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Commentary
10.19.2005

Sex, drugs, and Mickey Mouse

"Seniors of Kellenberg Memorial High School - You've just had your prom cancelled. What are you going to do now?" Why, go to Disney World, of course. It seems the $20,000 rental house in the Hamptons and liquor-loaded chauffeured limousines became simply too much for the principal of Long Island's tony Catholic high school to accept. So he called the whole shebang off.

Commentary
10.19.2005

Stemming the tide

District schools in Columbus, Ohio, are finally exploring ways to bring students back into the fold. Why now? Because the exodus of students to charter schools is hitting the district in its pocketbook. Last spring, the district set its budget for 2005-2006 based on an estimate of 6,200 students taking the charter option. But so far this year, it's looking more like 7,100 students.

Commentary
10.19.2005

Charter schools rising

Even as Education Secretary Margaret Spellings and President Bush were struggling to shine the best possible light on (the mostly disappointing) 2005 NAEP scores (The Nation's Report Card), charter school supporters have reason to celebrate.

Commentary
10.19.2005

Entrance requirements - not just for college anymore

To Idaho, now, where the state Board of Education wants to implement high school entrance requirements. If enacted, all eighth-grade students would need to earn a cumulative C average in four subjects and pass pre-algebra before moving on. Those who do not will - presumably - be retained for another year. That's the catch, though.

Commentary
10.19.2005

A new wave of home schooling

The number of home schoolers is on the rise, thanks to the combined impacts of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Displaced residents, many grown tired of placing their children in new surroundings, have decided to take on the education burden themselves. In Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana's southern-most, school officials estimate that some 800 families are taking the do-it-yourself route.

Commentary
10.19.2005

What 'cha reading?

Mark Bauerlein

[Editor's Note: The following editorial draws on the 2004 long-term trend NAEP results. These should not be confused with the 2005 "main NAEP" reading results discussed in our October 19 press release, Gains on State Reading Test Evaporate on 2005 NAEP.]

Commentary
10.12.2005

Charters for New Orleans?

Good news is hard to come by in New Orleans these days, but this might qualify: the Orleans Parish's school board has agreed to charter all 13 schools in the city's West Bank.

Commentary
10.12.2005

Counting on faith

Strong self-esteem and personal ambition aren't lacking in American high school students, but the developed intellectual capacity to achieve those ambitions often is. A new study by the U.S.

Commentary
10.12.2005

End of reform in Gotham?

Sol Stern

When negotiations over a new labor contract between New York City's public school system and the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) got under way last year, Joel Klein went straight for the jugular. Schools chancellor Klein looked intent on slaying the dragon of obstructionist teacher unionism right in its birthplace.

Commentary
10.12.2005

Lefties for charters

Mayor Nagin isn't the only Democrat showing signs of interest in charter schools. The Los Angeles Times profiles Green Dot charter schools founder (and "Rock the Vote" creator) Steve Barr and his campaign to take over a struggling high school in L.A. Who are his strongest opponents?

Commentary
10.12.2005

Today's lunch? Perfectly offal.

Those who lament the often sorry state of American public education may content themselves with this Pyrrhic victory: American students don't eat raw innards at school, at least not yet. The word out of New Zealand, however, is that that country's students do, indeed, feast upon entrails in the classroom.

Commentary
10.12.2005

Unintended, but consequential

Talk about your unintended consequences. The No Child Left Behind Act made performance test scores transparent so that parents could make good decisions about their children's education and could put pressure on schools to pay attention to the needs of all of their students. The law's writers couldn't have foreseen pupils using the test scores to berate one another.

Commentary
10.5.2005

Big Apple teachers get a bigger bite

This week, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) and the Bloomberg administration reached agreement on a new contract for New York City public school educators (who worked without any contract for nearly two years). So who won?

Commentary
10.5.2005

The charter school ice cream parlor

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

What does the phrase "charter school" convey? A common working definition is an "independently operated public school of choice, freed from regulations but accountable for results." Yet all that such formulations of the charter school concept address are matters of structure, governance, and accountability.

Commentary
10.5.2005

SOS on SES

As Paul Peterson explains in the current issue of Education Next, at the heart of No Child Left Behind's free tutoring provision is a blatant conflict of interest, even for districts "in need of improvement" that are not allowed to provide the tutoring themselves: "If parents

Commentary
10.5.2005

Economic integration push-back

Michelle Godard Terrell

Thank you for the "schooled on class" piece, which ran in last week's Gadfly. I have lived in Wake County for the past 12 years, and my eldest child is in the county's public school system.

Commentary
10.5.2005

Maybe the dingo ate your syllabus

Australian parents worried about their children have less to fear from dingoes than from their country's schools. Federal Education Minister Brendan Nelson has released a report that contravenes pie-in-the-sky notions about the Land Down Under's outcomes-based curriculum.

Commentary
9.28.2005

The shirt off their backs

First there was carnival-gate (see here), and now we have uniform-gate. Toledo requires all its public elementary and middle school students to wear uniforms. Low-income families can apply to the district for free uniforms, which are paid for by Lucas County Job and Family Services.

Commentary
9.28.2005

Put your merit pay where your mouth is

The list of high-profile political leaders who talk about merit pay for teachers keeps growing. Gadfly has already noted that New York City's school chancellor Joel Klein is a supporter. Now we can add Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney to the list.