First Bell: July 15, 2014
OKLAHOMA AND THE COMMON COREThe Oklahoma Supreme Court is hearing arguments on the state’s Common Core repeal. (Associated Press) PHILLY SCHOOL FUNDING
OKLAHOMA AND THE COMMON COREThe Oklahoma Supreme Court is hearing arguments on the state’s Common Core repeal. (Associated Press) PHILLY SCHOOL FUNDING
One of the great misconceptions in education is that the reform movement is monolithic. There have always been competing camps, often defined on ideological grounds. Conservatives and libertarians tend to stress school choice, for example; liberals are much more comfortable with an intrusive federal role.
Articles of the week from the Education GadflyWhither the NEA?Chester E. Finn, Jr. | July 9, 2014 | Flypaper
I’ve never been to the annual conference of the National Education Association and I’ve never regretted it, but it would have been fun to be a fly on the chandelier at last week’s shindig in Denver.
Just as the education-reform movement is starting to figure out how to use test-score data in a more sophisticated way, the Obama administration and its allies in the civil-rights community want to take us back to the Stone Age on the use of school-discipline data. This is an enormous mistake.
Common Core standards mean freedom to many teachers. Here's why.
We take a look at the results of a recent survey of the public's attitudes toward the state of education in America.
The most interesting story coming out of the landmark Vergara and Harris deci
TEACHER TENUREOn Thursday, an advocacy group filed a lawsuit challenging New York City’s teacher-tenure laws. (New York Times) TEACHER EQUITY
Note: This post is part of our series, "Netflix Academy: The best educational videos available for streaming." Be sure to check out our previous Netflix Academy posts on
Bad ideas in education are like horror movie monsters. You think you’ve killed them, but they refuse to stay dead.A generation ago, the infamous “reading wars” pitted phonics-based instruction in the early grades against “whole language,” which emphasized reading for meaning instead of spelling, grammar, and sounding words out.
Last week, I had the privilege to speak in front of a group of education journalists convened by the Poynter Institute and the Education Writers Association about identifying strengths and weaknesses in curriculum.
The early-childhood folks didn’t much like it when I faulted NCES for relying on the Rutgers-based National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) as the source for federal data on “the state of preschool”—and for
Richard Whitmire’s forthcoming book, On the Rocketship: How Top Charter Schools are Pushing the Envelope, is “the best account yet of what is happening with charters,” says the
After nearly a decade of research, the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) released in May the first outcomes of its efforts to use the results of the 2013 12th grade National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to report on the academic preparedness of U.S. 12th graders for college.
Bravo to Fordham’s original gadfly!The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools yesterday inducted Fordham president Chester E. Finn, Jr. into its Charter School Hall of Fame—established to honor pioneers in the development, growth, and innovation of charter schools.
NEWARK SCHOOL SUPENew Jersey has renewed the contract of embattled Newark schools superintendent Cami Anderson, whose pro-school choice “One Newark” plan has garnered her the enmity of some union and parent activists. (Star-Ledger)
School choice is a done deal in this one place, and we could learn a lot from it.
My chief mentor, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, occasionally warned against “semantic infiltration,” which he correctly attributed to the late arms-control expert, Fred Ikle.
While education reforms are nearly always won via legislation, rare exceptions do occur—and sometimes they’re significant. The year 2014 has already proven to be a landmark one for education reform thanks to judicial decision. Perhaps the most notable example thus far is Vergara v.
“Nobody expects new surgeons to be any good. It wasn’t until my fortieth or fiftieth bypass surgery that I started feel like I knew what I was doing.” “I wish I could go back and retry those cases from my first year. If I knew then what I know now, they’d never have been convicted.”