Huzzah for Florida Virtual School (FLVS), which just turned ten! Such celebratory language is appropriate, for the Sunshine State, home to many school reform innovations, has yet again provided a successful model for reinventing k-12 education for the 21st century.
The debate over charter schools in the Buckeye State continued last week when the Coalition for Public Education (CPE)-a group that has filed numerous lawsuits against charters and the charter school program over the years-held a news conference to unveil its
In 2005, Ohio voters overwhelmingly approved a plan to spend an extra $1.6 billion in bond money (increasing the program to $2 billion over 10 years) to support high-tech science research and industries in the state (see here).
The Mind Trust-a non-profit group supporting education innovation in Indianapolis-is offering Education Entrepreneur Fellowships to extraordinary individuals to develop strategies and launch initiatives that will transform public education. Learn more here.
Executives get bonuses when their companies excel, so why not give teachers a bump in pay when their students do the same?
Schools are under increasing pressure to boost the test scores of their special education students. And according to the Wall Street Journal (which is running a series about mainstreaming), many schools have responded to that pressure not by working harder, but by exploiting loopholes.
The debate about "mainstreaming"--whether students are best served in "regular" settings instead of segregated, specialized ones--is typically reserved for discussions of special education (see below). But this week's Time magazine considers mainstreaming (and its opposite) in the context of America's most gifted children.
True or false: NCLB considers teachers going through alternate routes to certification (like those employed by Teach For America) to be "highly qualified." False, charges a new lawsuit filed by "a coalition of pare
Someone call Jay Greene--officials are now naming schools after nonexistent historical figures! Our fourth president officially has a middle initial in Ogden, Utah, though it would be news to him. Seems someone submitted the name "James A.
The idea is simple: Allow low-performing schools to extend learning time by using money previously allotted to students for out-of-school tutoring. It's also simply wrong. A more blatant attack on the small amount of choice NCLB gives to parents and their children would be difficult to conceive.
What can we learn from the recent pronouncements by Jack O'Connell, California's state superintendent of public instruction, that race, not poverty, is the cause of the most distressing achievement gaps in his state and the nation?
One of the indisputable successes of NCLB is that it shines a bright light on the dimmest schools in the country. A decade ago, underperforming schools were free to languish in relative obscurity.
Phil Gonring, Paul Teske, and Brad JuppHarvard Education Press2007
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution wants to know why people in positions of authority are keeping parents in the dark about the quality of their child's teacher, whom they will meet next week for the first time. "Many of those parents have no real idea of the teacher's capabilities," the editorial board explains.
In 2005, Demarcus Bolton learned that he was one of 20 Atlanta high-schoolers who would receive a $1,000 scholarship from City Councilman H. Lamar Willis's charitable foundation. Two years later, Bolton remains scholarship-less. After calling Willis's office repeatedly, he finally gave up. "I just let it go because I was tired of being lied to," he said.
It's tough to know what to make of them, those who cling to the idea that social engineering will cure the ailments of public education's sickest parts. John Edwards belongs in that camp.
As Gadfly recently noted , prospects for Congressional bi-partisanship for the renewal of NCLB are eroding. George Miller and Buck McKeon appear to hold very different views--this month, anyway--as to what's wrong, what's right, and what needs fixing, and how NCLB 2.0 should differ from the first iteration.
Call it double-time, academic style. In March, the Pennsylvania National Guard launched a three-week GED prep class, completed in basic training, for those who signed up to serve but didn't finish high school. The program isn't easy (students are in class nine hours a day, and rise at 4:45 a.m. for physical training) but seems to be working. Of the 120 enrolled so far, 85 have received GEDs.
We provoked a bit of a stir with last week's piece, featured in the Wall Street Journal and Gadfly, titled (by the Journal's editors) "Not By Geeks Alone." Most of that stir was intentional.
Since the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), schools have ramped up instructional time in reading and math but are spending less time teaching things like history, social studies, science, and the arts-subjects not tested under the federal law (see
The powerful forces bearing down on Ohio and public education here were nicely encapsulated in two recent Dayton Daily News articles.
The Charter School Growth Fund is seeking charter management and support organizations to participate in a six-month project to develop strategic business plans, financial models, and implementation plans for expansion. At the conclusion of the project, selected organizations will receive multi-year grants and loan packages to help with the costs associated with expansion.
In June, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute released a study of Ohio's teacher pension system entitled Golden Peaks and Perilous Cliffs: Rethinking Ohio's Teacher Pension System. This report has triggered much overdue public debate in Ohio and beyond regarding teacher pension systems and their interaction with school-improvement efforts.
U.S. Government Accountability OfficeJuly 2007
National Center for Education StatisticsJuly 2007
There was much to praise in Judge Sharon Gleason's late June decision rejecting claims that Alaska's schools are underfunded, and noting that traditional concepts of "local control" must be abandoned when schools repeatedly fail to educate kids. But there was much to criticize, too. In her ruling in Moore v.
