Commentary
Research Perspectives on School Reform: Lessons from the Annenberg Challenge
Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown UniversityMarch 2003
Commentary
Performance-Driven Budgeting: The Example of New York City's Schools
Dorothy Siegel, ERIC Digest 168 May 2003
Commentary
Teaching Children to Read: The Fragile Links Between Science and Federal Education Policy
Gregory Camilli and others, National Institute for Early Education
Commentary
Teach for America caught in AmeriCorps cuts
This week, the national service program AmeriCorps announced that it has been forced to make drastic cuts in its grant programs, due to past-year overruns and a continuing impasse on how it accounts for the education awards earned by members.
Commentary
High School Issue Papers: For Youth and Adult Groups Organizing to Transform High School Education in the United States
In an effort to refocus attention on high schools - "the weakest link in a troubled education system" - the reform group Research for Democracy compiled this series of short essays on high school reform. Though their recommendations and research are not earth shattering, they underscore the need for higher standards and increased accountability for student achievement and teacher quality.
Commentary
Is history, history?
An unintended consequence of the No Child Left Behind Act is that, due to the pressure to boost pupil achievement in reading, math, and science (the subjects tested under the federal law), schools are neglecting other valuable subjects, not least of which are history, civics, and geography - aka "social studies." Maryland, for example, no longer mandates assessments in history and social studie
Commentary
Four Wars
No, this is not about Iraq but about four raging education battles, three in Washington and one in academe, all with mega policy implications. On the surface, each looks like a conflict between "keep it the way it is even though it isn't working" and "change it even though that'll be disruptive." Not far below is a tussle over - what else? - jobs, power, money, influence, and legitimacy.
Commentary
Accountability rollback in CA
Last month a study predicted that 20 percent of California's class of 2004 may fail the state's high school exit exam due to inadequate preparation.
Commentary
A grand bargain on teacher pay?
Matthew Miller thinks he's got the answer to teacher shortages in America's toughest schools - and maybe he does, since he's brought to the table both teacher union president Sandra Feldman and Fordham president Chester Finn.
Commentary
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A victory for NCLB, at what cost?
Tuesday, President Bush announced that all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico now have federally approved accountability plans in place and thus are in formal compliance with the No Child Left Behind Act.
Commentary
Vouchers for Special Education Students: An Evaluation of Florida's McKay Scholarship Program
Jay Greene and Greg Forster, Manhattan Institute's Center for Civic InnovationJune 2003
Commentary
Beyond the Pipeline: Getting The Principals We Need, Where They Are Needed Most
Lee D. Mitgang, The Wallace Foundation2003
Commentary
Efficiency, Bias, and Classification Schemes: Estimating Private-School Impacts on Test Scores in the New York City Voucher Experiment
Paul E. Peterson and William G. Howell, Harvard UniversityJune 12, 2003
Commentary
Resist Urge to "Refine" Graduation Testing
This month and last, as also happened during May-June 2002 in what threatens to become a new seasonal ritual, efforts to adopt state graduation testing are under fire. Nevada has announced that 12 percent of its 12th graders may not graduate. Florida reports that 13,000 students may be denied diplomas, while the number in Massachusetts is said to be 5,000. Parents are reportedly furious.
Commentary
Sabotage in the certification fight
The level of combat in the teacher certification wars escalated this week as the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence (ABCTE) announced that the field test of its "Passport to Teaching" certification exam had been compromised by leaks to ABCTE opponents. (This new test is being developed as an alternative to traditional education school certification.
Commentary
How Within-District Spending Inequalities Help Some Schools to Fail
One more area in which American schools and districts are less than transparent: the budget. In this working paper, presented at a recent Brookings conference on "The Teachers We Need," the University of Washington's Marguerite Roza and Paul Hill work from the bottom up to construct real school-by-school teacher salary figures in four districts, rather than relying on district-wide averages.
Commentary
Must the statistics commissioner be lobotomized?
Controversy is brewing over President Bush's choice of sociologist Robert Lerner as the next Commissioner of Education Statistics and the Senate may well fuss about him during the confirmation process. He happens to be a first rate scholar with two decades of distinguished work under his belt, much of it in education and much of it relying on - believe it or not - federal education statistics.
Commentary
New Head Start legislation: Now with 80 percent less reform!
Having introduced sweeping legislation to revamp the Head Start program on May 23 (the School Readiness Act of 2003), House Republicans have spent the past three weeks slowly rolling back its most important reforms.
Report
Charter Schools
Charter School Authorizing: Are States Making the Grade?
This new report by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute is the first significant study of the organizations that authorize charter schools. The report examines 23 states and the District of Columbia to determine how supportive they are of charter schools, how good a job their authorizers are doing, and how policy makers could strengthen their states' charter programs.
Commentary
Commentary
Stand by Me: What Teachers Really Think about Unions, Merit Pay, and Other Professional Matters
Steve Farkas, Ann Duffett, and Jean Johnson, Public AgendaMay 3, 2003
Commentary
Who is Leading Our Schools? An Overview of School Administrators and Their Careers
Susan M. Gates, Jeanne S. Ringel, Lucrecia Santibanez, Karen M. Ross, and Catherine H. Chung, RAND Education2003
Commentary
Boys, interrupted
"It may still be a man's world," writes Michelle Conlin of Business Week. "But it is no longer, in any way, a boy's." Conlin runs through an increasingly familiar counter argument to the 1990s social science focus on how girls were supposedly being shortchanged by education.
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Factors Affecting Mathematics Achievement for Students in Rural Schools
Gene Bottoms and Kathleen Carpenter, Southern Regional Education BoardMay 2003
Commentary
The least-known side of charter schools
Plenty has been written about charter schools and how they are (and aren't) doing, but practically nobody has looked carefully at the organizations that give birth to them, raise them, oversee them, hold them accountable, and decide whether or not they will get their charters renewed.
Commentary
Students speak up on education reform
In March, a group of five education reform-minded Yale undergrads, who had won first prize and $25,000 in cash in the Yale Entrepreneurial Society's 50K competition, published the inaugural edition of Our Education, a journal of education reform put out by the student-led nonprofit "Students for Teachers." [For the Gadfly's review of this journal, go to
Commentary
Hear ye the facts: schools win in court
In contrast to the general sense among school administrators that they are besieged by lawsuits, it turns out that courts tend to rule in favor of schools over both parents and teachers, the two groups most like to sue schools or districts. Since the 1985 Supreme Court case New Jersey v.