Commentary
Commentary
Attention focused on students who have not passed MCAS
In Massachusetts, 81 percent of the class of 2003 has already passed the state's high-stakes MCAS test and is scheduled to graduate next spring, but the 19 percent of students who have not yet passed it are now the subject of a federal lawsuit.
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Public Alternative Schools and Programs for Students at Risk of Education Failure: 2000-01
National Center for Education StatisticsAugust 2002
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Getting the Most from Technology in Schools
Noel White, Cathy Ringstaff and Loretta Kelley, WestEd2002
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Knowing It By Heart: Americans Consider the Constitution and its Meaning
Public AgendaSeptember 2002
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Beyond the Averages: Michigan School Trends
Standard & Poor's School Evaluation ServicesSeptember 2002
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Commentary
Internet access doesn't raise test scores
A recent study by two researchers at the University of Chicago confirmed what previous technology studies have found: simply giving schools access to the Internet does not automatically translate to gains in student achievement.
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"K12" leads the way in virtual schooling
In a piece for Tech Central Station, Joanne Jacobs recently profiled K12, former Education Secretary William Bennett's kindergarten through twelfth-grade online curriculum and "virtual school" program.
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New deputy secretaries for innovation and improvement, safe and drug-free schools
Secretary of Education Rod Paige this week announced the formation of two new offices within the Education Department, the Office of Innovation and Improvement and the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools. Nina Shokraii Rees will leave her job as deputy assistant to Vice President Cheney to serve as deputy undersecretary in charge of the new Office of Innovation and Improvement.
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Choice may be addictive
School choice may be addictive: the more of it people get, the more they seem to want. Don't be fooled by news accounts of scant demand for the public-school choice provision of NCLB. That's a consequence of too few decent options for kids combined with foot dragging by school systems. Look instead at Florida and Cleveland, where the appeal of vouchers is spreading.
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Confessions of a flag-waver
Over the last few weeks, many have set out to answer the question: What lessons should we teach our children about the attacks of September 11th? Some have responded that we should emphasize tolerance, others have said patriotism, some have recommended that we teach about America's commitment to freedom, others have advised us to recognize America's history of cultural imperialism.
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The California Master Plan for Education
Joint Committee to Develop a Master Plan for Education, California state legislature2002
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The Great Books make a comeback
Despite being branded racist, sexist and irrelevant to contemporary students' lives, the so-called "Great Books" are making a great comeback in some unlikely places: community colleges with largely minority student bodies, homeless shelters, shelters for battered women, and Native American reservations, to name just a few.
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A new generation finds many new ways to cheat
No longer is cheating restricted to the jocks and 'slow' kids in the back of the room. Today's cheaters are tomorrow's Harvard freshmen-overachievers with too much to do and few qualms about finding the easiest way to produce a 5-page paper on King Lear.
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Minority Students in Special and Gifted Education
edited by M. Suzanne Donovan and Christopher T. Cross, National Research Council2002
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NYC union creates curriculum to go with state standards
While standards-based reform is now the law of the land, teachers often complain that they don't have the resources they need to make the reform strategy work.
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Parents fight district effort to serve more disabled students in public schools
The Los Angeles Unified School District is trying to offer more special education services at public schools rather than paying to send students to more expensive private schools, but parents are fighting the change.
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Spending more on special ed without breaking the bank
By transferring funds from ineffective and low-priority labor, health and education programs, Congress could increase funding for special education by billions of dollars and thereby go a long way toward "full" federal funding of the program-which was defined as 40 percent of average per-pupil spending in the 1975 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
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Liberating Teachers: Toward Market Competition in Teacher Representation
Myron Lieberman, Cato InstituteAugust 28, 2002
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Latinos in Higher Education: Many Enroll, Too Few Graduate
Richard Fry, The Pew Hispanic CenterSeptember 5, 2002
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Innovative personnel practices in charter schools
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.
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Is it time for school boards to be accountable, too?
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.
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Leading the charge against effective reading instruction
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.
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Liberals and choice
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.
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Confronting an achievement gap at Berkeley High
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.
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Research and Rhetoric on Teacher Certification: A Response to "Teacher Certification Reconsidered"
Linda Darling-Hammond, Education Policy Analysis ArchivesSeptember 6, 2002
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The Effectiveness of "Teach for America" and Other Under-certified Teachers on Student Academic Achievement: A Case of Harmful Public Policy
Ildiko Laczko-Kerr and David C. Berliner, Education Policy Analysis ArchivesSeptember 6, 2002
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Teacher pay experiment in Chattanooga
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.
Commentary
The Religious Factor in Private Education
Danny Cohen-Zada and Moshe Justman, National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, Teachers College, Columbia UniversityJuly 2002