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Commentary
3.17.2004

Bad effects of big time sports

It's March Madness time, and not even Gadfly is immune to the pleasures of a couple of weeks of serious college basketball.

Commentary
3.17.2004

Charter sponsorship change pushed in three states

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.

Commentary
3.17.2004

Rigged elections in Gotham

"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

Commentary
3.17.2004

Looking forward on Brown

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.

Commentary
3.17.2004

Grassroots resistance to NCLB

Phyllis McClure

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.

Commentary
3.10.2004

The education tsetse fly?

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

Commentary
3.10.2004

Dueling petitions in Minnesota

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.

Commentary
3.10.2004

Reinventing 12th grade NAEP

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

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.

Commentary
3.10.2004

DoD and NCLB

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.

Commentary
3.10.2004

Charter victory in Washington

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.

Commentary
3.10.2004

Mathews NCLB results are in

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).

Commentary
3.10.2004

Garden state charters wilt

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.

Commentary
3.10.2004

Good news for Edison schools

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.

Commentary
3.3.2004

Focus on comprehension, not just reading&

Many educators believe it doesn't matter what kids read, so long as they are reading something. We beg to differ. Despite the good intentions of policymakers and teachers who want to improve students' reading skills, especially low-income and minority children, merely spending more time on "reading skills," does not a better reader make.

Commentary
3.3.2004

Will Congress hurt or help K-12 math education?

Much like the "reading wars" between phonics instruction and whole language learning, the K-12 "math wars" have raged for more than a decade. With many defeats and only occasional victories, parents, education reformers, and a number of university mathematicians have struggled against "fuzzy math" in schools.

Commentary
3.3.2004

Shakespeare and the SAT

How would Shakespeare do on the new writing section of the SAT? None too well, according to this article in the Atlantic, which scored several well-known writers against the writing criteria set by the College Board, which sponsors America's most prominent test.

Commentary
3.3.2004

Single-sex schools get boost

The Department of Education is entertaining comments on an important proposed change to Title IX regulations that presently impede single-sex schools.

Commentary
3.3.2004

New sponsor for CO charters?

In Colorado, a bill to create an independent state board to authorize charter schools is facing legislative obstacles. The Democrat who sponsored it says it would help charter schools by providing state, rather than local district, oversight.