How Program Officers at Education Philanthropies View Education
Tom Loveless, American Enterprise Institute April 2005
Tom Loveless, American Enterprise Institute April 2005
Linda Darling-Hammond, Deborah J. Holtzman, Su Jin Gatlin and Julian Vasquez HeiligStanford University2005
Michael H. Levine, Progressive Policy InstituteApril 2005
The Texas state House has overwhelmingly approved a new bill that would dramatically alter its textbook landscape.
Science magazine reports that researchers worry that the Department of Education's focus on medical-style randomized controlled trials in education research is premature, since the groundwork hasn't yet been laid for applying those techniques to education. "Rushing to do RCTs is wrongheaded and bad science," Alan Schoenfeld, a math education professor at Berkeley, told the magazine.
In 1998, San Diego City Schools launched one of the nation's most ambitious efforts at urban school reform. Superintendent Alan Bersin, former U.S. District Attorney for Southern California and President Clinton's "border czar," sought to reinvent the teaching and organization of the nation's eighth largest school district. In June, Bersin's stormy tenure will draw to a close.
Earlier this week, at an event marking the release of the new Koret Task Force volume, Within Our Reach: How America Can Educate Every Child, a key House Education Committee staff member made it clear - let us say, made it sharply clear - that No Child Left Behind would not, repeat not
The New York Times travels to State U and finds mega-sized classes, disengaged and anonymous students floating through their four (or increasingly four-and-a-half, or five, years of college), and an environment where books and studying have been replaced with beer bongs and "power hours" (a shot of beer every minute for an hour).
The selection of the New York City Department of Education as a finalist for the Broad award surprised many seasoned observers in our fair city, especially because of score declines in 2004 in some of the poorest neighborhoods.
Martin R. West and Paul R. Peterson, Program on Education Policy and GovernanceHarvard UniversityApril 2005
Paul E. Barton, Educational Testing Service February 2005Characteristics of Minority Students Who Excel on the SAT and in the ClassroomBrent Bridgeman and Cathy Wendler, Educational Testing ServiceJanuary 2005
Gary Miron, The Evaluation Center at Western Michigan UniversityApril 2005
Teachers, check up on your retirement plan immediately. The latest Forbes reveals that big insurance companies are peddling bad retirement plans to teachers - often with their unions' support.
The Florida class size amendment is causing problems again. Luckily, state schools chief John Winn is showing some useful flexibility in applying its regulations. Approximately 154,000 children are expected to enroll in Florida's new pre-kindergarten program, but the requirements of the class size amendment are causing a shortage in classroom space.
Columbia Journalism Review has a long essay in its March/April issue calling upon journalists to "get beyond" test scores in education reporting and not just accept the district or state's numbers, but also look at how numbers and policies are actually affecting the classroom.
Public school choice was the great promise of NCLB. It gave students in failing schools an escape hatch and reinforced NCLB's commitment to every child by providing low-income families with options long enjoyed by more affluent families.
Last week, the Ohio House of Representatives passed its state budget, which included a plan to provide 18,000 vouchers for more than 30 school districts in 2006 and double that number in 2007, which would make it the largest voucher program in the country.
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.