President Bush's 2004 budget previews many worthy education policy reforms, though in most cases the fine print remains to be written. Last week, I applauded the Administration's excellent Head Start initiative (http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=10#350).
David T. Gordon, Editor, Harvard Education PressJanuary 2003
Ronald D. Ferguson, NCREL Policy Issue 13December 2002
Sara Bolt, Jane Krentz, Matha Thurlow, University of Minnesota, National Center on Educational Outcomes. November 2002
George L. Wimberly, ACT Policy Report2002
If you missed the national conference on teacher compensation and evaluation sponsored by CPRE (Consortium for Policy Research in Education) in November 2002, you can now access most of its presentations online.
Parents who call school district offices in New York City to try to transfer their children out of failing schools have a nearly 1 in 2 chance of getting the wrong information, two reporters from the New York Daily News found.
U.S. Department of Education, Office of the Under SecretaryPrepared by Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. and Decision Information Resources, Inc.February 2003
A new book aimed at discovering why there are so few black and Hispanic professors points the finger at undergraduate affirmative action policies that steer minority students to schools where they don't achieve high grades.
Last June, the parent of a high school senior in New York City examined reading passages on the state's high-stakes Regents exams and discovered that somebody was sanitizing literary excerpts - doctoring the reading passages by literary greats to make sure that nothing offensive was included.
While support for many federal agencies will remain flat, President Bush has proposed a large increase in funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities in his FY 2004 budget, with nearly all of the new dollars going to the "We the People" program. Created last year to encourage better understanding of U.S.
This week, the Bush Administration released its proposed multi-trillion dollar federal budget for 2004. Included is $75 million for a new Choice Incentive Fund that would allow the Department of Education to make competitive awards directly to states, local education agencies and community-based non-profit organizations with proven records of securing educational opportunities for children.
Educators and parents are sometimes blamed for using medications like Ritalin to make overactive kids compliant and faulted for their inability to control their children without chemical assistance.
Standard & Poor's this week released its second comprehensive analysis of Michigan's K-12 education system. The report, reviewing both academic and financial data from districts in the state, covers a five year period: 1996-97 through 2000-01.
Larry Cuban and Michael Usdan, editors, Teachers College PressDecember 2002
The Center on Education PolicyNovember 2002
The National Commission on Teaching and America's FutureJanuary 2003
Frederick Hess, the Progressive Policy InstituteJanuary 2003
Paul Hill, The Progressive Policy InstituteJanuary 2003
Peter BrimelowFebruary 2003
California State University officials report that 59 percent of freshman entering the university system this fall needed remediation in math or English, despite ranking in the top third of their high school classes and having a B average in high school.
President Bush is in trouble with the Head Start establishment again, if you can believe The Washington Post, whose reporters on this beat seem to have swallowed the view that Head Start is swell and ought not be pushed to do anything different from what it's always done.
Clive R. Belfield and Henry M. LevinNational Center for the Study of Privatization in EducationTeachers College, Columbia UniversityDecember 2002
Geography plays a crucial role in shaping history, and the study of history provides an important context for students learning geography, but teachers rarely take advantage of the complementary nature of these subjects. This report shows how the study of U.S. history can be enriched by blending geography into the curriculum. The centerpiece is an innovative curriculum framework in which each historical period is supplemented and enriched by the introduction of relevant geography.
Since last year, top Washington (D.C.) Teachers' Union officials have been under investigation for having embezzled more than $5 million and using those funds to purchase luxury goods for themselves.
Since New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein announced last week that the city will require all but its top elementary schools to use a reading curriculum called Month by Month Phonics [see "Letters From New York City: Bloomberg's Reforms" in last week's Gadfly], top reading experts have raised doubts about the t
Fingering localized school funding as the cause of the persistent incompetence of many schools (as well as the source of great inequalities in per pupil spending), writer (and former White House aide) James Pinkerton proposes what he calls a grand compromise to address both these problems and please both Republicans and Democrats to boot: a Pell grant program for K-12 education.
You know how a balloon mortgage works: you pay a low interest rate at the beginning, but a few years out the rate soars. So you hope to refinance on more favorable terms - or offload the real estate onto someone else - before that painful day arrives.As tomorrow's deadline hits for states to file their No Child Left Behind (NCLB) accountability plans with the U.S.
