There is a right way and many wrong ways to crack down on poorly performing charter schools. This week, Ohio's attorney general decided, unfortunately, that it's better to hold a few hundred children hostage in court than to let established law operate to cure what ails two Dayton-area charter schools (see here).
Douglas N. Harris and Tim R. SassNational Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education ResearchMarch 2007
Elena RochaCenter for American ProgressAugust 2007
Two items in the Miller-McKeon NCLB reauthorization bill seem to be shoe-ins for making their way into federal law. The impetus behind both is to ensure that districts spend as much on schools serving poor students as they do on schools serving more affluent children.
People with clear, strong views usually attract critics as well as admirers, and Bill Evers is no exception.
Do you think of the achievement gap as an inner-city phenomenon? Think again. The Baltimore Sun reports that an alarming number of middle-class African-American students in suburban schools are having a difficult time passing the state's high school exit exams in algebra, English, biology, and government.
Fifteen years ago, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, then mayor of Neuilly, walked into a nursery school where a bomb-strapped man was holding students hostage and strolled out 30 minutes later with all the children.
Pray for Jonathan Kozol, who today enters the 70th day of his "partial fast" in protest over NCLB and, one assumes, to promote his new book. What is a "partial fast"?
Gadfly has been called a lot of things, but never a prophet--until now. It was a mere four years ago that we asked, "Why not religious charter schools?" The world's three great monotheistic religions heard us.
The Ohio Department of Education's recent state report card illuminated continuing academic problems in both public district and charter schools. The report card comes on the heels of newspaper stories highlighting auditing and recordkeeping difficulties in some charter schools. Brian L.
The case against the archaic, seniority-before-all-else system of teacher retention in Ohio's schools was never made clearer than with the July "riffing" of Dayton Public Schools teacher Homer Knightstep.
The Ohio Grantmakers Forum recently hosted a conversation between Lt. Governor Lee Fisher and leaders in Ohio's philanthropic community on growing the state's economy.
The NewSchools Venture Fund recently released a report highlighting key insights from its May meeting in New Orleans, now the epicenter of educational reform efforts in America.
KIPP is opening the first of a cluster of schools in Columbus, Ohio, next summer and needs a passionate, high energy executive director at the helm. Learn more about this opportunity here.
Malcolm Gladwell's 2000 bestseller The Tipping Point looks at "social epidemics"-when popular ideas and behavior "tip" quickly (and often unexpectedly) then die out as fast as they started.
I commend last week's spotlight on Florida Virtual School (FLVS) and its 10th anniversary ("A happy anniversary," August 30, 2007). But your commentary confused two very different types of virtual schooling programs.
Once upon a time, before U.S. schools were desegregated, the District of Columbia's Dunbar High School provided a top-flight education to the city's black elite and future leaders--so much so that families moved to Washington so their kids could go to school there.
Economics sage Bob Samuelson (my college classmate, if you're interested) wrote last week a characteristically perceptive column, titled "The Economic Catch-22." Observing that "We are now in the ‘blame phase' of the economic cycle," he asked whether peopl
Gadfly doesn't consider himself a moral crusader, much less a moral alarmist. But he is--and The Australian newspaper is his mouthpiece.
Do not come to school in Indianapolis with your trousers sagging, your shirttail fluttering or your logo-flaunting apparel. For you shall be turned away. The city has just adopted a strict dress code. High school students, for example, must wear solid-colored shirts, either in white or their school's official color. Pants should be tan, black, or navy; go gray and go home.
The last several years have witnessed an explosion in the number of students taking Advanced Placement courses--a laudable trend, on the whole.
Phi Delta Kappa's recent audit of the Wake County (North Carolina) Public School System should be viewed with healthy skepticism. Case in point: the educators group recommended that Wake tighten its "very liberal" policy on "site-based decision making" (i.e., the central office should give principals less autonomy).
National Charter School Research Project, University of WashingtonAugust 2007
It's back-to-school season, which means it must be time for a prominent news outlet to decry the teacher-turnover "crisis." Enter the New York Times, whose front-page story quotes all the usual suspects saying all the usual things. "The problem is not mainly with retirement," explains the president of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future.
Michelle Rhee, the District of Columbia's dynamic new schools chancellor, is already impressing parents, teachers, and the ever-cynical media with her no-nonsense style (she wants to fire bureaucrats and slim down the central office) and refreshing sense of urgency.
All California asks of its twelfth-graders is to pass an exit exam (you get six tries!) that tests ninth-grade standards in reading and seventh-grade standards in math. Ninety-three percent of the class of 2007 passed it. Results from that class also showed rising success rates for African-American, Latino, and poor youngsters.
It is no longer sufficient for ambitious high school seniors, bent on impressing college admissions committees, to distinguish themselves through their accomplishments. Now they're being encouraged to make creative errors. Steven Roy Goodman is an independent college counselor who advises his clients to purposefully screw up their applications. "Sometimes it's a typo," he said.
