Model Contractor Standards & State Responsibilities for State Testing Standards
S.E. Phillips and Theodor Rebarber, AccountabilityWorks and the Education Leaders CouncilJune 2002
S.E. Phillips and Theodor Rebarber, AccountabilityWorks and the Education Leaders CouncilJune 2002
The Partnership for ReadingSeptember 2001
Block scheduling caused the test scores of high school students in Iowa to drop, according to a new study by Iowa State University. The popular reform, which ordinarily divides the school day into four 80-to-90 minute classes instead of the traditional schedule of eight classes of 45-to-50 minutes each, led to "markedly lower" ACT scores.
John W. Oswald and Theodor Rebarber, AccountabilityWorks and the Education Leaders CouncilJune 2002
edited by Edward J. Dirkswager2002
edited by Kenneth K. Wong and Margaret C. Wang2002
Students in approximately 8,600 schools across the country must be given the option to attend a higher-performing school this year because the school they currently attend has failed to make adequate yearly progress, U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige announced last week.
After nine months of labor, the President's Commission on Excellence in Special Education has given birth to a stunning report.
Diane Ravitch and Checker Finn warn that a House-passed bill to overhaul the Department of Education's office of educational research and improvement would damage the federal government's ability to report on the condition of education.
During the National Education Association's annual meeting in Dallas last week, delegates voted to spend several millions to promote the union's agenda for the new No Child Left Behind Act, an unprecedented mobilization around a single issue, according to Mike Antonucci, who filed riveting daily reports on the union conclave for his own Education Intelligence Agency (EIA).
Now that the Supreme Court has shifted the school choice debate back to the political arena, policymakers should abandon their tired assumptions about choice and create a new model of schools based on the principle of "accountable choice," argues the Progressive Policy Institute's Andy Rotherham.
Convinced that the leadership battles between board and superintendent were creating a crisis for the Pittsburgh school district, three major local foundations announced that they were indefinitely suspending all funding to the district.
Facing a Ron Unz-sponsored ballot initiative this fall that would gut the state's bilingual education program, the Massachusetts House of Representatives passed a bill Tuesday that would revamp the Bay State's bilingual program in more limited ways.
In November, the NAACP challenged all fifty states to produce five-year plans to dramatically reduce the academic achievement gap between white and minority students. By last Sunday, when the NAACP opened its national convention, all but eleven states had submitted action plans.
The summer 2002 issue of American Educator, the A.F.T.'s flagship publication, now edited by Ruth Wattenberg, continues this quarterly's fine record of serious, thoughtful, constructive and nicely presented work.
It's not often that a study published in the journal Sociology of Education makes the front page of The Washington Post, but that's what happens when the study's findings suggest that sending junior to Andover may not have been such a good idea after all.
On the Newsweek website last week, Jonathan Alter tried to debunk the notion that the Supreme Court's ruling will turn the educational and political tides in favor of vouchers and Republicans who favor them. ("America still hates vouchers") Mickey Kaus quickly refuted Alter in his Kausfiles column on Slate.
According to school choice critic Richard Kahlenberg, private school vouchers will never work because successes with small pilot-level voucher programs (which help some students at the expense of others) cannot be replicated when taken to scale.