Public Schools: Comparison of Achievement Results for Students Attending Privately Managed and Traditional Schools in Six Cities
United States General Accounting OfficeOctober 2003
United States General Accounting OfficeOctober 2003
Jennifer O. Aguirre and Matthew Ladner, Children's Educational Opportunity FoundationNovember 4, 2003
Katrina Bulkley and Priscilla Wohlstetter, editors, Teachers College PressNovember 2003
Kevin Carey, The Education TrustOctober 2003
At first glance, the move by Barnstable, Massachusetts to transform all of its traditional district schools to charter schools is a bold and worthwhile reform experiment. The fine print, however, shows that plan to be a bit more, well, complex.
In 1999, the then head of the Colorado Springs NAACP, Willie Breazell, Sr. was fired for writing a pro-school choice column - an unforgivable sin in the eyes of the leadership of many African-American pressure groups.
Call it the last frontier of accountability: a former Louisiana school board member is pushing an initiative to withhold the $800-per-month salaries of school board members who oversee parishes with failing schools. "The accountability system is looking hard at everybody - the children, the teachers. Let's put the school board members in that category," said John Crose, recently of the St.
"Behaviorism," says the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "purports to explain human and animal behavior in terms of external physical stimuli, responses, learning histories, and (for certain types of behavior) reinforcements. . . . To illustrate, consider a food-deprived rat in an experimental chamber.
Good news on teacher quality: the Idaho state board of education has voted to accept the new Passport to Teaching test as a route to certification. Developed by the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence, the test makes mastery of content knowledge the central factor in determining whether a teacher is qualified.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), better known as the Nation's Report Card, has been used for 34 years to test representative samples of students in math, reading, writing, geography, U.S. history, and other subjects.
Though Congress will not complete (nor the Senate even commence) reauthorization of the Higher Education Act until next year, the debate is in full swing.
Jay Mathews weighs in with an even-handed column debunking ten myths about NCLB. He gets it pretty much right, managing in the process to tweak both the law's critics and supporters.