Dead stop on Head Start reform
First, there was the Bush administration's proposal to reform Head Start. [See http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=10#350.] That proved too strong for the House, which watered the measure down.
First, there was the Bush administration's proposal to reform Head Start. [See http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=10#350.] That proved too strong for the House, which watered the measure down.
If you're planning some summer reading, allow us to suggest "An Impossible Job?
Gadfly is pleased to note that Phoebe Cottingham has been named commissioner of the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance at the Department of Education (within the new Institute for Education Sciences that replaced the old Office of Educational Research and Improvement).
With states aflutter over how to meet NCLB's mandate that they must guarantee a "highly qualified teacher in every classroom," two recent reports are illuminating.Last month, Education Secretary Rod Paige issued his second annual report on teacher quality ("Meeting the Highly Qualified Teachers Challenge" or
Richard P. Phelps, with a foreword by Herbert J. Walberg and a preface by J.E. Stone, Transaction Publishers2003
Alliance for Excellent EducationJuly 2003
Erika Frankenberg and Chungmei Lee, The Civil Rights Project, Harvard UniversityJuly 2003
Gail Jones, Brett Jones, and Tracy Hargrove, Rowman and Littlefield2003
Former Los Angeles school board president Caprice Young, who warmed the hearts of education reformers during her four years in office and accomplished more than anyone expected with that sprawling, balky school system, has agreed to head a newly formed organization that will support the 400+ charter schools in California and help others get started.
James Tooley has spent years documenting how private education can work wonders for low-income students in international settings.
Florida's Opportunity Scholarship program, which lets students in persistently failing schools use a publicly funded voucher at the school of their choice, is doubling in size as more and more families in the (so far) nine failing Florida schools become aware of their options.
Gadfly tries not to read the political tea leaves, preferring a just-the-facts approach. But when the senior Senator from California, Democratic impresario, and teachers' union darling Dianne Feinstein comes out in favor of private school vouchers, something important is going on. Feinstein has emerged as a potential swing vote in the Senate, where foes of the D.C.
Across the country, art and music programs in schools are being squeezed by contracting budgets and the demands of No Child Left Behind, which places the curricular focus on reading and math. Devotees of these programs are fighting back with letter-writing campaigns and a website, http://www.supportmusic.com/index-home.html.
With encouragement from the Council of Great City Schools and various dispensations and special funding from the powers that be at NAEP, a handful of America's big-city school systems are doing something gutsy and important: administering the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests to representative samples of their 4th and 8th graders and allowing the results to be reported just as i
Those who would change the teaching profession by instituting pay incentives tied to performance can learn some things about teacher attitudes toward the issue from the latest Public Agenda study, Stand By Me. Here, I'd like to focus on what teachers told us was a glaring flaw in the public schools and what they would support to solve it.
We don't always agree with every single thing the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has to say about education but they're growing wiser with age, particularly when it comes to charter (and private) schools.
Jay P. Greene, Greg Forster, and Marcus A. Winters, Manhattan InstituteJuly 2003
Krista KaferThe Heritage FoundationMay 2003
National Center for Education StatisticsJuly 2003
Educational Testing ServiceMay 2003
As reported in Gadfly several weeks ago, Teach for America has feared for some time that it would be wounded by the drastic funding cuts for the national service program AmeriCorps.
By an overwhelming margin, the U.S. House of Representatives has raised the stakes on teacher preparation. The Ready to Teach Act, passed last week by a 404-17 vote, would make the passage rate of graduates of teacher training colleges a factor in awarding federal dollars to those institutions.
In a decision the Las Vegas Review-Journal called "stunning," Nevada's highest court overturned a referendum twice passed by state voters that requires a supermajority of legislators to approve new tax increases. The basis: a desire to increase school funding.
Gadfly is generally unsympathetic to unexcused absences. But this time we'll make an exception. Last week, the House Government Reform committee passed a bill authorizing education vouchers in the nation's capital on a close-to-party-line vote of 22-21. Only the absence of opponent Representative Major Owens (D-N.Y.) saved the bill from being stalled in committee by a tie, which D.C.
This is the second of the annual teacher quality reports that the Secretary of Education is required by No Child Left Behind to submit to Congress. Like last year's, the news in this report is mixed. Thirty-five states have linked their teacher certification requirements to student content standards; six are in the process of doing so.
"We expect," wrote Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, on behalf of a 5-4 Supreme Court majority okaying race-based affirmative action in the recent Michigan cases, "that 25 years from now the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today." [For Gadfly's coverage, see h
It's a fairly typical slow-news-day article about American students' appalling lack of civic and historical knowledge. (The article opens with a Mississippi state senator quizzing local high school seniors on the three unalienable rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence.
International Reading Association2003