America's Meltdown: Why We Are Losing the Skills Wars and What We Can Do About It
Edward E. Gordon, Imperial Consulting Corporation, November 2001
Edward E. Gordon, Imperial Consulting Corporation, November 2001
In Chicago, 55 percent of public high school students attend schools outside their neighborhoods. The mobile students are often the better students, who can today apply to a growing array of magnet schools and programs throughout the school district. A series of articles in last month's Catalyst take a close look at the schools left behind. The 12 least popular neighbor
Will the new feeling of national unity in the aftermath of terrorist attacks set the stage for a turn away from multicultural education, which de-emphasizes the common American culture and teaches children to take pride in their own racial ethnic and national origins instead?
While the costs and benefits of annual tests were debated at great length last year, analysts of the new "No Child Left Behind" education legislation are getting more excited about an opportunity created by those tests: the ability to identify effective schools and teachers using annual test scores. In a 9-page paper for the Lexington Institute, Robert Holland explains how statistical ana
Welcome to 2002. Allow me to open it by recalling nine great obstacles to serious education reform in America - and the (mostly obvious) changes we must make to break through them. You may, if you like, regard the latter as New Year's resolutions.We know more about the quality of our dishwashers than the quality of our children's schools.
If you feel amused or provoked by anything you read in the Education Gadfly, write us at [email protected]. From time to time, we publish correspondence that we think might interest other readers, such as the following letter.
James J. Kemple, Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, December 2001
Craig D. Jerald, The Education Trust, 2001
edited by Diane Ravitch and Joseph P. Viteritti, 2001
If you've been on another planet this week, you may not have heard that Congress passed the long awaited E.S.E.A. bill, which President Bush intends to sign in January. If you were out of our solar system all year, you might not know that this legislation requires states to test every student in grades 3 through 8 and report the results broken down by subgroup (e.g.
Just how different ARE charter schools? Everyone knows that their governance is freer, their budgets leaner and their longevity less certain than regular public schools, but how different is what actually goes on inside them? Is it anything that students, parents and teachers would notice? Anything that might make them produce better results?
While some see charter schools as a radical experiment of the 1990's, the model is actually over 200 years old, according to an article by Susan Hollins of the New Hampshire Charter School Resource Center.
A New Yorker piece by Malcolm Gladwell tells the fascinating tale of a working-class kid from Brooklyn who turned the world of college admissions testing upside down. As you read the article, it's hard not to root for Stanley H.
James Tooley, 2001
Brian P. Gill, P. Michael Timpane, Karen E. Ross and Dominic J. Brewer, RAND, 2001
David E. Campbell, Pioneer Institute for Public Policy Research, September 2001
A recent study by the Manhattan Institute's Jay Greene (High School Graduation Rates in the United States) shone a spotlight on the enormous number of students who disappear from school attendance rolls between 8th grade and 12th grade but aren't counted in any official dropout statistics.
It's not only in the world of education research that ideology sometimes trumps scientific evidence; the folks who study drug-prevention programs for children can be hostile to research-based practices as well.
The teachers who have worked their way to the top of today's education system were hired at a time when fewer professional opportunities were open to all and when choosing a lifelong career was the norm. By contrast, today's new teaching candidates have many attractive career options and very different expectations about career mobility and job security.
As Enron, the giant energy company, plummeted toward bankruptcy from its one-time market value of $80 billion, business and finance experts bestirred themselves to try to explain what had gone wrong and what lessons could be drawn from this corporate calamity.One such account appeared in the December 4 Wall Street Journal in the form of a perceptive op ed by Joe Berardino, managin
In last week's Gadfly, we reported on efforts by the government of Pakistan to rein in some state-funded Islamic schools that breed extremism and violence and provide incentives for teaching modern subjects like science, math, computers, and English. Hopefully these efforts to promote liberal education in Pakistan will be more sincere than they have been in the schools run by the P
Why are school finance litigators jumping for joy over the imminent passage of President Bush's education plan? In the December Washington Monthly, Siobhan Gorman explains that the detailed test scores that will eventually emerge from the plan - which requires that states annually test students in grades 3 through 8 in reading and math - will be a "potential bonanza" for lawyers ho
The General Accounting Office issued this report at the behest of four Senators. It offers the first close look we've ever seen at the federal government's own two "school systems," the one run by the Interior Department's Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) with 47,000 pupils and the one run by the Defense Department (DOD) with 108,000 students.
National Center for Education Statistics, December 2001
Donna Walker James, Sonia Jurich and Steve Estes, American Youth Policy Forum, 2001
edited by Don McAdams, Paul Hill and Jim Harvey, Center for Reform of School Systems, 2001
edited by Paul Peterson and David Campbell, The Brookings Institution, 2001
Eric A. Hanushek, John F. Kain and Steve G. Rivkin, National Bureau of Economic Research, November 2001
In an article in Adolescent Medicine, Paul Hill explains why most large, urban high schools are not only ineffective but actually harmful to adolescents - especially low-income and minority students - and what can be done about them. These schools are widely known to be plagued by low standards, poorly qualified teachers, frequent leadership changes, violence and a lack of decorum,