Education News Nuggets
There is no need for high school seniors to despair, for while tough economic times make fewer traditional scholarship dollars available, there are some new unconventional scholarship opportunities popping up: via
There is no need for high school seniors to despair, for while tough economic times make fewer traditional scholarship dollars available, there are some new unconventional scholarship opportunities popping up: via
Over the past decade, digital learning at the K-12 level has exploded?from a national enrollment of?40,000-50,000 in 2000 to an estimated 3 million in 2010. And this trend line is sure to get steeper, way steeper, in coming years.
?And we must all accept that [school] choice is part of securing the civil right of high-quality education.? * RiShawn Biddle, Editor, Dropout Nation
Fordham's Chester Finn will be speaking today at a Hudson Institute event, entitled, The 112th Congress and
Writing earlier this week in the Wall Street Journal, my friend and long-time former co-author, Diane Ravitch, challenged resurgent Congressional Republicans to return K-12 education to ?local control?
Who, after all, can resist that sunshine and all those casual, wavy palm trees? Not Michelle Rhee, it seems.
Another YouTube video making the rounds shows a furious fistfight between two Florida middle schoolers ? taken, of course, by a fellow student with cellphone.
While Michelle Obama was celebrating the House vote on the $4.5 billion school lunch bill yesterday, I was having a power lunch with a couple of 3rd graders at my local intermediate school.
It was thirty-five years ago that President Ford signed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (later renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act). This was a watershed moment in American society, as it made our public schools accessible to children who had been shut out (or shut into dark corners of school basements) for too long.
Here's an update on a few new initiatives to boost student achievement, some innovative, some contentious: high-tech school buses, kindergarten literac
?Evidence has shown that special ed is one of the academic ghettos of American public education.'' * -RiShawn Biddle, Editor of Dropout Nation
It took two months for the New York City Education Department to fire Melissa Petro, a Bronx elementary school teacher who had written a Huffington Post article and sundry blog posts about her sexually adventurous past, including some time spent?shedding her clothing at a club in Mexico and her stin
At the recent Washington, D.C., educational forum hosted by former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, New Jersey's governor, Chris Christie, gave the keynote address. Speaking about his state's teachers' unions, Christie said, ?It is an obscenity?an obscenity?that those who claim to be involved in public education for kids aren't just as offended and just as impatient as I am.?
Like batting averages? You'll love VAM
The twin pressures of budget cuts and accountability are spurring calls for change
Context matters--but so does getting the fundamentals right
?These days it seems anyone with any degree of managerial success is qualified to run whole school systems. But only school systems. I'd love to see someone make the argument that private sector managerial experience entitles you to run the NYPD.'' * Ta-Nehisi Coates, Senior Editor, The Atlantic
Many reformers and funders have written off schools of education as beyond repair, and much of the current energy for teacher preparation is centered on non-traditional programs like Teach For America. But are schools of education more ready for reform than the conventional wisdom supposes? The event is LIVE on December 2 at 3:30pm.
Fordham's Mike Petrilli and AEI's Rick Hess have penned a thoughtful piece that you can find on <
?There is no way in our state right now that the dadgum unions are going to agree with this kind of stuff.?
The?California Court of Appeal ruled 3-0 yesterday that a parent can sue a school in order to compel it to provide the physical education that state law mandates?viz., 200 minutes of kinetic exertion every ten days in elementary schools, and 400 minutes in middle and high schools.
The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation has been authorizing (aka sponsoring) charter schools in Ohio since 2005, and each year we submit an ?accountability report? to the state that documents our authorizing work, our schools' performance, and more. Sharing lessons from our charter authorizing work is important and so we spend a lot of time and energy on it.
It's just a brief news item in Education Week, but it caught my eye:? Yale is ending its masters degree program in urban education.