America's Charter Schools: Results From the NAEP 2003 Pilot Study
National Center for Education StatisticsDecember 2004
National Center for Education StatisticsDecember 2004
Caroline M. Hoxby, Harvard UniversityDecember 2004
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported this week that local school choice leaders want to create an accountability system to serve "as a stronger system of checks and balances for schools in the voucher program." According to Bob Smith, the superstar president of Messmer Catholic Schools - a cornerstone of the Milwaukee voucher program - and a supporter of the plan, the group wants to c
Parents need to grow up - so their children can do the same. Hara Estroff Marano reported recently in Psychology Today about the negative effects of parental hyper vigilance on children's lives.
Thanks to exploding population and a voter mandate to reduce class size, Florida will need nearly 200,000 new teachers over the next 10 years. That's bad news for the Sunshine State, according to a Sarasota Herald Tribune series that documents the alarming number of Florida teachers who have repeatedly failed portions of the state's three certification exams.
Much ado in New York these days, as ever. The school system created "pandemonium" among graduating seniors by retroactively increasing the grades of students who took advanced and AP classes. We're not necessarily opposed to giving extra credit to students who succeed in tough classes.
Prichard Committee for Academic ExcellenceNovember 2004
U.S. Department of Education, Office of Innovation and ImprovementNovember 2004
Education Week has a collection of articles this week called "No Child Left Behind Taking Root." Taken together, they provide a basic understanding of where states are in compliance with NCLB's testing, accountability, and teacher quality requirements, and of reaching the goal of 100 percent proficiency in reading, math, and (soon) science.
It's on everyone's lips: the NEXT BIG THING in education reform is a serious focus on high school. That's what the President wants to do, what the Gates Foundation wants to do, what a vast array of think tanks and education groups want to do.
An interesting vignette in the Rocky Mountain News this week, about two staffers from the Education Trust sitting down with teachers and community activists from one of Denver's most troubled high schools. True to the Ed Trust style, the two lay it on the line: yes, kids are affected by what happens at home. Yes, poverty makes teaching difficult.
Last week, Education Week published an appalling commentary from LouAnne Johnson assailing the most common deterrent to student misbehavior: detention.
By now, you've read the bad news from the quadrennial Program for International Student Assessment (PISA): the math skills of American 15-year-olds are sub-standard and falling, compared to their international peers. In fact, the U.S. is outperformed by almost every developed nation, beating only poorer countries such as Mexico and Portugal.
One more piece of interesting data from the recent PISA test: Two German researchers found that students who use computers at school frequently (i.e., several times a week) perform "sizably and statistically worse" in math and reading than pupils who use computers (at school) seldom or never.
How did New York City's experiment in school reform, once so promising, become such a mess? Author Sol Stern explains in this third edition of Fordham's new Fwd: series of short articles of interest to K-12 education reformers.
Your comment on the Akron Beacon-Journal series on home schooling mystified and disappointed me. It's not that we merely disagree about need for regulating home schooling. It's that you are spectacularly wrong to criticize the series in light of the very principles you allege to champion in education.
Tom Loveless, The Brookings InstitutionNovember 2004
U.S Department of Education2004
Kate Walsh and Christopher Tracy, National Council on Teacher QualityNovember 2004
Noel Epstein, Editor, Brookings Institution Press and Education Commission of the States 2004
At the end of a 108th Congress plagued by partisan rancor and seemingly more devoted to symbolic than substantive progress on a host of issues, a lame duck session just before Thanksgiving managed to produce an unexpectedly promising bill to reauthorize the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which governs special education.
In Fremont, California, the local school board was determined to reroute elementary and middle school students from the posh Mission Hills neighborhood away from high-performing Mission Hills High School to lower-performing schools in the area. Mission Hills parents objected, and even weighed splitting off to form their own school district, though in the end they did not.
It was perhaps a foregone conclusion, but one cannot help but be struck by Tuesday's recommendations from a court-appointed panel of referees in the New York City school financing case: increased state aid eventually reaching $5.63 billion extra for Big Apple schools each year, plus an additional $9.17 billion for capital improvements.
The Education Department's new Institute for Education Sciences was set up to take policy guidance and expert advice from a fifteen member National Board for Education Sciences, nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate.
There are achievement gaps and then there are achievement gaps. A Japanese elementary school teacher with decades of experience was fired this month for repeatedly failing a writing exam designed for his students. According to an Osaka education official, the teacher had been placed in a training program to improve his teaching skills in March, but "failed to show any signs of improvement.
When the Advanced Placement (AP) program was established in 1955, it was designed to distinguish high-achieving high school students by giving them access to more rigorous, college-level coursework. Nearly a half-century later, enrollment in AP courses is expanding to include not just the highest-achieving students, but virtually anyone who wants in.
Ted Kolderie, Education/EvolvingSeptember 2004
Patrick J. Wolf and Stephen Macedo, editors, The Brookings Institution2004