A New Yorker piece by Malcolm Gladwell tells the fascinating tale of a working-class kid from Brooklyn who turned the world of college admissions testing upside down. As you read the article, it's hard not to root for Stanley H.
If you've been on another planet this week, you may not have heard that Congress passed the long awaited E.S.E.A. bill, which President Bush intends to sign in January. If you were out of our solar system all year, you might not know that this legislation requires states to test every student in grades 3 through 8 and report the results broken down by subgroup (e.g.
Craig D. Jerald, The Education Trust, 2001
edited by Diane Ravitch and Joseph P. Viteritti, 2001
James J. Kemple, Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, December 2001
Just how different ARE charter schools? Everyone knows that their governance is freer, their budgets leaner and their longevity less certain than regular public schools, but how different is what actually goes on inside them? Is it anything that students, parents and teachers would notice? Anything that might make them produce better results?
While some see charter schools as a radical experiment of the 1990's, the model is actually over 200 years old, according to an article by Susan Hollins of the New Hampshire Charter School Resource Center.
If you feel amused or provoked by anything you read in the Education Gadfly, write us at [email protected]. From time to time, we publish correspondence that we think might interest other readers, such as the following letter.
Why are school finance litigators jumping for joy over the imminent passage of President Bush's education plan? In the December Washington Monthly, Siobhan Gorman explains that the detailed test scores that will eventually emerge from the plan - which requires that states annually test students in grades 3 through 8 in reading and math - will be a "potential bonanza" for lawyers ho
A recent study by the Manhattan Institute's Jay Greene (High School Graduation Rates in the United States) shone a spotlight on the enormous number of students who disappear from school attendance rolls between 8th grade and 12th grade but aren't counted in any official dropout statistics.
In last week's Gadfly, we reported on efforts by the government of Pakistan to rein in some state-funded Islamic schools that breed extremism and violence and provide incentives for teaching modern subjects like science, math, computers, and English. Hopefully these efforts to promote liberal education in Pakistan will be more sincere than they have been in the schools run by the P
It's not only in the world of education research that ideology sometimes trumps scientific evidence; the folks who study drug-prevention programs for children can be hostile to research-based practices as well.
David E. Campbell, Pioneer Institute for Public Policy Research, September 2001
As Enron, the giant energy company, plummeted toward bankruptcy from its one-time market value of $80 billion, business and finance experts bestirred themselves to try to explain what had gone wrong and what lessons could be drawn from this corporate calamity.One such account appeared in the December 4 Wall Street Journal in the form of a perceptive op ed by Joe Berardino, managin
The teachers who have worked their way to the top of today's education system were hired at a time when fewer professional opportunities were open to all and when choosing a lifelong career was the norm. By contrast, today's new teaching candidates have many attractive career options and very different expectations about career mobility and job security.
Brian P. Gill, P. Michael Timpane, Karen E. Ross and Dominic J. Brewer, RAND, 2001
In an article in Adolescent Medicine, Paul Hill explains why most large, urban high schools are not only ineffective but actually harmful to adolescents - especially low-income and minority students - and what can be done about them. These schools are widely known to be plagued by low standards, poorly qualified teachers, frequent leadership changes, violence and a lack of decorum,
It's nice to reoccupy this space after making room for two terrific guest editorials and a week's hiatus at Thanksgiving. Allow me to bend your ear, as it were, on a quartet of important issues.* * * *The long Elementary and Secondary Education Act (E.S.E.A.) drama appears at long last to have reached its final act.
Arizona could become the second state (after Iowa) to do away with its seniority-based pay scale for teachers and replace it with a system in which teachers are paid based on how effective they are. But daunting obstacles lie ahead.
Reducing class size is a reform that is popular with teachers, parents, and the education establishment, but policymakers need more solid information about the costs and benefits of other reform options before they commit billions more dollars to across-the-board class-size reduction.
National Center for Education Statistics, December 2001
In October 2001, the Abell Foundation released a study on teacher certification which included a comprehensive review of all studies that investigate whether certified teachers are more effective than teachers without traditional state certification (and a related question, whether formal teacher training from a school of education is correlated with greater student achievement).
Donna Walker James, Sonia Jurich and Steve Estes, American Youth Policy Forum, 2001
edited by Don McAdams, Paul Hill and Jim Harvey, Center for Reform of School Systems, 2001
edited by Paul Peterson and David Campbell, The Brookings Institution, 2001
Eric A. Hanushek, John F. Kain and Steve G. Rivkin, National Bureau of Economic Research, November 2001
The General Accounting Office issued this report at the behest of four Senators. It offers the first close look we've ever seen at the federal government's own two "school systems," the one run by the Interior Department's Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) with 47,000 pupils and the one run by the Defense Department (DOD) with 108,000 students.
The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation asked experts to share their knowledge and ideas on topics related to effective education philanthropy. Here are seven papers that answer some of philanthropists' most important questions in the education reform arena.
