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Commentary
4.16.2003

L.A. school board votes to oppose state testing requirement

The Los Angeles Unified School Board voted unanimously last week to oppose the state's high school exit exam. The board, which has a new union-backed majority (at least for now - one union-backed incumbent still faces a run-off in May), hopes to influence the state board to postpone or drop the requirement that students pass an exit exam before being allowed to graduate from high school.

Commentary
4.16.2003

New York Times smears No Child Left Behind

Checker was right to skewer Michael Winerip for his grouchy piece, "A Pervasive Dismay On a Bush School Law," [see "The Law People Love to Hate - and Pretend to Love," http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=16#242It is always annoying when reporters proclaim that grumblings are the manifestation of a zeitgeist (

Commentary
4.16.2003

College instructors value grammar more than high school teachers do

College instructors value grammar more than high school teachers do While college instructors rank "grammar and usage" as a student's most important writing skill, high-school teachers rank it as least important, and only 69 percent of high-school English teachers say they teach their students grammar and usage skills, according to a new survey by ACT.

Commentary
4.9.2003

The next frontier in reading instruction

Now that a scientific consensus has been reached on how best to teach children to decode words, the time has come to move on to challenge of boosting their reading comprehension. The Spring 2003 issue of American Educator focuses on this topic. The lead article, by E.D. Hirsch, explains how weak comprehension ruins poor children's chances to achieve academic success.

Commentary
4.9.2003

NYC adds phonics, exempts more schools from systemwide curriculum

After reading experts criticized Month by Month Phonics, the reading curriculum that he had originally selected for citywide implementation, on grounds that it lacked evidence of effectiveness, New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein has quietly decided to supplement it with a phonics-intensive program developed by Voyager Expanded Learning and based on sound reading research.

Commentary
4.9.2003

English-only Pupils Learn More English

Just five years after California voters approved Proposition 227, which replaced bilingual education with English-only programs for most California LEP students, the number of English learners who scored "proficient' on the state's language test has risen significantly.

Commentary
4.9.2003

Kaplan to launch online ed school

Kaplan, Inc. will open a "virtual" school of education in 2004, to be led by former New York City chancellor Harold Levy. The school hopes to attract working adults and midcareer professionals who will take their classes via distance learning and also have clinical experiences in K-12 classrooms.

Commentary
4.9.2003

Colorado to enact statewide voucher plan

Kathleen Porter-Magee

Last week, the Colorado Senate narrowly passed a pilot voucher bill that, when signed, will mark the first voucher plan enacted since last year's landmark Zelman decision. The Colorado House, which passed a similar version of the bill on February 19, is reviewing the Senate amendments.

Commentary
4.9.2003

Consolidation is a Bad Idea

John T. Wenders

Arkansas, Arizona, South Dakota, Kansas, Vermont, Iowa and Idaho are presently weighing proposals to reduce the number of school districts within their borders by consolidating some of them into larger units.

Commentary
4.9.2003

Core Knowledge publishes summary of effectiveness evidence

Parents, principals, and policymakers who want to know what research shows about the effectiveness of the Core Knowledge (CK) curriculum will find a useful summary in an article in the Core Knowledge Foundation newsletter. It summarizes three large studies that compare the academic performance of students in CK schools with pupils in control groups.

Commentary
3.26.2003

Urban Catholic schools innovate to survive

While many inner-city Catholic schools struggle to survive, and more than a few shut down, three innovative models of Catholic middle and high schools are spreading across the country. In Cristo Rey high schools, which now exist in four cities and will soon expand to six more sites, students earn much of their tuition by working in banks, law firms, and other businesses needing clerical help.

Commentary
3.26.2003

Voucher program in Florida has long waiting list

The largest but perhaps least well known of Florida's three voucher programs is providing scholarships to private schools for more than 15,000 children this year and has exhausted the $50 million that policymakers allowed for it.

Commentary
3.26.2003

The Law People Love to Hate--and Pretend to Love

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

Bring back Richard Rothstein! The space his education column formerly occupied in the Wednesday New York Times is often filled nowadays by the grumpy Michael Winerip, who seems bent on proving that everybody in America hates the No Child Left Behind act. His latest contribution was last week's column reporting "pervasive dismay" with NCLB across the land.

Commentary
3.26.2003

Teachers complain that principals won't back them up on discipline

Former teachers often say they left the classroom because of a lack of "administrative support." Often what they mean is that school administrators failed to back them up when they tried to enforce classroom discipline or punish students for cheating or plagiarism. An article in the Baltimore Sun illuminates both sides of this struggle.

Commentary
3.26.2003

Teach for America asks districts to pay for teachers

Teach for America (TFA) has begun asking school districts to contribute $1500 for each teacher they hire from the program. The national program--which recruits top college graduates, trains them over the summer to teach in high-need schools, places them in classrooms, and supports them while they teach--spends about $8,000 to develop each TFA corps member.

Commentary
3.26.2003

Are small schools really better?

In his online Class Struggle column, Jay Mathews praises a new book by Tom Toch called High Schools on a Human Scale: How Small Schools Can Transform American Education. While small schools are in vogue today, boosted in part by many dollars from the Gates Foundation, skeptics wonder whether size alone can determine school effectiveness.

Commentary
3.26.2003

Big city districts gaining on state tests

A new report from the Council of the Great City Schools (CGCS) finds that the nation's largest school districts are making significant gains on state tests, often improving faster than rural and suburban districts. Eighty-seven percent of grades in big-city districts posted gains in math between 1997 and 2002, and 44 percent improved faster than the state average.

Commentary
3.26.2003

Performance pay desirable for high-need schools

Performance-based pay should be tried. If one were to offer substantial pay premiums for teachers in poor, low performing schools, market-based pay might be successful. By substantial, I mean at least a 25% increase in pay over the existing salary schedule. For example, my district, LAUSD, starts credentialed teachers at $41,000.