Hardwired to Connect: The New Scientific Case for Authoritative Communities
YMCA, Dartmouth Medical School and the Institute for American Values2003
YMCA, Dartmouth Medical School and the Institute for American Values2003
Julian R. Betts and PPIC's Andrew C. Zau and Lorien A. Rice, Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC)2003
Karl T. Kurtz, Alan Rosenthal, and Cliff Zukin, National Conference of State LegislaturesSeptember 2003
Christopher B. Swanson, Education Policy Center, The Urban InstituteAugust 2003
Christopher Mazzeo, National Governors Association's Center for Best PracticesSeptember 2003.
We welcome a new player on the education-choice team, the Hispanic Council for Reform and Educational Options, or Hispanic CREO. The group was launched today at the National Press Club, with a follow-up conference in Washington and the release of a new study on Hispanic students and choice, authored by Jay Greene of the Manhattan Institute.
The latest issue of National Review contains a special section on education, featuring Victor Davis Hanson (a contributor to Fordham's recent publication Terrorists, Despots, and Democracy: What Our Children Need to Know) on the Iraq War and college campuses.
In August, the Marysville, Washington school superintendent refused to comply with 30 union demands, including across-the-board raises that would have cost the district $14 million. And so, on September 1st - the first day of school, chosen to cause maximum chaos - Marysville teachers began what is about to become the longest strike in the state's history.
Standardized tests may be under attack in America but they turn out to be a godsend for Russian parents. That nation's college entrance exams, relics of the Communist era, are specific to each university and usually involve professors drilling applicants in an oral exam.
"If men were angels," Madison wrote in Federalist #51, "no government would be necessary."
Tom Loveless, Brown Center on Education Policy, Brookings Institution and RAND CorporationOctober 1, 2003
Jennifer King Rice, Economic Policy Institute2003
Joseph Viteritti, Political Science QuarterlySummer 2003
Colleges and universities pride themselves on being havens of diversity where the best and brightest of every race, creed, and color come together to teach, study, and conduct research. However, as any non-P.C. academic is apt already to have learned in painful ways, this commitment to diversity is generally skin-deep.
Among the many arguments that voucher opponents level against the D.C. voucher program is the supposed drain they would cause in the District's public school budget. This argument is nonsense, especially in D.C., where Congress is ready to sweeten the pot with quite a lot more money for the regular public-school system.
"Facts are stubborn things," John Adams famously wrote, "and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence." Nowhere is that truer than in education, where passions and wishes often take the place of hard information.
How to describe the bizarre chain of recent events in Michigan? It began when philanthropist Robert Thompson offered to build 15 charter schools in the educational wasteland of Detroit, at a cost of $200 million.
In Iowa and Philadelphia, teacher pay-for-performance plans are in serious jeopardy. In Iowa, lawmakers are considering scrapping their state's initiative, which was adopted back in 2001 but never really implemented due to budget constraints.
The debate over the D.C. voucher bill took a nasty turn in recent days, with Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA) accusing the GOP of using the voteless District as a guinea pig.
Lance D. Fusarelli, Palgrave Macmillan Inc. 2003
In May, Gadfly reported that the Los Angeles teachers union, United Teachers Los Angeles, had managed to unseat several reform-minded members to win back the majority of the Los Angeles Unified School District School Board [see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=24#103].
The Long Beach (CA) Unified School District has received this year's $500,000 Broad Prize for Urban Education, the nation's largest education prize. This prize recognizes urban school systems that have made the greatest strides in shrinking the achievement gaps among ethnic and socioeconomic groups.
Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, Simon and SchusterOctober 2003
John R. Logan, Deirdre Oakley and Jacob Stowell, Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research, Harvard UniversitySeptember 1, 2003
Elizabeth McPike et al., Albert Shanker InstituteSeptember 2003
There's nothing like a little old-fashioned blackmail. . . . The Wall Street Journal reports that education unions are increasingly turning to powerful allies in their fight against education privatization and outsourcing: public employee retirement funds and their billions of investment dollars.
A fascinating Education Week profile features Mike Antonucci, author of the Education Intelligence Agency's invaluable weekly Communique on doings within the teacher unions (http://members.aol.com/educationintel/communique.htm).
A state's academic standards are the recipes from which its education system cooks. A gifted chef may produce tasty dishes without great cookbooks, but most people's food isn't apt to be much better than its recipes.