Always blame standards
As everyone knows, last week the Yale Child Study Center issued a report indicating that pre-schoolers are three times more likely to be "expelled" from their programs than K-8 children are to be expelled from school.
As everyone knows, last week the Yale Child Study Center issued a report indicating that pre-schoolers are three times more likely to be "expelled" from their programs than K-8 children are to be expelled from school.
J. Carl Setzer, Laurie Lewis, and Bernard Greene, National Center for Education StatisticsMarch 2005
Bible Literacy ProjectMay 2005
Bruce O. Boston, America Youth Policy Forum and Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development2005
Gregg Vanourek, Charter School Leadership Council May 2005
The Kansas State Board of Education has just wrapped up its evolution trial. Proponents of "intelligent design" have pushed the state to present a "more critical" view of evolution in Kansas classrooms and to move away from the definition of science in the state standards as a search for "natural explanations," which they say represents an endorsement of naturalism and atheism.
Given Gadfly's many doubts about Mayor Michael Bloomberg's education efforts (see "A rush to judgment?"), we pondered how to present the news that proficiency scores for Big Apple fourth graders have jumped 10 percent this year (accompanied by a slight dip among eighth graders).
Much has been said about the specious nature of official high school graduation rates promulgated by states, districts, and the feds (see here for Jay Greene's February 2005 report on the subject). The message is beginning to take hold.
The Christian Science Monitor reports a resurgence of interest in spelling in American classrooms, a subject which, according to author and spelling zealot Richard Gentry, was dealt a setback by whole-language instruction in the 1980s.
A new report from the Yale University Child Study Center (see here) finds that pre-Kindergarten students are being expelled from their programs at rates much higher than students in K-12 are expelled from school.
California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is bent on ending teacher tenure as we know it. If legislators won't budge, he's gathered signatures to put it on the ballot and let voters decide. "If they don't do their job," quoth the Gubernator, "then we go to special election without any doubt."
ACT and The Education TrustFebruary 2005
Gerard Robinson, Institute for the Transformation of LearningApril 2005
Michael Moore is the master of the subtle conspiracy charge, wherein a cabal is alleged with winks, nods, and innuendos without actually being stated. CNN has learned the lesson well. The cable network is airing a special on high-stakes testing (it premiered May 8 and will be shown again May 14).
In Wednesday's Wall Street Journal, Diane Ravitch criticizes Big Apple Mayor Michael Bloomberg's education policies and chronicles his tumultuous tenure.
Energy, enterprise, and ardor overflowed the hotel at the annual hootenanny of the New Schools Venture Fund, held last week near Silicon Valley.
Anyone who has seen a student suffering from senioritis could have predicted the findings of this latest survey of high school students. An Indiana University study shows that a majority of high school students (55 percent) spend no more than three hours a week studying yet are still managing to maintain good grades (65 percent).
No matter what you think of Florida's package of school reforms over the past several years (See here for our analysis of the latest piece, the Voluntary Pre-K program) one has to be astonished at the deftness with which Governor Jeb Bush has moved his schools agenda (which seems to be working, see
An article in this week's Time accurately lays out the crucial battle taking place between the Feds and the states over NCLB.
Newsweek's annual ranking of America's best high schools (using the system devised by Washington Post education writer Jay Mathews) is out, alerting readers to some high-performing but relatively unknown schools. Top dog this year is Jefferson County International Baccalaureate in Irondale, Alabama, which is acclaimed for its rigorous college-prep courses.
In 2002, when its voters approved a ballot measure calling for universal pre-Kindergarten by 2005-06, Florida joined a handful of states in which all children are eligible for free, publicly funded education in the year prior to Kindergarten. The passage of the referendum was cause for great optimism among those aware of the power of high-quality pre-K programs to prepare children, particularly low-income children, to meet the challenges of K-12 education. But as with any public policy initiative, the devil is in the details. In designing the half-day Voluntary Pre-Kindergarten program (VPK), the Florida legislature faced competing demands. How did they balance the trade-offs? Amy Wilkins of the Education Trust lays it out in Fordham's latest Fwd: Arresting Insights in Education.
Tom Loveless, American Enterprise Institute April 2005
Linda Darling-Hammond, Deborah J. Holtzman, Su Jin Gatlin and Julian Vasquez HeiligStanford University2005
Michael H. Levine, Progressive Policy InstituteApril 2005
The Texas state House has overwhelmingly approved a new bill that would dramatically alter its textbook landscape.
Science magazine reports that researchers worry that the Department of Education's focus on medical-style randomized controlled trials in education research is premature, since the groundwork hasn't yet been laid for applying those techniques to education. "Rushing to do RCTs is wrongheaded and bad science," Alan Schoenfeld, a math education professor at Berkeley, told the magazine.
In 1998, San Diego City Schools launched one of the nation's most ambitious efforts at urban school reform. Superintendent Alan Bersin, former U.S. District Attorney for Southern California and President Clinton's "border czar," sought to reinvent the teaching and organization of the nation's eighth largest school district. In June, Bersin's stormy tenure will draw to a close.
Earlier this week, at an event marking the release of the new Koret Task Force volume, Within Our Reach: How America Can Educate Every Child, a key House Education Committee staff member made it clear - let us say, made it sharply clear - that No Child Left Behind would not, repeat not