The High School Transcript Study: A Decade of Change in Curricula and Achievement
Robert Perkins, Brian Kleiner, Stephen Roey, and Janis Brown, Westat and National Center for Education StatisticsApril 2004
Robert Perkins, Brian Kleiner, Stephen Roey, and Janis Brown, Westat and National Center for Education StatisticsApril 2004
The Colorado legislature has passed, and Governor Bill Owens is expected to sign, a bill creating a voucher program for higher education in that state. The new program will give Colorado students $2,400 to spend on up to 140 credit hours at state colleges and universities. It will also loosen some of the arcane?and ruinous?funding regulations that Colorado colleges labor under.
Caroline M. Hoxby2003
Writing in The Nation, Stanford professor Claude Steele makes a number of points about the "ability paradigm," his term for the testing system that assesses the academic readiness and achievement of individual students, guides placement decisions (such as whether a student will go on to the next grade level or a competitive college), and guides political and social decisions as to how
In Minnesota, a state Senate committee voted yesterday along party lines to reject the nomination of Cheri Yecke to be state superintendent. Her apparent sin? Being too "controversial," which is code for getting useful things done.
As we know, K-12 education is beset by snake oil and flim-flam. Usually, we don't bother to comment, on grounds that life is too short, that it's best not to draw attention to nonsense, that it's bad for our digestions, etc.But sometimes, there crops up an example of meretriciousness so obnoxious we must take note. Thus it is with "High Test Scores?
The suggestion that the Pennsylvania Department of Education is "refusing" to release district-by-district data or public information is just not accurate ("Secrecy vs. sunshine"). The controversy began when the School District of Philadelphia asked the Department to produce an interim report.
The Sun-Times reports that Chicago students who used the school-choice provision of No Child Left Behind to transfer from weak to stronger schools showed gains in reading and math. Further, the transfers didn't harm either the schools they left or the schools they entered, according to a study performed by the Chicago Board of Education at the paper's request.
As its name suggests, this is a free-market research institute, based in London, that includes a strong education-policy program and has issued a number of provocative papers and reports by the likes of James Tooley and Chris Woodhead. Though (understandably) UK-oriented, much of what it has to say has broader applicability, so you may want to become acquainted.
The Wall Street Journal this week highlighted a new study (by acclaimed reading expert Sally Shaywitz) published in the journal Biological Psychiatry that used magnetic resonance imaging to measure the brain activity of poor readers and gauge the brain wave effects of an intensive phonics program.