Unfinished Business: More Measured Approaches in Standards-Based Reform
Paul E. Barton Educational Testing ServiceJanuary 2005
Paul E. Barton Educational Testing ServiceJanuary 2005
John Cronin, G. Gage Kingsbury, Martha S. McCall, and Branin BoweNorthwest Evaluation AssociationApril 12, 2005
Lynn A. Karoly, James H. Bigelow RAND Corporation 2005
David Salisbury and James Tooley, editorsCato InstituteApril 2005
And you thought textbooks caused problems in the U.S. (see The Mad, Mad World of Textbook Adoption).
As students at Palm Springs Middle School were being let out for the day, they encountered a big blue fish with a simple message: Please don't eat me. Freda Fish (get it, free-da-fish?) was asking students to "Look not Hook" and handed out a pamphlet from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, "The Secret Lives of Fish." Unfortunately for Freda, the kids weren't buying it.
Even as negotiators announced the first concrete details of the new Denver pay for performance plan for teachers (see here for a profile of the program), its future is in jeopardy because of a looming conflict with the local union over pay, scheduling, and curricular issues.
With dozens of states throwing toddler-style tantrums vis-??-vis NCLB's rules and expectations, the Bush Administration is offering them a "new, common sense approach" to compliance.
George Will examines an Arizona referendum called the "65 percent rule," which reallocates school district budgets from bureaucracy to classrooms. If passed, it would require that at least 65 percent of district operational budgets be spent directly on "in the classroom" instruction - a worthy goal.
This week, the Broad Foundation announced the five finalists for its 2005 Prize for Urban Education, the "largest education award in the country given to a single school district." The nominees are: Aldine Independent School District (near Houston), Boston Public Schools, New York City Department of Education, Norfolk (Virginia) Public Schools, and the San Francisco Unified School District.
Several weeks ago, we echoed The Economist in worrying that "the new SAT, with its writing requirement and junking of the analogy section, might signal a return back to something like the old WASPocracy, since it will reward students who have been rigorously coached in essay-writing" (see