesDecember 2003
Achieve, Inc., The Education Trust, and The Thomas B. Fordham FoundationFebruary 2004
Department for Education and Skills, United KingdomFebruary 2004
The federal budget process is something of a kabuki drama, with affected special interests acting out their ritualized poor-mouthing on cue. This is especially the case for Fiscal 2005, in which the White House gave the Department of Education a $1.7 billion increase in a very tight fiscal environment.
Former IBM CEO Lou Gerstner once said, "Never confuse activity with results." New York City Deputy Schools Chancellor Diana Lam could do well to learn that lesson. Unfortunately, rather than judging schools by results, Lam and her team have focused on mandating superficial activity for teachers - apparently assuming that teachers, left to their own devices, could never do right by students.
Jake Bogdanovich, an Ohio senior randomly chosen to take a standardized test to gauge his district's progress toward meeting the goals of a school reform program, decided to engage in a little sabotage. As he observed, no "scholarship opportunities" were connected to the test, nor would its outcome be reflected on his report card.
In an editorial, USA Today notes that the 15,000 National Merit Scholars are not just chosen on the basis of, well, merit, but also geography. That is, scholarships are apportioned to each state based on the number of graduating seniors in that state relative to the number nationwide.
Education and political circles are buzzing with talk of the unfair burdens that Congress has allegedly heaped upon states and districts via the No Child Left Behind Act.
This week, California Education Secretary Richard Riordan introduced a plan that would cede control over a school's administration and budget to its principal, taking it away from the central office administration. A hearty thumbs-up for this fine proposal, but now we learn that some principals would just as soon have the buck stop with someone else.
Last week, we reported that the Utah House Education Committee sent a bill to the floor barring state schools from "any further participation in the No Child Left Behind Act." (See http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=133#1656 for background info.) Now it seems that legislators have decided that, while they
Jack Jennings, Center on Education PolicyJanuary 2003
Brian Stecher and Sheila Nataraj Kirby, editorsRAND Education2004
Over the course of the past several years, education policy makers have increasingly looked to non-traditional education reforms as means both of correcting traditional public education inequities and of improving the state of education overall. In Florida, one of the first states to implement statewide accountability and reform measures, the results have been encouraging.
We're all for civics in our schools but this version is outrageous. Next week, schools in the two big districts in the Maryland suburbs of D.C., Montgomery and Prince George's counties, will close two hours early so their students and teachers can attend a rally in the state capital to protest planned cuts in the state education budget.
The Georgia Performance Standards, the new curriculum proposed by the Department of Education for the public schools of Georgia, is a giant step forward for students and teachers in the Peachtree State.
Two articles put us in mind of the old but trusty clich??, it's all about the kids. In the Washington Post, Bruce Fuller of UC-Berkeley offers a few suggestions for fixes to No Child Left Behind, some of which strike us as sensible.