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Commentary
5.21.2003

CA schools paid extra to do the minimum

A recent article in the Sacramento Bee uncovered a questionable education finance plan in California dating back to 1979 that forces the state to provide extra money to schools that meet bare minimum requirements for carrying out state mandates.

Commentary
5.21.2003

Crossing the Ideological Divide

Thomas J. Lasley

As Checker says, it's true that we need better school leadership to improve American K-12 education. With a large percentage of U.S.

Commentary
5.14.2003

The NCLB testing price tag

Last week, the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) released a report on the costs to states of implementing the testing requirements of No Child Left Behind. Not surprisingly, this doesn't seem to have settled any of the NCLB funding fuss.

Commentary
5.14.2003

Union to Bloomberg: drop dead

Last August, when New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg brought in Joel Klein as schools chancellor to help implement his Children First reform initiative, United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten came out in support of the mayor and his education plans.

Commentary
5.14.2003

Stiffening soft America

The war in Iraq got columnist Michael Barone thinking: America's military is chock full of the underskilled, undereducated graduates produced by so many schools. What happened in the intervening years to turn them into the determined, competent soldiers who toppled Saddam's regime?

Commentary
5.14.2003

Technology Counts 2003

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

Kevin Bushweller, Project Editor, Education WeekMay 8, 2003

Commentary
5.14.2003

Debating NCLB: Part II

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

Last week I began to "debate myself" about the No Child Left Behind act, covering five NCLB issues that make me, and many others, ambivalent about this ambitious undertaking. [http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=21#125]That was not the end of it. Five more issues warrant pro-con examination.

Commentary
5.14.2003

Mayor Jerry Brown checked on charter change

Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown went to the California General Assembly last week to lobby for a bill that would allow nonprofit groups, colleges and universities, and mayors to authorize charter schools in that state.

Commentary
5.7.2003

The battle over Minnesota state standards

In January, Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty announced his plan to kill the five year old "Profile of Learning" standards, which focus on measuring "higher-order thinking" based on projects and reports instead of traditional pencil and paper tests, and replace them with new, more rigorous content-based academic standards.

Commentary
5.7.2003

Two DC voucher opponents down, one to go

Last week, District of Columbia Mayor Anthony Williams shocked both voucher friends and foes when he came out publicly in support of an experimental D.C. voucher program. In February, when the White House released its 2004 budget proposal, which included funding for the D.C. voucher program, Mayor Williams, along with D.C. school board president Peggy Cooper Cafritz and D.C.

Commentary
5.7.2003

Potential benefit of California's budget crisis

The Hoover Institution's Eric Hanushek seeks a silver lining to California's budgetary clouds. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, he contends that this could be the time to free California from the costly "straitjacket" of class-size reduction and thereby free some resources for more effective achievement-boosting strategies.

Commentary
5.7.2003

Debating NCLB: Part I

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

Readers of these columns know that I've been a wee bit ambivalent about the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act. So when I was asked to discuss it at the recent educator awards ceremony of the Milken Family Foundation, the likeliest - and most boring - approach was to give an equivocal speech, full of buts, howevers and maybes. Yawn.

Commentary
5.7.2003

Do we know what the NYC voucher data really tell us?

In his New York Times column this week, the curmudgeonly Michael Winerip attempts to discredit the voucher movement by questioning Harvard scholar Paul Peterson's findings from a 2000 study of a New York City voucher experiment - a study that, according to Peterson's team, showed vouchers significantly improving achievement for black students.

Report
5.1.2003
Governance

Better Leaders for America's Schools: A Manifesto

This report, published jointly by the Fordham Institute and The Broad Foundation, contends that American public education faces a 'crisis in leadership' that cannot be alleviated from traditional sources of school principals and superintendents. Its signers do not believe this crisis can be fixed by conventional strategies for preparing, certifying and employing education leaders. Instead, they urge that first-rate leaders be sought outside the education field, earn salaries on par with their peers in other professions, and gain new authority over school staffing, operations and budgets.

Commentary
4.30.2003

A Competent, Caring Journalist in Every Newsroom?

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

People (myself included) who favor the radical overhaul of educators' training are wont to suggest that ed schools should become more like journalism schools: optional institutions that you attend if you think they add value but that you're not obliged to attend before entering this profession, so long as somebody wants to hire you and give you a chance.