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.
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.
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.
Aspiring teachers in the Bay State did not do as well on their tests. More than half of the applicants who were accepted into the state's fast-track teacher certification program contingent upon their passing the Massachusetts Test for Educator Licensure failed the test, according to an analysis by a critic of the fast-track program.
As he ends his tenure as president of Children First America, a private scholarship program, school choice icon Fritz Steiger offers some closing remarks and thanks to his allies. His final "Voice for Choice" statement reads like a mini-history and who's who of the school choice movement. "A Voice for Choice," Fritz S.
September 3, 2002I just finished reading a sampling of the essays contained in your report on September 11 and can only hope that the report gets the wide circulation that it deserves.
Why haven't charter schools taken greater hold in suburban areas in most states?
This week's New York Times Magazine contained a fascinating profile of the quirky Goldstein family of West Hempstead, NY-the von Trapps of the spelling bee world.
John Wenders, Idahoans for Tax ReformAugust 2002
Harvard Civil Rights ProjectAugust 23, 2002
While the National Educational Goals Panel and others have reported high school graduation rates remaining essentially stable (around 86 percent) over the last decade, the graduation rate has actually fallen if students receiving GEDs are not included in those numbers, according to an article by Duncan Chaplin of the Urban Institute that appears in the new issue of Education Next.
One year after pass rates on the MCAS exam rose significantly-a gain which was dismissed as a fluke by opponents of Massachusetts' high-stakes testing program-scores on the test have risen yet again, though this round of gains is smaller than last year's.
Contrary to many people's glum assumption, urban school systems are not all education disaster zones. Nor are they all alike. Some, in fact, are far more effective than others at educating children-and we're beginning to understand why that is and what might enable other urban school systems to turn themselves around.
Cardinal Edward Egan and other New York bishops have charged state politicians with violating poor parents' "fundamental rights" by condemning kids to failing public schools and denying them the option to attend parochial schools.
Tom Loveless, Brown Center on Education Policy, Brookings InstitutionSeptember 2002
Our report features timely advice on what schools should teach and children should learn about September 11 and about history, civics, heroism and terrorism. Featuring 23 statements by leading educators and experts, plus an extensive bibliography, the report is a constructive, hard-hitting alternative to the 'diversity and feelings' approach that many national education groups have taken to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Why haven't charter schools taken hold in suburban areas in most states? In this report, Pushpam Jain takes a close look at three states with high proportions of charter schools in the suburbs to see how they managed to introduce charter schools, and then compares them to one state with only a few charter schools to see what is blocking the spread of charters there. His conclusion: if a state sets up a system for authorizing charter schools where the only authorizing body doesn't want charter schools, there won't be many charter schools!
The public school choice provision of the No Child Left Behind act isn't all that different from a federal choice program created two years ago, writes Alexander Russo in this month's Washington Monthly, and the lesson of that Clinton-era program is that providing viable transfer options for children in failing schools is far harder than it sounds.
This month's Worth magazine ranks the public and private high schools with the best records of placing graduates at the most elite colleges. Roxbury Latin, Brearley, and Collegiate top the list: at all three schools, at least 20 percent of graduates over the last four years attended Harvard, Yale or Princeton.
In an essay in this month's Commentary, Paul Peterson reflects on whether the Supreme Court's Zelman decision will be a turning point in how Americans think about education, akin to the Court's Brown vs. Board of Education decision half a century ago.
Test scores in Los Angeles elementary schools are rising nicely and many view such gains as evidence that state and district reforms in math and reading are working. Turning its back on a hodgepodge of exploratory math programs, L.A.U.S.D. standardized its math program and now uses only two textbooks in the elementary grades, both of which stress fundamental skills.
As America readies itself for the "anniversary" of the 9/11/01 terrorist attacks, innumerable education groups and experts are again bestirring themselves to tell schools and teachers what to teach their students on this topic. Unfortunately, much of that advice is bad and some is awful.
The average math score on the SAT rose two points (to 516) this year, while the average verbal score dropped two points to 504, according to figures released this week by the College Board.
Committee for Economic DevelopmentAugust 2002
Craig Jerald and Richard Ingersoll, Education TrustAugust 2002
