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Building a Plane While Flying It: Early Lessons from Developing Charter Schools
Noelle C. Griffin and Priscilla Wohlstetter, Teachers College RecordApril 2001
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No Child Left Behind Act: A Description of State Responsibilities
Council of Chief State School OfficersApril 2002 (draft)
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Teaching American students to hate America
In the belief that public understanding of the Middle East will strengthen American security, the government subsidizes the work of Middle Eastern studies programs at universities around the country. But while trying to encourage the study of foreign languages and areas of the world that pose a challenge to U.S.
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The pitfalls of value-added analysis
In recent months, policymakers and policy wonks alike have been singing the praises of value-added analysis, which focuses on the achievement gains that a school or teacher elicits rather than just looking at how high the students score, since high or low scores of students in a school may reflect the socioeconomic makeup of the student body (and other "input" variables) rather than the quality
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Putting the memorial back in Memorial Day
Secretary of Education Rod Paige is asking teachers to help reclaim Memorial Day for its intended purpose of honoring those who have died in service to our country.
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Collective bargaining and education policy
Considerable attention has recently focused on a bill (AB 2160) working its way through the California legislature that would expand the scope of collective bargaining beyond wages and working conditions to include matters of education policy such as curriculum and textbooks. The bill has the strong support of the California Teachers Association, the state's largest teacher union.
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Expansion of collective bargaining in doubt
After California Governor Gray Davis threatened to veto AB 2160 (discussed in the accompanying editorial by Michael Podgursky) if it included a provision expanding collective bargaining to cover curriculum and textbook decisions, the bill was amended by a legislative committee yesterday to prohibit any expansion of collective bargaining, but substituting a new process by which teachers and dist
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Final Report of the Evaluation of New York Networks for School Renewal: An Annenberg Foundation Challenge for New York City
Institute for Education and Social Policy, Steinhardt School of Education, New York UniversityDecember 2001
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Special Education Services in Colorado Charter Schools
Debora Scheffel, Colorado Department of EducationMarch 2002
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Statement of the Wingspread Coalition: Where Will We Find the Leaders and What Will We Ask Them to Do?
Forum for the American School SuperintendentJanuary 2002
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Education Management Organizations: Growing a For-profit Education Industry with Choice, Competition, and Innovation
Guilbert C. Hentschke, Scot Oschman and Lisa Snell, Reason Public Policy InstituteMay 2002
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School districts worry about letting kids leave failing schools
The No Child Left Behind Act requires school districts to allow children in persistently failing schools to transfer to better (public) schools and to pay the transportation costs for those students to reach their new schools. For thousands of schools, that provision takes effect in September.
Commentary
In response to "The Special Ed Burden," guest editorial by Jay Greene in last week's Gadfly.
Mr. Greene: Superb analysis. I had never considered that full funding of special education costs by the federal government would dramatically increase public schools' incentive to classify challenging children.
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A field guide to low academic standards
The miserable failure of most states to implement the requirements of the 1994 federal education amendments in timely fashion had already cast a veil of doubt over the prospects for No Child Left Behind: the stark fact that states don't necessarily make the changes that Washington expects of them-and then get away with it.But what happens when states do comply with the formal requirement
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Why social studies teachers don't teach history and what to do about it
Last week, the Department of Education released the most recent batch of scores on the NAEP history exam, and the results for 12th graders were abysmal.
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Enhancing Urban Children's Early Success in School
Andrea Del Gaudio Weiss and Robert M. Offenberg, American Educational Research AssociationApril 2002
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Facing the Challenges of Whole-School Reform: New American Schools After A Decade
Mark Berends, Susan J. Bodilly and Sheila Nataraj Kirby, RAND2002
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New American Schools, Driven By Results, A Decade of Experience, and other papers
New American Schools2002
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Teachers' Professional Lives: A View from Nine Industrialized Countries
Carol F. Stoel and Tin-Swe Thant, Council for Basic EducationMarch 18, 2002
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"Lost at Sea": New Teachers' Experiences with Curriculum and Assessment
David Kauffman, Susan Moore Johnson, Susan M. Kardos, Edward Liu and Heather G. Peske, Teachers College Record2002
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The myth of the special ed burden
The debate swirling around renewal of the major federal law addressing special education, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), draws much of its energy from a widely shared but probably false premise: that schools are increasingly swamped with disabled children who are diverting scarce resources away from other students.
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High school seniors still know little U.S. history
The U.S. Department of Education released the results of the 2001 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in history today, and while the scores of fourth and eighth graders have modestly improved since 1994, the scores of twelfth graders were frustratingly low and showed no improvement.
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Do we really need school boards?
Why have school boards at all? asked Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt in a provocative op-ed this week. We don't elect our city police chief or our county health commissioner, yet nobody sees this as a denial of democracy. Why not let our elected mayors and city or county councils-the people who make the budgets-take similar responsibility for public schools?
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NBPTS-certified teachers flunk value-added test in Tennessee
Teachers who are certified as outstanding by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) are awarded large salary increases in many states and districts, but some researchers have questioned whether the NBPTS is accurately identifying the most effective teachers with its complex and expensive procedures.
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School Choice or Best Systems: What Improves Education?
edited by Margaret C. Wang and Herbert J. Walberg2002
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What's Public About Charter Schools? Lessons Learned about Choice and Accountability
Gary Miron and Christopher Nelson2002