Resolve and Resources to Get a Qualified Teacher in Every Classroom
Southern Regional Education Board2004
Southern Regional Education Board2004
Citing the Sunshine State's controversial Blaine Amendment - which states that "no revenue . . .
Deinya Phenix, Dorothy Siegel, Ariel Zaltsman, and Norm Fruchter, Institute for Education and Social Policy, Steinhardt School of Education, New York University June 2004
George C. Leef, American Council of Trustees and AlumniMay 2004 The Hollow Core: Failure of the General Education Curriculum Barry Latzer, American Council of Trustees and AlumniMay 2004
Charter news isn't just the AFT report this week, though it doesn't get any better.
This week's firestorm over the performance of charter schools can be traced to mischief by the charter-hating American Federation of Teachers and a (generally very able) New York Times reporter's susceptibility to being drawn into its web.For months, it appears, AFT analysts have been beavering away at their own analysis of new data from the Nat
We couldn't make it up. Here's the Los Angeles Times on professional development courses that some California teachers are taking to renew their certification and earn higher salaries: "Sara Telona learned the choreography for Mexican folklore dances, mastered the words to folk songs and took a crash course in marimba and xylophone playing. . . .
Teachers' union types are in a snit over Department of Education funding for the Arkansas Virtual Academy (AVA), an online charter school that uses curricula from K12, a venture headed by former Secretary of Education William Bennett.
School leaders in Philadelphia, like most everywhere, are currently so hamstrung by teacher contracts and union regulations that they have virtually no control over the hiring and firing of their own staff. In the City of Brotherly Love, however, help may be on the way.
The Evergreen Freedom Foundation July 2004
Karen Hawley Mills, Education Resource Strategies and Marguerite Roza, University of Washington, Center for Reinventing Public EducationJuly 15, 2004
National Center for Education StatisticsJuly 2004
Neal McCluskey, Cato InstituteJuly 7, 2004
Christopher W. Hammons, Alabama Policy InstituteApril 2004
The U.S. keeps hiring scads more teachers. Their ranks have swollen markedly faster than school enrollments.
We're not sure if our endorsement helps or hurts, but we'd love to see Samuel Freedman, now filling in for Michael Winerip as the "On Education" columnist for the New York Times, get the job permanently. By contrast to Winerip, who has only two gears - frothing and grumbling - Freedman is calm, clear, and open-minded.
We've made the case that local districts should not charter schools, since it ordinarily makes one competitor responsible for another's existence - a classic fox/henhouse situation. Some have suggested that this line of thinking is too cynical and doesn't give districts enough credit. Maybe.
Talk about "defining success." For years, all 32 of Michigan's teacher-training institutions reported that 100 percent of their graduates passed state certification exams. However, a report from the Michigan education department found that those pass rates actually ranged from 66 to 97 percent for first-time test takers.
Analysts beyond counting, beginning with the late, great James Coleman, have shown beyond peradventure that increased spending on education is not related to increases in student achievement. Yet the conventional wisdom still resists that powerful insight.
Gadfly adores poetry, especially when memorized. This is, no doubt, a hangover from his days in fly school, when he was forced to memorize "Paul Revere's Ride," "The Walrus and the Carpenter," and other favorites. Today, such memorization is widely considered a form of oppression if not child abuse.
In the New York Sun, Andy Wolf reports that "virtually all schools [in New York City] received budget cuts that in some cases exceeded 20 percent," despite an increase of $264 million in total funding for Gotham's public schools in 2004-05. Where did the money go?
Jay Mathews's latest column at washingtonpost.com offers selections from emails he received after confessing his "deep ignorance about the home-schooling movement" earlier this summer. He makes it clear that the stereotype of home schoolers - usually depicted as fundamentalist or right-wing zealots - doesn't bear much relation to reality.
National Center for Education Statistics June 2004
In 1994, the Lake View (AR) school district - a tiny, rural district with declining enrollment and a high proportion of poor and minority students - sued Arkansas, arguing that the state's system of education finance was inequitable.
When I learned recently that the Council for Basic Education had closed its doors, I felt terribly sad. According to an article in Education Week, some attributed its demise to a "tight fund-raising environment for education groups" and suggested that CBE had expired because it was swimming in a crowded pond.
Gadfly is pleased to report the results of a recent study, to be published in Psychological Science this fall, comparing the effectiveness of "direct instruction" (where teachers actually teach, rather than observe or facilitate) and "discovery learning" (where children are given certain materials and are expe
On Tuesday, the Democratic Convention adopted a platform containing a 3-page education plank that offers something for everybody, but nothing in particular, save for a pointed 3-paragraph dig at George W. Bush. Insofar as one can detect policy impulses in the fog, however, many of them resemble what Republicans also say.
According to a new report from the Capital Research Center - penned by Education Intelligence Agency sleuth Mike Antonucci (see http://members.aol.com/educationintel/) - an organization you've heard of "files unfair labor practice charges and restraining orders. Circumvents the other side's negotiators.
State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO) 2004The State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO) produced this 92-page fact book dealing with the finances of higher education at the state level in 2003. It offers lots of important and sometimes counterintuitive information. For example: