Private schools are increasingly feeling the heat to release data about their students' achievement, acceptances into college, and other vital performance statistics, though some contend that these schools need only be accountable to parents, not to the general public.
Did you ever wonder how they think about politics, policy and the future of teacher education at the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education (AACTE), principal trade association of the ed schools? See for yourself by surfing to http://www2.gasou.edu/coe/july.htm ("Contextual Scan -- July 2002").
For those tracking Washington's handling of federal education research, statistics and assessment (you can find previous Gadfly commentaries on this subject at http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=66#983 and http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/
The public-school choice provisions of No Child Left Behind have been getting plenty of attention in recent weeks, mostly negative. It's time to reflect more broadly and candidly on the potential of public-school choice to solve vexing education problems.That potential seems limited at best.
Jay Mathews of The Washington Post is generally a fan of standards and tests, but in a recent column in Washingtonpost.com he praises Deborah Meier's newest anti-testing book, In Schools We Trust: Creating Communities of Learning in an Era of Testing and Standardization.
In Massachusetts, 81 percent of the class of 2003 has already passed the state's high-stakes MCAS test and is scheduled to graduate next spring, but the 19 percent of students who have not yet passed it are now the subject of a federal lawsuit.
Public AgendaSeptember 2002
Standard & Poor's School Evaluation ServicesSeptember 2002
Joint Committee to Develop a Master Plan for Education, California state legislature2002
National Center for Education StatisticsAugust 2002
Noel White, Cathy Ringstaff and Loretta Kelley, WestEd2002
edited by M. Suzanne Donovan and Christopher T. Cross, National Research Council2002
Despite being branded racist, sexist and irrelevant to contemporary students' lives, the so-called "Great Books" are making a great comeback in some unlikely places: community colleges with largely minority student bodies, homeless shelters, shelters for battered women, and Native American reservations, to name just a few.
While standards-based reform is now the law of the land, teachers often complain that they don't have the resources they need to make the reform strategy work.
The Los Angeles Unified School District is trying to offer more special education services at public schools rather than paying to send students to more expensive private schools, but parents are fighting the change.
By transferring funds from ineffective and low-priority labor, health and education programs, Congress could increase funding for special education by billions of dollars and thereby go a long way toward "full" federal funding of the program-which was defined as 40 percent of average per-pupil spending in the 1975 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
A recent study by two researchers at the University of Chicago confirmed what previous technology studies have found: simply giving schools access to the Internet does not automatically translate to gains in student achievement.
School choice may be addictive: the more of it people get, the more they seem to want. Don't be fooled by news accounts of scant demand for the public-school choice provision of NCLB. That's a consequence of too few decent options for kids combined with foot dragging by school systems. Look instead at Florida and Cleveland, where the appeal of vouchers is spreading.
Over the last few weeks, many have set out to answer the question: What lessons should we teach our children about the attacks of September 11th? Some have responded that we should emphasize tolerance, others have said patriotism, some have recommended that we teach about America's commitment to freedom, others have advised us to recognize America's history of cultural imperialism.
In a piece for Tech Central Station, Joanne Jacobs recently profiled K12, former Education Secretary William Bennett's kindergarten through twelfth-grade online curriculum and "virtual school" program.
Secretary of Education Rod Paige this week announced the formation of two new offices within the Education Department, the Office of Innovation and Improvement and the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools. Nina Shokraii Rees will leave her job as deputy assistant to Vice President Cheney to serve as deputy undersecretary in charge of the new Office of Innovation and Improvement.
No longer is cheating restricted to the jocks and 'slow' kids in the back of the room. Today's cheaters are tomorrow's Harvard freshmen-overachievers with too much to do and few qualms about finding the easiest way to produce a 5-page paper on King Lear.
Richard Fry, The Pew Hispanic CenterSeptember 5, 2002
Ildiko Laczko-Kerr and David C. Berliner, Education Policy Analysis ArchivesSeptember 6, 2002
Linda Darling-Hammond, Education Policy Analysis ArchivesSeptember 6, 2002
Myron Lieberman, Cato InstituteAugust 28, 2002
Danny Cohen-Zada and Moshe Justman, National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, Teachers College, Columbia UniversityJuly 2002
In Chattanooga, Tennessee, the mayor has developed a performance-pay plan whereby teachers and principals in struggling schools will earn big bonuses if their students make significant progress on state tests. Inspired by the plan, twelve top teachers have made the move to at-risk schools in the city.
Special education is receiving a lot of attention these days. The federal program to provide special accommodations and services to students with disabilities has been critiqued by a Presidential Commission, by multiple authors of a Thomas B. Fordham Foundation/Progressive Policy Institute volume, and by both Democratic and Republican members of Congress.
