Is There a Plateau Effect in Test Scores?
Naomi Chudowsky and Victor ChudowskyCenter on Education PolicyJuly 2009
Naomi Chudowsky and Victor ChudowskyCenter on Education PolicyJuly 2009
Government Accountability OfficeJune 2009
Detroit's schools are in a pickle and state-appointed emergency financial manager Robert Bobb is ready to extricate them from the brine.
President Obama's attention to high school dropout rates has brought an already-contentious issue to the national scene. The U.S. can hardly be expected to compete in a global economy with so many of its young people failing to make it to and through their senior years, or so the argument goes.
It appears increasingly likely that President Obama and Secretary Duncan are at risk of doing to charter schooling, merit pay, and school "turnarounds" what the Bush administration did to educational accountability. That's not meant as a compliment.
Violent video games are no new addition to the world of electronic entertainment; it seems hardly a jump, skip, or hop, then, to find iPhone apps with those same violent tendencies. But not all material is acceptable for target practice. RetardedArts, developer of the iPhone app "Zombie School," was a bit slow on this realization.
Gadfly would be the first to admit he's gotten his wings a bit sticky over at Flypaper; the best blogging is provocative, which sometimes provokes angry reactions. Michele Kerr, a recent graduate of the Stanford Teacher Education Program, learned that lesson the hard way.
Gadfly couldn't be more pleased that Hunter College ed school dean David Steiner will be moving to Albany in October as the new New York state education commissioner. Steiner brings ample reform credentials to the table.
This paper aims to promote a clearer understanding of the graduation-rate debate by distilling the policy developments and controversy surrounding the measurement of these rate. Why are there so many different ways to calculate graduation rates? How do these different rates account for the multiple pathways to graduation? What are the data sources used in the various dropout-rate calculations, and what are their pros and cons?
Graduation rates. We all know that defining and measuring them has been the source of much contentious discussion in recent years.