On Monday, the Fordham Foundation awarded its 2007 Prizes for Excellence in Education. This year's winners numbered four. Kati Haycock won the award for valor, while Paul Hill shared the prize for scholarship with Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom.
"If good ideas were all that mattered, everybody who has heard of Jeffrey Sachs would have heard of James Tooley as well--but they aren't, and you almost certainly haven't." So begins Clive Crook's perceptive tribute to
The bi-partisan, governor-led, Gates-funded, Aspen-housed Commission on No Child Left Behind has produced a report that should be called No Idea Left Behind. Unfortunately, only a fraction of those ideas are sound.
Jay P. Greene and Marcus A. WintersManhattan Institute's Center for Civic InnovationJanuary 2007
Brian Gill, Ron Zimmer, Jolley Christman, Suzanne BlancRAND CorporationFebruary 2007
Merit pay is controversial, especially when tied to student test scores. But if you really want to engulf the teacher lounges in acrimony, make the list of individual bonus winners (and losers) public for all the world to see.
This past week, as the temperature in Chicago dipped below zero, the Chicago Tribune's editorial board warmed itself by the ed reform fire.
Supporters of traditional math instruction were dealt a blow recently when the What Works Clearinghouse released its evaluation of elementary math curricula.
California Assemblyman Joe Coto apparently believes that the Golden State doesn't have enough problems getting kids to graduate from high school; he wants to tack on more requirements for the diploma. That's fine when the requirements are academic.
And you thought trying to compute high school graduation rates was complicated. Try figuring out the percentage of students who need "remedial" work once they enter the hallowed halls of higher education.
School reforms come and go. But educational determinism, it appears, goes on forever. By which I mean the view that schools are essentially powerless to accomplish much by way of learning gains, no matter what is done to or about them.
Fordham’s Dayton office is looking for a talented Project Administrator to join its small team of dedicated Ohio staffers. The Project Administrator will support Fordham’s charter school sponsorship efforts and perform general office management duties.
One of the toughest challenges facing charter schools, in Ohio and elsewhere, is the demands of serving children with special needs. Charter schools, like their district counterparts, educate any and all students who come to them (a fact still lost on many critics).
It’s no secret that my colleagues and I at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation have been critics of the Dayton Public Schools (DPS) over the past decade and have done our best--not good enough--to help create sound educational alternatives for kids whose prospects were blighted by the system’s disabilities.
A new bill making its way through the legislature in Arizona would provide state charter schools with the same amount of funding as traditional public schools. The proposed legislation would increase per-pupil funding by $852 for charters serving K-8 students, and $993 for charter high schools. All additional funding would be provided by the state.
Kevin DonnellyHardie Grant Books2007
Connecticut Coalition for Achievement NowJanuary 2007
For more than three decades, advocates of "whole-language" reading instruction have argued--to the delight of many teachers and public school administrators--that learning to read is a "natural" process for children.
School board meetings are the choicest venues to stage a culture war this side of the O'Reilly Factor. The best battles, of course, pit religion against science, faith against fact. And just when you thought this struggle was going stale, here comes Al Gore and his global warming docu-drama An Inconvenient Truth.
To instruct students on the artistic technique of chiaroscuro, a Renaissance innovation that contrasts dark colors with intense whites, a typical teacher might display Baglione's Sacred Love versus Profane Love or Rembrandt's
When New York elected Democratic attorney general Elliot Spitzer to succeed Republican George Pataki as governor, nobody knew exactly what tack he would take on education.
As we reported a few weeks ago ("Nothing easy in the Big Easy,"), every day brings new challenges to New Orleans's schools.
If you thought whole-language reading instruction had been relegated to the scrap heap of history, think again. Many such programs (proven to be ineffective) are still around, but they're hiding behind phrases like 'balanced literacy' in order to win contracts from school districts and avoid public scrutiny. Louisa Moats calls them out in Fordham's new report, Whole-Language High Jinks.
Human-robot interaction may have been occurring a long time ago, but until now we've seen few practical uses for robotics in education.
At Editorial Projects in Education, we were starting to wonder whether the reception to the latest edition of our Quality Counts report and its Chance-for-Success Index had been a bit too positive.
Teachers unions have lately taken a pummeling in the war of ideas (see here, for example) and yearn for some defending. Diane Ravitch provides it in this impassioned article from the AFT's flagship publication.
