North Dakota state legislators and school board members are shocked! shocked! to discover that the U.S. Department of Education has rejected the state's plan for designating elementary teachers as "highly qualified" pursuant to NCLB requirements.
Tim Waters & Sally Grubb, Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning2004
Philip Kaufman and Martha Naomi Alt, MPR Associates, Inc. Christopher D. Chapman, National Center for Education Statistics November 2004 Issue Brief: Educational Attainment of High School Dropouts 8 Years Later National Center for Education Statistics November 2004
James E. Ryan, New York University Law Review, Volume 79, Number 3 June 2004
Kate Walsh & Emma Snyder, National Council on Teacher QualityDecember 2004
Newspapers across the country were abuzz this week with reports of teachers cheating on behalf of their students.
The Denver Post reports that "Colorado's charter-school students have outperformed their traditional public-school peers on the state assessment test," with 46 percent of charters rated "excellent" or "high" on the state's accountability reports, compared to just 39.6 percent of traditional public schools.
(To the tune of "Walking in a Winter Wonderland")Two-thousand-four starts as No ChildLeft Behind debates get wildThe unions yell, "Pay!"But Paige says, "No way!"And adds, "You terrorists are out of hand!"
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported this week that local school choice leaders want to create an accountability system to serve "as a stronger system of checks and balances for schools in the voucher program." According to Bob Smith, the superstar president of Messmer Catholic Schools - a cornerstone of the Milwaukee voucher program - and a supporter of the plan, the group wants to c
National Center for Education StatisticsDecember 2004
Thanks to exploding population and a voter mandate to reduce class size, Florida will need nearly 200,000 new teachers over the next 10 years. That's bad news for the Sunshine State, according to a Sarasota Herald Tribune series that documents the alarming number of Florida teachers who have repeatedly failed portions of the state's three certification exams.
Parents need to grow up - so their children can do the same. Hara Estroff Marano reported recently in Psychology Today about the negative effects of parental hyper vigilance on children's lives.
Much ado in New York these days, as ever. The school system created "pandemonium" among graduating seniors by retroactively increasing the grades of students who took advanced and AP classes. We're not necessarily opposed to giving extra credit to students who succeed in tough classes.
Caroline M. Hoxby, Harvard UniversityDecember 2004
International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement2003
Education Week has a collection of articles this week called "No Child Left Behind Taking Root." Taken together, they provide a basic understanding of where states are in compliance with NCLB's testing, accountability, and teacher quality requirements, and of reaching the goal of 100 percent proficiency in reading, math, and (soon) science.
It's on everyone's lips: the NEXT BIG THING in education reform is a serious focus on high school. That's what the President wants to do, what the Gates Foundation wants to do, what a vast array of think tanks and education groups want to do.
One more piece of interesting data from the recent PISA test: Two German researchers found that students who use computers at school frequently (i.e., several times a week) perform "sizably and statistically worse" in math and reading than pupils who use computers (at school) seldom or never.
By now, you've read the bad news from the quadrennial Program for International Student Assessment (PISA): the math skills of American 15-year-olds are sub-standard and falling, compared to their international peers. In fact, the U.S. is outperformed by almost every developed nation, beating only poorer countries such as Mexico and Portugal.
An interesting vignette in the Rocky Mountain News this week, about two staffers from the Education Trust sitting down with teachers and community activists from one of Denver's most troubled high schools. True to the Ed Trust style, the two lay it on the line: yes, kids are affected by what happens at home. Yes, poverty makes teaching difficult.
Last week, Education Week published an appalling commentary from LouAnne Johnson assailing the most common deterrent to student misbehavior: detention.
Prichard Committee for Academic ExcellenceNovember 2004
U.S. Department of Education, Office of Innovation and ImprovementNovember 2004
Your comment on the Akron Beacon-Journal series on home schooling mystified and disappointed me. It's not that we merely disagree about need for regulating home schooling. It's that you are spectacularly wrong to criticize the series in light of the very principles you allege to champion in education.
When the Advanced Placement (AP) program was established in 1955, it was designed to distinguish high-achieving high school students by giving them access to more rigorous, college-level coursework. Nearly a half-century later, enrollment in AP courses is expanding to include not just the highest-achieving students, but virtually anyone who wants in.
There are achievement gaps and then there are achievement gaps. A Japanese elementary school teacher with decades of experience was fired this month for repeatedly failing a writing exam designed for his students. According to an Osaka education official, the teacher had been placed in a training program to improve his teaching skills in March, but "failed to show any signs of improvement.
At the end of a 108th Congress plagued by partisan rancor and seemingly more devoted to symbolic than substantive progress on a host of issues, a lame duck session just before Thanksgiving managed to produce an unexpectedly promising bill to reauthorize the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which governs special education.
Noel Epstein, Editor, Brookings Institution Press and Education Commission of the States 2004
