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Commentary
2.15.2006

Halls of ignorance

For Jenna Helenski, the daily grind at Connecticut's Ellington High School can be exhausting. Thank goodness the senior has three study halls everyday to catch her breath.

Commentary
2.8.2006

The mad, mad world of education research

Douglas Reeves

"What? Me Worry?" Alfred E. Newman, Mad Magazine's mascot since the late 1950s, delivered this signature line whenever the world around him was going, well, mad. So, too, it seems, those working in the field of educational research.  

Commentary
2.8.2006

The President's Budget: A thought experiment

Michael J. Petrilli

Conventional wisdom posits that the President’s 2007 Budget is nothing but a collection of recycled education policies (and cuts). The same old private-school choice proposal that never goes anywhere. The same high school reform plan that crashed and burned in 2005.

Commentary
2.8.2006

Pride and progress

Jay Mathews tells a touching story of struggle and triumph, chronicling a low-income Alexandria (VA) school’s battle to meet NCLB’s adequate yearly progress (AYP) definition. Since it found itself on the “needs improvement” list in 2004, and losing students to other, better-performing schools, Maury Elementary School embraced wide-reaching internal reforms.

Commentary
2.8.2006

Will learn for iPods

Introducing another bad idea in contemporary K-12 education. The New York Times reports that many schools, plagued by truancy (and attendant problems both with test scores and state funding formulae), now bribe kids to come to class. At Chelsea High School, located in an impoverished community outside Boston, students earn $25 for each quarter of perfect attendance.

Commentary
2.8.2006

Danger: High-flying students

In addition to ensuring that all kids succeed academically, No Child Left Behind aims to make schools safer. But when crafting this part of the law, the feds overlooked a major hazard: cheerleading. According to the Columbus Research Institute, cheerleading participation between 1990 and 2002 increased by a mere 18 percent.

Commentary
2.8.2006

NCLB's Majority interest

Ed policy gurus are buzzing this week about Rep. John Boehner’s unexpected ascent to House Majority Leader. Boehner (R-Ohio) is the former House Education Committee chairman, and his departure has many wondering how this move will affect NCLB and its impending reauthorization, as well as scads of other programs. So far, the news is good. NCLB proponent Rep. Howard P.

Commentary
2.7.2006

Following the money

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.

Commentary
2.7.2006

Learning on the Job: When business takes on public schools

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.

Commentary
2.7.2006

Making a difference

Evidence of the positive effects of charter schools appeared in two recent articles. The Dayton Daily News reported that the dropout rate in Montgomery County was cut in half between 2000 and 2005, falling from 25.6% to 12.3% That is an impressive accomplishment, and it is the result of the county’s Out of School Task Force, a network of programs linked to charter schools.

Commentary
2.7.2006

Making Choice Work in Dayton

Dayton is a leader in school choice. This city of just 165,000 residents provides families with educational options not typical of a city its size.

Commentary
2.1.2006

The twilight zone

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.

Commentary
2.1.2006

WASL weasels

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.

Commentary
2.1.2006

South Carolina: the next Florida?

Martin A. Davis, Jr.

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.

Commentary
2.1.2006

Don't fix it, just sell it!

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.

Commentary
2.1.2006

Bush's first- and second-term policies don't harmonize

Michael J. Petrilli, Chester E. Finn, Jr.

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).

Commentary
1.25.2006

The religion police

Christian creationists aren't the only devout Americans expressing angst over K-12 school curricula. Of late, Hindus, Jews, and Muslims have joined them. In California, for example, Hindus are pressing to change how their faith is described in state history texts.

Commentary
1.25.2006

FERPA: As bad as it sounds

Though the Bush Administration talks nonstop about the essential role of rigorous research in informing education policy and practice (see here for example), it has made little progress removing one of the biggest barriers to such research.

Commentary
1.25.2006

Religion and schools

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

Recently I found myself both mourning the Florida Supreme Court decision that invalidated the Sunshine State's Opportunity Scholarship (aka exit voucher) program and applauding the federal court ruling in Pennsylvania that barred intelligent design from the science classroom.

Commentary
1.25.2006

Do-it-yourself education diversifying

Time was that "diversity" in the home-school movement referred to the handful of hippies that showed up at meetings and protests along with throngs of white Christian fundamentalists. No more, says Brian Ray of the National Home Education Research Institute. "There's an obvious ...