Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform is her usual blunt self in a recent exchange with the editors of USA Today, who bemoan financial, curricular, and administrative scandals among charter schools and call for greater accountability for them.
A pair of excellent articles in Education Week by Lynn Olson point to the UK for lessons on the pitfalls of standards-based reform on the one hand, and value-added analysis on the other.
Big news for Colorado charter schools. That state's legislature has just passed two bills packed with useful charter law reforms. One creates a Colorado State Charter Institute to sponsor charter schools, removing local districts from their monopoly over that key role.
Martha McCall, Gage Kingsbury, and Allan Olson, Northwest Evaluation AssociationApril 2004
The Albert Shanker Institute and the New Economy Information ServiceApril 20, 2004
Richard J. Coley, Educational Testing ServiceNovember 2003
Sobering thoughts from Frederick Hess on why the new D.C. voucher program won't have the hoped-for effect of reforming the public school system by exposing it to competition. In fact, the new program shields public schools from real competition by capping enrollment at 3 percent of the school-age population, while actually adding dollars to the woeful D.C.
A rosebud to our friends at the Progressive Policy Institute for the launch of "Eduwonk," a daily blog on education issues. It's peppered with smart and witty comments on the education news of the day, perfect for those who just can't wait the full seven days for the next Gadfly. Check it out at http://www.eduwonk.com.
Bryan C. Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel, Armchair Press May 2004
Clifford Adelman, Institute of Educational Sciences, U.S. Department of Education April 2004
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
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.
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.
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 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.
Robert Perkins, Brian Kleiner, Stephen Roey, and Janis Brown, Westat and National Center for Education StatisticsApril 2004
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.
Last Saturday, the Washington Education Association's (WEA) political action committee voted to withhold support for Terry Bergeson, a former WEA president, now running for a third term as the state's school chief.
After months of increasingly shrill criticisms directed at No Child Left Behind, recent news out of Pennsylvania (see "Secrecy vs. sunshine" below for more) offers a painful but healthy reminder of what motivated anyone to pass such a law in the first place.
After the massacre at Columbine High School five years ago, lawmakers and school boards across the land scrambled to prevent similar atrocities. In California, that led to Assembly Bill 537, the California Student Safety and Violence Prevention Act of 2000.
On Tuesday, lawmakers in Texas began a special 30-day session to discuss Republican Governor Rick Perry's sweeping new school finance and property tax cut plan. The proposal would reform the current system, which takes money from "property rich" districts and distributes it to "property poor" districts.
Some of us expect the greatest education reform benefit that No Child Left Behind is likely to yield to be the onrushing flood of information about school, district, and state performance.
This week, the District of Columbia City Council rejected Mayor Anthony Williams's proposal to take control of the District's public school system (the wretchedness of which we have spilled much electronic ink documenting; see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=124#1554,
Bryan Hassel, Valaida Fullwood, and Michelle Godard Terrell, Public ImpactJanuary 2004 Facilities Financing: New Models for Districts that are Creating Schools NewBryan Hassel, Katie Walter Esser, Public ImpactFebruary 2004
Brian Anderson, editor of the estimable quarterly City Journal, argues here that tax credits for private school tuitions have a brighter political future than vouchers. He's also sensitive to new roadblocks placed in the way of vouchers by the Supreme Court's ruling in Locke v.
