The strongest argument for vouchers is moral, Jonathan Rauch writes in the October Atlantic Monthly. It's wrong for rich, white liberals to insist that poor children attend dysfunctional schools that they'd never allow their own children to set foot in.
To hardly anyone's surprise, the Houston Independent School District won the first $500,000 Broad Prize for Urban Education. Funded by Los Angeles billionaire education reformer Eli Broad, the prize recognized Houston for improving student achievement and narrowing its achievement gaps, gains achieved largely through the leadership of then-superintendent Rod Paige.
In the most elaborate cheating scandal in the history of Chicago's public schools, teachers were caught giving tips, erasing incorrect answers, pointing to correct answers, and filling in the answers to questions left blank on students' Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, which were administered in May to students in grades 3 through 8.
Standards-based reform has become America's main strategy for boosting student achievement, strengthening school effectiveness and renewing our education system.
When Edison Schools filed its 2002 annual report with the Securities and Exchange Commission on September 30, the world learned two things: that the firm's financial situation was unsteady and that there have been changes to its board of directors.
Disillusioned with the corporate world, discouraged by the dot-com bust and idealistic about making a difference in the world, some of today's most motivated and ambitious young professionals are joining the battle to better our nation's education system, often by creating companies and organizations that aim to help schools improve.
States with high academic standards have protested that the No Child Left Behind Act punishes them for setting high expectations for their students. But NCLB is not the only program that allows standards to vary for students in different states.
Robin Lake, Abigail Winger and Jeff Petty, Center on Reinventing Public Education, University of WashingtonMay 2002
United States General Accounting OfficeSeptember 2002
Valerie E. Lee and David Burkam, Economic Policy InstituteSeptember 2002
Lance T. Izumi with K. Gwynne Coburn and Matt Cox, Pacific Research InstituteSeptember 2002
Michael DeArmond, Sara Taggart and Paul Hill, Center on Reinventing Public Education, University of WashingtonMay 2002
Michael deCourcy Hinds, Carnegie Corporation of New York2002
Christopher Barnes, Center for Civic Innovation at the Manhattan InstituteSeptember 2002
In a recent meeting with reporters in Detroit, Education Secretary Rod Paige spoke heresy to the education establishment. He asserted that the "teacher shortage" is "contrived" and that many individuals who would make good teachers are shut out by the current system. He's right.For more than a decade, educational Cassandras have been warning that the U.S.
I am writing in response to Chester Finn's unfair characterization of the article "On the Spirit of Patriotism" written by Michalinos Zembylas and Megan Boler and published in the Teachers College Record (TCR) online edition. [See http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=44#642 for Finn's editorial.
Several states - Connecticut, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Virginia included - recently announced that they were not yet required to offer supplemental services like tutoring to students in failing schools. Not so, says the U.S.
Reporter Joshua Benton describes how principal Nancy Hambrick turned around a failing middle school in Texas in "Principal demands perfection, gets it," The Dallas Morning News, September 29, 2002. But it can work the other way, too.
While Education Secretary Rod Paige and the National Commission for Teaching and America's Future battle over whether traditional teacher education and state certification guarantee teacher quality, Martin Haberman contends that both sides are missing the point.
Educational psychologists report a big increase in demand by middle class parents for diagnoses that will allow their teenage sons and daughters to receive extra time to take the SAT, particularly in well-off communities, now that the College Board is no longer "flagging" the scores of students who take the test under special conditions.
While most special ed experts believe that including learning disabled children in regular classrooms is ideal, try telling that to parents whose kids attend the Lab School in Washington, DC. Each year, 400 applicants vie for 40 spots at this privately operated school, where all 310 students suffer from moderate to severe learning disabilities.
This week's Chronicle of Philanthropy features a trio of articles by Meg Sommerfeld on charter schools. "Nonprofit Lesson Plans" looks at charters launched by charities such as the YMCA, and some of the rewards and challenges for those schools and charities.
Peter Cookson, and Kristina Berger2002
Sara Mead, Progressive Policy InstituteSeptember 12, 2002
Scott Joftus, Alliance for Excellent EducationSeptember 2002
Earlier this month, the Gadfly reviewed a study of the effectiveness of Teach for America participants and other teachers without full certification in Arizona, a study that we found to be severely flawed.
Even more big guns were brought out by the Education Commission of the States (ECS) to evaluate a small study that examined the effectiveness of teachers certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) in Tennessee. That study (actually a 4-page brief followed by 4 pages of data), by J.E.
