The standards and accountability movement that is transforming K-12 education has begun to permeate the ivory tower, as colleges and universities are being pressed to prove that they can deliver results, not just rest on reputation. Although some public universities are phasing in state assessments, many higher education officials don???t want to open that Pandora???s box.
Last week, the Camden city council unanimously approved a resolution asking the New Jersey legislature to award hefty $6,000 vouchers to students in the city's notoriously low-performing schools. The measure-which faces steep opposition from the governor and teachers union-marks the first time a Northeastern municipality has endorsed a publicly funded voucher program.
A host of opposing forces-not a failure of will, goals or effort-is what's retarding urban schools, writes ace journalist Richard Whitmire in the Democratic Leadership Council's Blueprint Magazine.
As the editor of Teachers As Owners, I couldn't be happier with the conclusion in the recent Gadfly review, namely that "one can't put the book down without noting the chasm between these ideas and the reality of most American schools." (See http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=51#770.) Notwithst
A new report from the National Research Council proposes that math and science Ph.D.s, who face fewer job openings in academia, should instead try teaching in K-12 schools, which are in dire need of math and science teachers.
The Department of Education has given the Blue Ribbon School award since 1982, but attention has recently been drawn to the fact that not all honored schools can actually claim stellar records of student achievement. Accordingly, the DOE recently announced that test scores and test score improvements will become a major component of the selection process.
On Monday, July 29th, New York City mayor Michael R. Bloomberg named Joel I. Klein, the chairman and chief executive of Bertelsmann Inc., and a former assistant attorney general in the Clinton administration-where he led the antitrust prosecution of Microsoft-as chancellor of the city's public school system.
Seven months after President Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act, and one month after the U.S. Department of Education announced that children at 8,652 low-performing schools are now eligible to transfer to higher-performing schools, some states and school districts are giving the new law's approach to failing schools a chilly embrace.
edited by George W. Bohrnstedt and Brian M. Stecher, CSR Research ConsortiumAugust 2002
National Geographic Society and Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning2002
James E. Bruno, Education Policy Analysis ArchivesJuly 26, 2002
Sondra Cooney and Gene Bottoms, Southern Regional Education Board2002
Randy Elliott Bennett, Journal of Technology, Learning and AssessmentJune 2002
A recent issue of Duke Magazine featured a profile of the Media and Technology Charter High School, started by a Duke alumnus to serve students from the worst neighborhoods in Boston.
Fueled by an active business community, frustrated parents, reform-minded local legislators, dedicated entrepreneurs (and some assistance from the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation), charter schools have flourished in Dayton, Ohio, which some term "ground zero" of the national charter movement.
Some weeks back, I used this space to describe ways that a state's academic standards may be lowered, including several that occur out of public view.
If private school vouchers are offered to all parents living in poor districts (as opposed to being offered only to low-income families), this would lessen income segregation across school districts. That's because many families presently stretch their budgets to pay inflated housing prices in good public school districts.
Is Success for All (SFA) the leading example of evidence-based education in America or is it all smoke and mirrors?
Teachers nationwide are scrambling to create lesson plans in observance of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, turning for help to new university workshops like "Understanding the World After September 11" and tolerance-heavy lesson plans such as a National Council for the Social Studies lesson about "Osama," a young Iraqi immigrant to the US who is teased at school because of his name.
A remedial reading program with basic phonics instruction and sentences like "Dad had a sad lad," is being taught to 35,000 middle and high school students in the Los Angeles Unified School District this year, much to the embarrassment of students in the program, who landed in these classes due to their low Stanford 9 reading scores.
Most failing schools desperately need new principals, but talented leaders are in short supply. Maryland superintendent Nancy Grasmick has inaugurated an effort to bring well-regarded principals from suburban districts to lead failing schools in inner city Baltimore.
In "Serving Students With Disabilities in Charter Schools: Legal Obligations and Policy Options," Paul T. O'Neill, Richard J.
That many of our vast public school systems are all but ungovernable doesn't stop the powers that be from searching far and wide for messiah-like figures to lead them. Philadelphia's latest quest for the perfect executive led the City of Brotherly Love to select Paul Vallas, who rides in from Chicago to see whether he can lead another troubled urban system out of educational perdition.
Writing in the summer 2002 issue of Manhattan Institute's City Journal, California State University classics scholar Victor Davis Hanson examines the decline of civic education in America, tracing much of it to the degradation of history and the triumph of multiculturalism and relativism, and suggests (in fairly general terms) what would be needed to revive it.
In an editorial in last week's Gadfly, Checker Finn blasted the AFT's new report "Do Charter Schools Measure Up?" A point-by-point refutation of the key conclusions of the AFT's study will be posted later today by the National Association of Charter School Authorizers at
Deborah Nelson, Consortium for Policy Research in EducationMay 2002
Marie Gryphon and David Salisbury, CATO InstituteJune 10, 2002
Paul A. Herdman, New American SchoolsApril 4, 2002
Paul E. Barton, Educational Testing ServiceMay 2002
