Part I: Can Failing Schools Be Fixed
Even before the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act shot across the sky, many districts and states had embarked upon heroic efforts to identify failing schools and set them right.
Even before the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act shot across the sky, many districts and states had embarked upon heroic efforts to identify failing schools and set them right.
President Bush's 2004 budget previews many worthy education policy reforms, though in most cases the fine print remains to be written. Last week, I applauded the Administration's excellent Head Start initiative (http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=10#350).
Parents who call school district offices in New York City to try to transfer their children out of failing schools have a nearly 1 in 2 chance of getting the wrong information, two reporters from the New York Daily News found.
Anthony Bryk, Paul Peterson, and E.D. Hirsch have won the first annual Fordham prizes for excellence in education, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation announced this week. Bryk and Peterson will split a $25,000 prize for distinguished scholarship while Hirsch will receive his own $25,000 prize for valor.
If you missed the national conference on teacher compensation and evaluation sponsored by CPRE (Consortium for Policy Research in Education) in November 2002, you can now access most of its presentations online.
Anthony Alvarado, brought in by Superintendent Alan Bersin to lead a curriculum overhaul in San Diego, will leave the district by September. Bersin called his departure a mutual decision.
A review of world history textbooks used in U.S. classrooms found that they routinely sanitize the problems of Islam while treating events in Western history and Christianity more critically.
Peter BrimelowFebruary 2003
The Center on Education PolicyNovember 2002
The National Commission on Teaching and America's FutureJanuary 2003
Larry Cuban and Michael Usdan, editors, Teachers College PressDecember 2002
Paul Hill, The Progressive Policy InstituteJanuary 2003
Clive R. Belfield and Henry M. LevinNational Center for the Study of Privatization in EducationTeachers College, Columbia UniversityDecember 2002
Frederick Hess, the Progressive Policy InstituteJanuary 2003
While support for many federal agencies will remain flat, President Bush has proposed a large increase in funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities in his FY 2004 budget, with nearly all of the new dollars going to the "We the People" program. Created last year to encourage better understanding of U.S.
This week, the Bush Administration released its proposed multi-trillion dollar federal budget for 2004. Included is $75 million for a new Choice Incentive Fund that would allow the Department of Education to make competitive awards directly to states, local education agencies and community-based non-profit organizations with proven records of securing educational opportunities for children.
Last June, the parent of a high school senior in New York City examined reading passages on the state's high-stakes Regents exams and discovered that somebody was sanitizing literary excerpts - doctoring the reading passages by literary greats to make sure that nothing offensive was included.
Standard & Poor's this week released its second comprehensive analysis of Michigan's K-12 education system. The report, reviewing both academic and financial data from districts in the state, covers a five year period: 1996-97 through 2000-01.
Educators and parents are sometimes blamed for using medications like Ritalin to make overactive kids compliant and faulted for their inability to control their children without chemical assistance.
President Bush is in trouble with the Head Start establishment again, if you can believe The Washington Post, whose reporters on this beat seem to have swallowed the view that Head Start is swell and ought not be pushed to do anything different from what it's always done.
California State University officials report that 59 percent of freshman entering the university system this fall needed remediation in math or English, despite ranking in the top third of their high school classes and having a B average in high school.
A new book aimed at discovering why there are so few black and Hispanic professors points the finger at undergraduate affirmative action policies that steer minority students to schools where they don't achieve high grades.