In Chattanooga, Tennessee, the mayor has developed a performance-pay plan whereby teachers and principals in struggling schools will earn big bonuses if their students make significant progress on state tests. Inspired by the plan, twelve top teachers have made the move to at-risk schools in the city.
Reporter Larry Slonaker took a one year leave of absence from The Mercury News to fulfill a lifelong dream of teaching in a California public school (using an emergency teaching credential).
A long story in The Christian Science Monitor looks at where Rod Paige came from to try to understand how he became so single-minded about leaving no child behind. Reporter Amanda Paulson interviewed neighbors, family members and former colleagues for this colorful portrait of the Secretary of Education.
Last year, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) administered its latest U.S. history assessment to approximately 29,000 students in grades 4, 8, and 12 in schools across the country. NAEP's web site now offers the public the opportunity to test their knowledge of American history and see how their performance stacks up against students in the nationwide sample.
Special education is receiving a lot of attention these days. The federal program to provide special accommodations and services to students with disabilities has been critiqued by a Presidential Commission, by multiple authors of a Thomas B. Fordham Foundation/Progressive Policy Institute volume, and by both Democratic and Republican members of Congress.
Myron Lieberman, Cato InstituteAugust 28, 2002
Richard Fry, The Pew Hispanic CenterSeptember 5, 2002
Berkeley High-the only public high school in Berkeley, California-sends many of its students on to top colleges but consigns just as many to failure.
Are charter schools really different? Two studies published by the Fordham Foundation in recent years found that charter schools were serving as promising seedbeds for new approaches to finding, employing, and keeping better teachers.
Elected urban school board members are not accountable to the public, possess modest skills, are conflict-prone and politicized, and cannot work successfully with superintendents, concludes University of Memphis professor Tom Glass in a yet to be published report described by Jay Mathews at WashingtonPost.com.
The Reading First program, part of the No Child Left Behind Act, offers $5 billion over six years to states and school districts to support research-based reading instruction, but not everybody is happy about the strings attached to this funding.
The following appeared on The Wall Street Journal's "Best of the Web Today" page on September 9:"In a letter to the editor of The Washington Post, one April Falcon Doss explains why she chose to send her daughter to a private school:For a card-carrying liberal, I was surprisingly unapologetic about our decision.
Danny Cohen-Zada and Moshe Justman, National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, Teachers College, Columbia UniversityJuly 2002
Linda Darling-Hammond, Education Policy Analysis ArchivesSeptember 6, 2002
Researchers from Teachers College and the University of Maryland sought to find out "what actually happens to children during an entire school day" so they asked elementary teachers to complete a time diary.
Ildiko Laczko-Kerr and David C. Berliner, Education Policy Analysis ArchivesSeptember 6, 2002
