As Yogi Berra once said: “You can observe a lot, just by watching.” I’ve been a reporter for 30 years, and have covered nearly every kind of story – except for education. Now that I am doing some writing and editing for the Ohio Education Gadfly, I’ll be looking at education a lot.
In Ohio about 27,500 students currently attend schools run by for-profit and non-profit school management organizations. That number is likely to grow in coming years, so Wilson’s Learning on the Job has particular relevance to K-12 education in the Buckeye State.
Washington state is again enmeshed in a testing imbroglio. Should high school seniors have to pass the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) to graduate? Neal Starkman, a Seattle Post-Intelligencer guest columnist, has a solution to appease all sides of the debate. "It's a degree for students who fail the WASL. It's the A.G.
Has the trust - busting Joel Klein re-emerged to supplant the top-down know-it-all reformer? One can hope. Last month he announced that an additional 150 schools would be placed in his "autonomy zone" (besides the 58 schools there already), making them eligible for greater freedom from oversight.
Floridians are keeping a watchful eye on South Carolina these days, for two reasons. First, former University of Florida coach Steve Spurrier jumped to the University of South Carolina last year and has the Gamecocks bearing down on the overrated Gators.
Jay P. Greene and Marcus A. WintersEducation NextSpring 2006
President Bush's revamped second-term education agenda came into sharper focus on Tuesday night: improve math and science achievement, quoth he. This quest, however, while well intended and much needed, is likely to be impeded by the chief legacy of the President's own first-term education agenda: the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB).
Chris Lubienski and Sarah Theule LubienskiNational Center for the Study of Privatization in EducationTeachers College, Columbia UniversityJanuary 2006
The Boston Teachers Union is out to quash chah-dah schools using its big gun - the union contract. Its recently released 32-page contract proposal now being negotiated includes a request that the school system spend $100,000 a year to recruit charter families back to district schools.
