Caps, Gowns, and Games: High School Graduates and NCLB
Christopher B. Swanson, The Urban InstituteMay 2003
Christopher B. Swanson, The Urban InstituteMay 2003
After a five-year battle to replace Minnesota's disgraceful Profile of Learning standards with a more rigorous set of academic standards and accountability - a fight led by Governor Tim Pawlenty and education secretary Cheri Pearson Yecke-the state legislature finally reached a bipartisan agreement to repeal the standards minutes before the close of this year's session.
A recent article in the Sacramento Bee uncovered a questionable education finance plan in California dating back to 1979 that forces the state to provide extra money to schools that meet bare minimum requirements for carrying out state mandates.
As Checker says, it's true that we need better school leadership to improve American K-12 education. With a large percentage of U.S.
On Tuesday, union-backed (and incumbent) Los Angeles Board of Education member David Tokofsky defeated challenger Nellie Rios-Parra in a key runoff election that shifted the board's balance of power back to the union.
Last year, in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that public money could cover tuition costs for children at private schools. Now, the Court is being asked to rule on whether tax dollars can cover scholarships, textbooks, and other types of aid for the study of religion in higher ed institutions.
Report of the National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and CollegesApril 2003
Sol Stern, Encounter BooksMay 2003
Alliance for Excellent EducationApril 2003
Kevin Bushweller, Project Editor, Education WeekMay 8, 2003
Anthony P. Carnevale and Stephen J. RoseCentury FoundationMarch 2003
Last week, the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) released a report on the costs to states of implementing the testing requirements of No Child Left Behind. Not surprisingly, this doesn't seem to have settled any of the NCLB funding fuss.
The war in Iraq got columnist Michael Barone thinking: America's military is chock full of the underskilled, undereducated graduates produced by so many schools. What happened in the intervening years to turn them into the determined, competent soldiers who toppled Saddam's regime?
Last week I began to "debate myself" about the No Child Left Behind act, covering five NCLB issues that make me, and many others, ambivalent about this ambitious undertaking. [http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=21#125]That was not the end of it. Five more issues warrant pro-con examination.
Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown went to the California General Assembly last week to lobby for a bill that would allow nonprofit groups, colleges and universities, and mayors to authorize charter schools in that state.
Last August, when New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg brought in Joel Klein as schools chancellor to help implement his Children First reform initiative, United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten came out in support of the mayor and his education plans.
RAND Mathematics Study Panel2003
The American Institutes for Research and SRI InternationalApril 2003
Paul Gagnon, Albert Shanker Institute2003
David N. Plank and Gary Sykes, editors, Teachers College PressApril 2003
In January, Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty announced his plan to kill the five year old "Profile of Learning" standards, which focus on measuring "higher-order thinking" based on projects and reports instead of traditional pencil and paper tests, and replace them with new, more rigorous content-based academic standards.
The Hoover Institution's Eric Hanushek seeks a silver lining to California's budgetary clouds. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, he contends that this could be the time to free California from the costly "straitjacket" of class-size reduction and thereby free some resources for more effective achievement-boosting strategies.
On Tuesday, the Princeton Review released its second annual ranking of the states' testing and accountability systems - rendered all the more timely by the requirements of NCLB.
Readers of these columns know that I've been a wee bit ambivalent about the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act. So when I was asked to discuss it at the recent educator awards ceremony of the Milken Family Foundation, the likeliest - and most boring - approach was to give an equivocal speech, full of buts, howevers and maybes. Yawn.
In his New York Times column this week, the curmudgeonly Michael Winerip attempts to discredit the voucher movement by questioning Harvard scholar Paul Peterson's findings from a 2000 study of a New York City voucher experiment - a study that, according to Peterson's team, showed vouchers significantly improving achievement for black students.
Last week, District of Columbia Mayor Anthony Williams shocked both voucher friends and foes when he came out publicly in support of an experimental D.C. voucher program. In February, when the White House released its 2004 budget proposal, which included funding for the D.C. voucher program, Mayor Williams, along with D.C. school board president Peggy Cooper Cafritz and D.C.
This report, published jointly by the Fordham Institute and The Broad Foundation, contends that American public education faces a 'crisis in leadership' that cannot be alleviated from traditional sources of school principals and superintendents. Its signers do not believe this crisis can be fixed by conventional strategies for preparing, certifying and employing education leaders. Instead, they urge that first-rate leaders be sought outside the education field, earn salaries on par with their peers in other professions, and gain new authority over school staffing, operations and budgets.
Policy Study Associates, Inc. October 2002