Two months ago, Georgia's Professional Standards Commission (PSC) - the committee that is responsible for "certification, preparation, and conduct of certified, licensed, or permitted personnel employed in the public schools of the State of Georgia" - quietly launched an investigation into "diploma mill" teachers.
In New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg took control of the board of education, with decidedly mixed results so far (see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=140#1730).
Homeschooling - once considered the education option of choice for gun-toting religious fanatics or a haven for social misfits - is coming of age as home-schooled students begin to find themselves welcomed at prestigious colleges and universities. It's hardly surprising that many homeschooled students, who get personalized attention in a nurturing educational environment, are doing well.
In any reform of anything, the devil is always in the details. And the Old Deceiver lurks still in the fine print of the pay-for-performance plan approved last week by Denver teachers. How realistic is a plan that won't fully take effect for another eight years? How will the inevitable tension between teachers on the old tenure-based system and teachers on the new plan be resolved?
Just about everyone - principals, parents, students, the general public - knows that many U.S. schools have a discipline problem, that kids are often out of control, not to mention rude, inattentive, and sometimes violent. Nearly every survey of problems facing U.S. schools puts discipline near the top of the list.
Evidence that D.C. Public Schools are in crisis is not hard to come by.
Michael Casserly, Council of the Great City SchoolsMarch 2004
Consortium on Chicago School ResearchFebruary 2004
In this space, Michael Kirst recently provided a useful commentary comparing the time it took to implement the original Title I to the present controversies over implementing the No Child Left Behind act.
U.S. News & World Report has a fantastic special issue on the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. One of the articles therein, "Unequal Education," is as fine a lay-of-the-land piece on education we've seen in many a year.
It's March Madness time, and not even Gadfly is immune to the pleasures of a couple of weeks of serious college basketball.
Education Secretary Rod Paige announced this week that the Department of Education will relax NCLB's "highly qualified teacher" requirements.
"It was a political hit that would make Tony Soprano blush." Just hours before the New York City Panel for Education Policy - successor to the Big Apple's school board - was to vote on Mayor Bloomberg's controversial plan to hold back third graders who failed the city's math and reading tests, the mayor axed two of his own hand-picked board members and orchestrated the firing of a third, all of
Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning and the Education Commission of the StatesFebruary 2004
The push is on to open up the job of authorizing charter schools to more entities. (See Fordham's report on charter school authorizing, which advocated just such a move, at http://www.edexcellence.net/detail/news.cfm?news_id=67). So far, however, success is rare.
Council for Basic Education March 2004
Kyle Stevens, Trafford Publishing2004
Yesterday, the Washington state legislature narrowly passed a bill that will allow both the creation of 45 charter schools for disadvantaged students over the next six years and the conversion of an unlimited number of failing public schools into charters.
NPR recently aired a fascinating story on the schools operated by the Department of Defense for children of military personnel, and whether they, too, should be subject to NCLB's requirements. (Today they're not, because they're not funded by the Department of Education and Title I.) The National School Boards Association says they should be.
A mixed bag of results has arrived from New Jersey's charter schools, with a few showing strong gains but many falling behind local district schools. Only 17 percent of eighth graders in Garden State charters, for example, passed state math tests, compared to 74 percent of students across the state.
After a run of bad press about plummeting stock prices and voided contracts with districts, Edison Schools, Inc., finally seems to be hitting its stride in at least one of the districts it serves. In its third year of a "$30 million, five-year contract to manage six elementary schools and a middle school in disadvantaged areas for the Clark County, Nev.
Some weeks ago, we noted that Washington Post education columnist Jay Mathews was seeking "true life stories" of how NCLB is affecting classrooms, good and bad (http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=133#1658).
No Child Left Behind is focusing so much attention on the 4th and 8th grade results that American students (and states) get on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) that a lot of people scarcely remember that NAEP also tests 12th graders.
The guest editorial in the March 4, 2004 issue of the Education Gadfly ("Will Congress hurt or help K-12 math education?" http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=138#1708 ) begins with name-calling ("fuzzy math") and then descends into an ideological diatribe filled with acid opinion and seldom "marred
For months now, Minnesota's courageous and passionate education commissioner, Cheri Pierson Yecke, has been the target of unrelenting criticism for her team's proposed social studies standards.
Richard D. Kahlenberg, editorThe Century Foundation2004
