While the President and First Lady celebrated the first anniversary of the No Child Left Behind Act at the White House with school principals and superintendents, education leaders, and members of Congress on Wednesday, critics of the law gripe that it will be impossible for states and districts to comply unless the path is greased with $7.7 billion in additional federal education funds.
School districts across the country are having an easier time finding and keeping qualified teachers at the very time that shortages were expected to grow more severe.
While some have blamed skyrocketing expenditures for special education on an increase in children with disabilities, it has been hard to find solid evidence that the number of students with certain disabilities has increased; it seems more likely that the diagnosis of those disabilities is what has increased. A recent New York Times article about autism illustrates the problem.
Will the sanctions for failing schools laid out in the politics-governance Act (NCLB) succeed in turning those schools around? This report draws on the results of previous efforts to overhaul failing schools to provide a glimpse at what may be expected from NCLB-style interventions. The results: no intervention strategy has a success rate greater than 50%, so policymakers are urged to consider additional options for children trapped in failing schools.
Rt. Hon. John Redwood and Nick Seaton, Centre for Policy StudiesSeptember 2002
Scott Joftus and Brenda Maddox-Dolan, Alliance for Excellent EducationDecember 2002
Dan Laitsch, Education Policy Analysis ArchivesDecember 4, 2002
Edited by Michael Pressley2002
General Accounting OfficeDecember 2002
Students in the Lone Star state's class of 2005 - today's 10th graders - will have to pass the new Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) in order to graduate from high school. A report released by the Texas Education Agency earlier this month indicates that more than 53 percent of students will have trouble passing the test and risk being denied a diploma.
I enjoyed Checker's recent piece on school report cards. [See http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=31#438] But he neglected two big issues: First, the need for huge amounts of PUBLICITY to make parents aware that these report cards even exist.
A recent article in The World & I examines how computer giant IBM's massive Reinventing Education initiative - which seeks to bring classroom-and school-level successes to scale - is transforming not only the company's culture, but also the way teachers do their jobs.
As readers may have noticed, these "desk" messages tend toward the crotchety and Cassandra-ish. That's because we see plenty still not working well in U.S.
FBI agents have seized fur coats, alligator shoes, a $57,000 Tiffany tea set, a $13,000 plasma TV set, and hundreds of other luxury items from the homes and offices of the former president of the Washington (D.C) Teachers' Union and her assistant as part of an investigation into the disappearance of over $2 million in union funds over the past several years.
This month's issue of "&ize," the Institute for Justice's monthly compilation of media clips - features a case study on the future of school choice. Included are scads of news articles from the past year - many that you've seen but also some you may have missed - that document where the school choice movement has been and where it's going. A handy volume for any reformer's bookshelf.
U.S. Department of EducationNovember 2002
Kirk A. Johnson, Ph.D., and Elizabeth H. MoserMackinac Center for Public PolicyDecember 2002
Geoffrey Borman, Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed at Risk, Johns Hopkins UniversityNovember 2002
Your recent report [see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=31#442] on the vote of the Massachusetts Board of Education to endorse standards for a "certificate of attainment" might leave your readers with the impression that we have established an alternative diploma. We have not.
Chancellor Joel Klein says that New York City's best principals will get up to $75,000 in bonus pay if they agree to work for three years with a principal-in-training in a failing school.
Charles Zogby has resigned as Pennsylvania's Education Secretary, leaving behind a legacy of controversial but sensible and far-reaching reforms. Among many other accomplishments, Zogby and his predecessor, Eugene Hickok, now U.S.
A successful suburban principal with thirty years' experience - a woman hired to work miracles - has crashed and burned after only four months as principal of a troubled Philadelphia elementary school that's now managed by Edison Schools.
Step back from the furor over Trent Lott's recent statement and observe how the episode itself opens a window onto the legacy of distrust that has characterized African-American views of conservatives and Republicans since the civil rights era.This distrust has shaped public policy on many fronts but perhaps nowhere as profoundly as in K-12 education.
Virginia third-graders are having a blast while studying for the Standards of Learning (SOL) exams thanks to SOLAR, a computer software program designed by Lockheed Martin Corp. When students answer SOL-like questions correctly, the program rewards them with exciting graphics and sound effects reminiscent of a video game.
Massachusetts has granted appeals to roughly 200 students who demonstrated-via good grades, stellar attendance, teacher recommendations, and having taken part in MCAS tutoring-that they knew enough to graduate despite thrice failing at least one section of the state exit test by a narrow margin.
Innocenti Research Centre, UNICEFNovember 2002
