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.
Tim Waters & Sally Grubb, Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning2004
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.
Newspapers across the country were abuzz this week with reports of teachers cheating on behalf of their students.
(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!"
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
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.
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
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.
National Center for Education StatisticsDecember 2004
Caroline M. Hoxby, Harvard UniversityDecember 2004
International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement2003
Last week, Education Week published an appalling commentary from LouAnne Johnson assailing the most common deterrent to student misbehavior: detention.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Prichard Committee for Academic ExcellenceNovember 2004
U.S. Department of Education, Office of Innovation and ImprovementNovember 2004
How did New York City's experiment in school reform, once so promising, become such a mess? Author Sol Stern explains in this third edition of Fordham's new Fwd: series of short articles of interest to K-12 education reformers.
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.
In Fremont, California, the local school board was determined to reroute elementary and middle school students from the posh Mission Hills neighborhood away from high-performing Mission Hills High School to lower-performing schools in the area. Mission Hills parents objected, and even weighed splitting off to form their own school district, though in the end they did not.
It was perhaps a foregone conclusion, but one cannot help but be struck by Tuesday's recommendations from a court-appointed panel of referees in the New York City school financing case: increased state aid eventually reaching $5.63 billion extra for Big Apple schools each year, plus an additional $9.17 billion for capital improvements.
The Education Department's new Institute for Education Sciences was set up to take policy guidance and expert advice from a fifteen member National Board for Education Sciences, nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate.
