Over the past half-century, the number of pupils in U.S. schools grew by about 50 percent while the number of teachers nearly tripled. Spending per student rose threefold, too. If the teaching force had simply kept pace with enrollments, school budgets had risen as they did, and nothing else changed, today's average teacher would earn nearly $100,000, plus generous benefits.
Recent discussions about inadequate high schools have focused on improving math and English. But topics like geography remain in desperate need of attention as well. Several years ago, a poll reported that only 13 percent of Americans ages 18-24 could find Iraq on a map, and scores on the 2001 geography NAEP were dismayingly low for high school students.
National Center for Education StatisticsMarch 2005
Kevin Donnelly, Menzies Research Centre2004
The Department of Health and Human Services is under fire for not doing enough to ferret out financial mismanagement, fraud, and abuse in Head Start programs.
If only every school had this problem. School officials at the affluent New Trier High School in northern Chicago, a high-performing public school that sends 95 percent of its graduates to four-year colleges, are discussing plans that they hope will decrease student intensity.
Roger Shattuck, a distinguished literary and cultural critic from Boston University, has a fascinating story in the New York Review of Books about serving on a local school board in Vermont.
It's a no-rules steel cage match to the death in California, pitting the California Teachers Association against Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Union members are expected to approve a proposal to increase member dues by $180 over three years, a levy that will add a staggering $54 million to the $11 million war chest the union has assembled to fight the Governor's education proposals.
A Bronx teacher at notoriously bad Middle School 142 was charged this week with coercion, falsifying business records and other crimes following the discovery that he paid a former homeless man two dollars to take his state certification exam. The teacher, Wayne Brightly, was "tired of flunking" and was scared of losing his $59,000 salary if he failed again.
George K. Cunningham and J. E. Stone, JAM PressMarch 2005
The New York Sun reports that Saudi Arabia has given Columbia University's Middle East Institute annual grants of $15,000 since 2002 to support "outreach" programs, which allow Columbia faculty and graduate students to instruct many of New York's public school teachers about how to teach Middle East politics.
In the New York Times, Diane Ravitch - as is her wont - yells "Stop!" to the tide of governors, policy wonks, and technology moguls who have recently fingered high schools as the weak link in American K-12 education.
The old SAT is dead, but The Economist offers a proper eulogy, crediting it for "producing one of the great silent social revolutions in American history - the rise of the meritocracy." In the 1930s, Harvard president James Bryant Conant determined to break the WASP stranglehold that populated America's top colleges and universities with the feckless children of wealth.
Last month we reported that a Rhode Island school district had cancelled its annual spelling bee on the dubious grounds that it violated NCLB. Well, we're happy to report that the district bowed to public pressure and held the competition, but not without some changes.
Patricia J. Kannapel and Stephen K. Clements, Prichard Committee for Academic ExcellenceFebruary 2005
Only Nixon, it is said, could go to China, and perhaps only Arthur Levine could go to our schools of education.
The Palm Beach Post reports that Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Education Commissioner John Winn are changing their tune on NCLB requirements. Despite promises to the contrary, the state recently met "informally" with U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings to discuss lowering their adequate yearly progress benchmarks.
This is no April Fools item. Teachers in America's leftist heartland, Berkeley, California, have announced that they will not assign their students written homework until they receive a pay raise. The local teachers' union initiated the strike and is requiring teachers not to "volunteer" outside of their contracted hours.
With legislatures across the country in full swing, school-choice proposals - both vouchers and tuition tax credits - are being debated all over. Parents rallied on the State House steps in South Carolina in support of Governor Mark Sanford's tax credit for home school and private school students. As Sanford said, "This is simply about recognizing that competition has made every product . . .
Don't cancel your subscription to the New York Times just yet. Education reformers (and people of contrarian spirit everywhere) should be pleased with the announcement that reporter and columnist John Tierney is taking over William Safire's patch of the most-watched journalistic real estate in the world: the Times op-ed page.
The latest California Field Poll shows that, while many of Governor Schwarzenegger's reform proposals - the Govern-ator has dubbed this the "Year of Reform" in the Golden State - garner only lukewarm support, his idea of teacher merit pay (see here) is a genuine hit.
Like going steady in elementary school, everybody's talking about it, but nobody's actually doing it. We mean, of course, mounting a major challenge to NCLB.
Saul Geiser and Veronica Santelices, Center for Studies in Higher Education, University of California at Berkeley2004
Cheri Pierson Yecke, Center of the American ExperimentFebruary 2005
A year ago, responding to an outrageous piece by People for the American Way (as they pretentiously and falsely style themselves), I wrote in this space that a little "pork" in federal appropriations wasn't such a bad thing (see here). These Congressionally-earmarked projects, I argued,
