In "The Dems Go Back to School," (Gadfly, September 1, 2005) you refer to the "loopy left arguments" of Richard Rothstein who, you claim, "declare[s] education improvement impossible until poverty is eradicated."
Will all high school students in the state of Maine pass through a Kaplan test-prep course on their way to graduation? The Boston Globe reports that the land of the lobster may soon swap its Maine Educational Assessment test for the SAT. If adopted, the state would pay for every 11th grade student to take the test once.
Breaking news: civil rights groups disagree on NCLB. Though John Jackson, the NAACP's national director of education, tells Education Week, "Unity is always best," it is proving elusive.
Chris Whittle, Riverhead PressSeptember 2005
What does the National Education Association eat? Every serious school reformer wants to know. And so, as official Washington took its usual late-August snooze, we recruited some friends and investigated. (Sorry, Mike Antonucci, we did not wear trench coats.)Yes, the NEA Caf??
Upon taking office in February, Secretary Spellings explained her views on NCLB flexibility to Education Week: "There is room to maneuver through the administrative process without waivers. But this 'waive everything' - no.
The stated purpose of the "National Task Force on Public Education," appointed by President Clinton's former chief-of-staff John Podesta, was to "address the challenges facing our education system in an increasingly complex and interconnected world." Its true purpose was to carve out an education agenda for the Democratic Party. That's no easy task. Five years after George W.
New York Times columnist Michael Winerip seldom gets kudos here but last week he turned in a great profile of an outstanding lifelong teacher. Jean Louise Stellfox was a Shakespeare-quoting, grammar-loving English teacher in the coal-mining town of Shamokin, Pennsylvania, who set high, exacting goals and held all her students to them.
Don't be fooled, says Hoover Institution senior fellow Terry Moe, by recent headlines; despite popular belief, unions are not in decline. While private sector unions, which have seen their memberships plummet from 35 percent of the private work force in the 1950s to a mere 8 percent today, may be experiencing problems, public sector unions are thriving. "School teachers, for ex
Cristo Rey schools are placing low-income students on the corporate ladder. Students who enroll in one of the network's eleven Catholic college-preparatory schools, which combine high academic standards with real-world work experience in corporate America, take on entry-level positions one day each week with a sponsoring company.
National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and the Center for School Change August 2005
Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences has great influence on teacher practice. After all, shouldn't teachers be conscious of whether Johnny is spatially, musically, or linguistically intelligent and tailor their instruction accordingly? Well, not quite, according to Daniel T. Willingham, a professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Virginia.
Center on Education Policy August 2005
A riddle: Who has been talking a good game for forty years about equalizing resources for poor kids while creating obscure rules that do the exact opposite? Answer: Uncle Sam. Title I, the mother of all federal education programs, requires that high-poverty schools receive roughly comparable resources before adding funds from Washington.
The summer heat causes some to wilt, but it seems to have stiffened the spine of Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings.
Readers are surely aware that, while vacationing at the ranch, President Bush uttered a few unfortunate words about the teaching of so-called intelligent design: "Both sides ought to be properly taught...so people can understand what the debate is about...Part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought...You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to differe
Good grief! Americans' famed ambivalence, not to say schizophrenia, deepens with respect to school reforms. The annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll released Tuesday, which measures the nation's attitudes toward public schools, shows that while most Americans endorse the goals associated with the No Child Left Behind Act, few embrace its methods.
Educational Policy InstituteAugust 2005
The Business Roundtable August 2005
Ericca Maas, Milton & Rose D. Friedman Foundation and the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public AffairsJuly 2005Indiana???s New and (Somewhat) Improved K-12 School Finance SystemDr. Susan L. Aud, Milton & Rose D. Friedman FoundationJuly 2005
U.S. charter schools are being deprived of essential funding in nearly every community and state where they are found.
Harold Stevenson, one of the most eminent education researchers of our generation, died in July at the age of 80. A professor of psychology at the University of Michigan for thirty years, Stevenson was best known for his book (co-authored by James Stigler), The Learning Gap: Why Our Schools Are Failing and What We Can Learn from Japanese and Chinese Education, published in 1992.
Of all the controversies swirling around the nation's charter schools, none is more hotly contested than the debate over funding. Into the fray leaps Charter School Funding: Inequitys Next Frontier, the most comprehensive and rigorous study ever undertaken of how public charter schools are funded, state by state, and how their revenues measure up to dollars received by district-run schools.
The Dukes of Hazzard isn't the only Southern revival this summer: the recent NAEP scores show southern states accelerating faster than the General Lee.
What could possibly be nasty enough to slash recess, eliminate gym class, demolish the arts, cause childhood obesity, increase anxiety, and now, slight of all slights, trim little Susie's summer vacation? But of course: the evil No Child Left Behind Act!
Last week's Time was all about "being 13." Its conclusion: "Today's 13-year-olds, growing up in a world more connected, more competitive, more complex than the one their parents had to navigate as kids, so far show every sign of rising to the challenge." Perhaps, but are their schools "rising to the challenge," too?
Gadfly can only imagine the expressions of shock and awe as ed school profs and deans awoke at their favorite summering spots to find the Grey Lady of Times Square asking, "Who Needs Education Schools?" The answer, according to this expansive and mostly astute article by Anemona Hartacollis, is pretty much nobody.
National Alliance for Public Charter SchoolsAugust 2005
Lauren E. Allen, Eric Osthoff, Paula White, and Judy Swanson, Cross City Campaign for Urban School Reform2005
