Commentary
Time is on our side
An article in this week's Time accurately lays out the crucial battle taking place between the Feds and the states over NCLB.
Commentary
Top dogs
Newsweek's annual ranking of America's best high schools (using the system devised by Washington Post education writer Jay Mathews) is out, alerting readers to some high-performing but relatively unknown schools. Top dog this year is Jefferson County International Baccalaureate in Irondale, Alabama, which is acclaimed for its rigorous college-prep courses.
Report
Standards
Fwd: Half Empty or Half Full?: Florida's voluntary pre-Kindergarten standards
In 2002, when its voters approved a ballot measure calling for universal pre-Kindergarten by 2005-06, Florida joined a handful of states in which all children are eligible for free, publicly funded education in the year prior to Kindergarten. The passage of the referendum was cause for great optimism among those aware of the power of high-quality pre-K programs to prepare children, particularly low-income children, to meet the challenges of K-12 education. But as with any public policy initiative, the devil is in the details. In designing the half-day Voluntary Pre-Kindergarten program (VPK), the Florida legislature faced competing demands. How did they balance the trade-offs? Amy Wilkins of the Education Trust lays it out in Fordham's latest Fwd: Arresting Insights in Education.
Commentary
How Program Officers at Education Philanthropies View Education
Tom Loveless, American Enterprise Institute April 2005
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Does Teacher Preparation Matter? Evidence about Teacher Certification, Teach for America, and Teacher Effectiveness
Linda Darling-Hammond, Deborah J. Holtzman, Su Jin Gatlin and Julian Vasquez HeiligStanford University2005
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Texas tech textbooks
The Texas state House has overwhelmingly approved a new bill that would dramatically alter its textbook landscape.
Commentary
Right time for randomized trials?
Science magazine reports that researchers worry that the Department of Education's focus on medical-style randomized controlled trials in education research is premature, since the groundwork hasn't yet been laid for applying those techniques to education. "Rushing to do RCTs is wrongheaded and bad science," Alan Schoenfeld, a math education professor at Berkeley, told the magazine.
Commentary
Lessons from San Diego
In 1998, San Diego City Schools launched one of the nation's most ambitious efforts at urban school reform. Superintendent Alan Bersin, former U.S. District Attorney for Southern California and President Clinton's "border czar," sought to reinvent the teaching and organization of the nation's eighth largest school district. In June, Bersin's stormy tenure will draw to a close.
Commentary
NCLB needs a course change
Earlier this week, at an event marking the release of the new Koret Task Force volume, Within Our Reach: How America Can Educate Every Child, a key House Education Committee staff member made it clear - let us say, made it sharply clear - that No Child Left Behind would not, repeat not
Commentary
Animal House 101
The New York Times travels to State U and finds mega-sized classes, disengaged and anonymous students floating through their four (or increasingly four-and-a-half, or five, years of college), and an environment where books and studying have been replaced with beer bongs and "power hours" (a shot of beer every minute for an hour).
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A rush to judgment?
The selection of the New York City Department of Education as a finalist for the Broad award surprised many seasoned observers in our fair city, especially because of score declines in 2004 in some of the poorest neighborhoods.
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The Efficacy of Choice Threats Within School Accountability Systems: Results From Legislatively Induced Experiments
Martin R. West and Paul R. Peterson, Program on Education Policy and GovernanceHarvard UniversityApril 2005
Commentary
One-Third of a Nation: Rising Dropout Rates and Declining Opportunities
Paul E. Barton, Educational Testing Service February 2005Characteristics of Minority Students Who Excel on the SAT and in the ClassroomBrent Bridgeman and Cathy Wendler, Educational Testing ServiceJanuary 2005
Commentary
Evaluating the Performance of Charter Schools in Connecticut
Gary Miron, The Evaluation Center at Western Michigan UniversityApril 2005
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Retirement rip-off
Teachers, check up on your retirement plan immediately. The latest Forbes reveals that big insurance companies are peddling bad retirement plans to teachers - often with their unions' support.
Commentary
Class size troubles
The Florida class size amendment is causing problems again. Luckily, state schools chief John Winn is showing some useful flexibility in applying its regulations. Approximately 154,000 children are expected to enroll in Florida's new pre-kindergarten program, but the requirements of the class size amendment are causing a shortage in classroom space.
Commentary
Just the facts, ma'am
Columbia Journalism Review has a long essay in its March/April issue calling upon journalists to "get beyond" test scores in education reporting and not just accept the district or state's numbers, but also look at how numbers and policies are actually affecting the classroom.
Commentary
Keep the choice provision strong
Public school choice was the great promise of NCLB. It gave students in failing schools an escape hatch and reinforced NCLB's commitment to every child by providing low-income families with options long enjoyed by more affluent families.
Commentary
Vouchers ahead? Stay tuned
Last week, the Ohio House of Representatives passed its state budget, which included a plan to provide 18,000 vouchers for more than 30 school districts in 2006 and double that number in 2007, which would make it the largest voucher program in the country.
Commentary
Unfinished Business: More Measured Approaches in Standards-Based Reform
Paul E. Barton Educational Testing ServiceJanuary 2005
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The Impact of the No Child Left Behind Act on Student Achievement and Growth: 2005 Edition
John Cronin, G. Gage Kingsbury, Martha S. McCall, and Branin BoweNorthwest Evaluation AssociationApril 12, 2005
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The Economics of Investing in Universal Preschool Education in California
Lynn A. Karoly, James H. Bigelow RAND Corporation 2005
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What America Can Learn from School Choice in Other Countries
David Salisbury and James Tooley, editorsCato InstituteApril 2005
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Textbooks and geopolitics
And you thought textbooks caused problems in the U.S. (see The Mad, Mad World of Textbook Adoption).
Commentary
I'll have the fish, with a side of lunacy
As students at Palm Springs Middle School were being let out for the day, they encountered a big blue fish with a simple message: Please don't eat me. Freda Fish (get it, free-da-fish?) was asking students to "Look not Hook" and handed out a pamphlet from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, "The Secret Lives of Fish." Unfortunately for Freda, the kids weren't buying it.
Commentary
Disagreement in Denver
Even as negotiators announced the first concrete details of the new Denver pay for performance plan for teachers (see here for a profile of the program), its future is in jeopardy because of a looming conflict with the local union over pay, scheduling, and curricular issues.