A Consumer's Guide to High School History Textbooks is a summary review of 12 widely used U.S. and world history textbooks.
Frederick Hess and Andrew Kelly, The Abell ReportJanuary 2004
Gail L. Sunderman and Jimmy Kim, Harvard Civil Rights ProjectsFebruary, 2004
American students are being overworked, says an alarmed chorus of newspapers, magazines, and books. As described by the popular media and even some academics, the crisis is reminiscent of Sister Carrie and Industrial era child-labor scandals. "Overbooked: Four Hours of Homework for a Third Grader" blared a recent cover of People magazine.
It is surprising and disappointing to have a couple thousand-word article dismissed in less than a sentence, as "focusing on ancillary issues." That is what happened in last week's Gadfly. Perhaps, after a brief review offered below, some readers will find more of value than did Mr.
While it doesn't have quite the shock value of accusations of terrorist leanings, the battle over three proposed Massachusetts charter schools lacks little for controversy.
In a diverse suburb just outside Chicago, Evanston Township High School officials are thinking about pulling out of NCLB, "saying that the financial benefits might not be worth the trouble." Though the school would still be held accountable to Illinois' "less stringent penalties if students do not meet standards," it would likely not be required to disaggregate student scores as NCLB requires,
True, Rod Paige should not have called the National Education Association "a terrorist organization." Given the times in which we live, the middle word in that phrase might have been better chosen. (How about "hostile"? "Disgraceful"?
Does the Supreme Court's decision in Locke v. Davey - concerning a college scholarship for underprivileged students that was denied to a divinity student attending an evangelical college - have implications for the debate about vouchers and the effort to roll back Blaine Amendments in 32 states?
Walt Haney, George Madaus, Lisa Abrams, Anne Wheelock, Jing Miao, and Ileana GruiaBoston CollegeJanuary 2004
We have only one concern at the news that litigator Clint Bolick of the Institute for Justice will shortly leave that group to head the new School Choice Alliance (formed by the merger of the American Education Reform Council, the American Education Reform Foundation, and Children First America) - that the school choice movement may lose his incisive lawyerly mind in future court battles.
Meave O'Marah, Kenneth Klau, Theodor Rebarber, AccountabilityWorks and the Education Leaders CouncilFebruary 2004
Articles by Frederick M. Hess, Linda Nathan, Joe Nathan, Ray Bacchetti, and Evans Clinchy, Phi Delta KappanFebruary 2004
Good news and bad from Georgia, where the state's Professional Standards Commission recently announced that teachers needn't earn an education degree but can be certified if they pass both the state's certification exam and a standardized content knowledge test called the "principles of learning and teaching." While teachers certified through this alternative process will still have to undergo
The New York State Council for the Social Studies recently released the agenda for its annual conference, to be held in balmy Rochester in March.
In The Language Police, Diane Ravitch lifted the veil on the way "bias committees" at major publishing houses sanitize and censor the information presented in student tests and textbooks.
Last week, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and schools chief Joel Klein (two men who've been at the point of Gadfly's rapier wit more than once) declared that they would hold back third-graders who fail the state's standardized exam. But only after the second failure, and only after the students take summer school for six weeks - and an appeals process will be built in to the plan.
A small intellectual brush fire has broken out among American liberals concerning the No Child Left Behind act.
A notice in the Federal Register seldom elicits more than a yawn from anyone but a few affected bureaucrats and the special interests organized to hound them. But the Department of Education's regulations for educating and testing disabled students under NCLB deserve much wider attention.
Two bills now before the Tennessee General Assembly question the reliability and worth of the Tennessee Value Added Assessment System (TVAAS), which was implemented 14 years ago in a trailblazing effort to track student progress, measure whether students were making suitable yearly academic gains, and estimate the effectiveness of their teachers.
Sandra Thompson and Martha Thurlow, National Center on Educational OutcomesDecember 2003
Achieve, Inc., The Education Trust, and The Thomas B. Fordham FoundationFebruary 2004
Department for Education and Skills, United KingdomFebruary 2004
The federal budget process is something of a kabuki drama, with affected special interests acting out their ritualized poor-mouthing on cue. This is especially the case for Fiscal 2005, in which the White House gave the Department of Education a $1.7 billion increase in a very tight fiscal environment.
Former IBM CEO Lou Gerstner once said, "Never confuse activity with results." New York City Deputy Schools Chancellor Diana Lam could do well to learn that lesson. Unfortunately, rather than judging schools by results, Lam and her team have focused on mandating superficial activity for teachers - apparently assuming that teachers, left to their own devices, could never do right by students.
Jake Bogdanovich, an Ohio senior randomly chosen to take a standardized test to gauge his district's progress toward meeting the goals of a school reform program, decided to engage in a little sabotage. As he observed, no "scholarship opportunities" were connected to the test, nor would its outcome be reflected on his report card.
In an editorial, USA Today notes that the 15,000 National Merit Scholars are not just chosen on the basis of, well, merit, but also geography. That is, scholarships are apportioned to each state based on the number of graduating seniors in that state relative to the number nationwide.
