Vouchers over Easy

As we reported a few weeks ago ("Nothing easy in the Big Easy,"), every day brings new challenges to New Orleans's schools.

Reading wars redux

For more than three decades, advocates of "whole-language" reading instruction have argued--to the delight of many teachers and public school administrators--that learning to read is a "natural" process for children.

School bored politics

School board meetings are the choicest venues to stage a culture war this side of the O'Reilly Factor. The best battles, of course, pit religion against science, faith against fact. And just when you thought this struggle was going stale, here comes Al Gore and his global warming docu-drama An Inconvenient Truth.

On the Clock: Rethinking the Way Schools Use Time

Elena SilvaEducation SectorJanuary 2007

Next time, use Kinko's

To instruct students on the artistic technique of chiaroscuro, a Renaissance innovation that contrasts dark colors with intense whites, a typical teacher might display Baglione's Sacred Love versus Profane Love or Rembrandt's

Great Schools for All: A Plan Big Enough to Close America's Largest Achievement Gap

Connecticut Coalition for Achievement NowJanuary 2007

Dumbing Down: Outcomes-based and politically correct--the impact of the Culture Wars on our schools

Kevin DonnellyHardie Grant Books2007

A reformer is born (or so one hopes)

When New York elected Democratic attorney general Elliot Spitzer to succeed Republican George Pataki as governor, nobody knew exactly what tack he would take on education.

Work it

This ain't your daddy's shop class. The Boston Globe reports that almost 50 percent of Bay State vocational ed students "now enroll in a two- or four-year college after graduation, more than double the rate in 1990." Not only are voc ed programs helping keep at-risk students from dropping out, but they're pushing some on into higher education, too.

No more bubble boys

Human-robot interaction may have been occurring a long time ago, but until now we've seen few practical uses for robotics in education.

Quality redoubts

At Editorial Projects in Education, we were starting to wonder whether the reception to the latest edition of our Quality Counts report and its Chance-for-Success Index had been a bit too positive.

Shame on the blame game

Teachers unions have lately taken a pummeling in the war of ideas (see here, for example) and yearn for some defending. Diane Ravitch provides it in this impassioned article from the AFT's flagship publication.

Teach Like Your Hair's on Fire: The Methods and Madness Inside Room 56

Rafe EsquithViking Press2007

Climbing to the Crest

United Federation of Teachers2007

Mr. Fix-It

Though it's not the fundamental rethinking of No Child Left Behind that we would have preferred, the President's reauthorization proposal represents a pretty decent repair attempt.

Desperate measures in Denver

Reporter Katherine Boo's recent piece in the New Yorker about education reform in Denver shows why good intentions, ideas, and actions are often slow to solve the problems of blighted schools.

Opening Doors: How Low-Income Parents Search for the Right School

Proficiency Has Its Price

Ohio’s Coshocton City Schools has taken performance pay in a whole new direction--offering elementary school students as much as $100 for solid test scores ($15 for each “proficient,” and $20 for each “accelerated” or “advanced” on the state’s five tests).

School Safety Expert Speaks in Dayton

School safety is one issue that brings together all educators, regardless of their affiliation with charter, district or private schools.

Changes Will Bring a New Order to OBR

Sometimes fundamental political changes can be identified months or years before they arrive. Like the dust raised by an ancient army of foot soldiers in the distance, everyone can plainly see what is to come, even if the outcome is unknown.

An Amendment Adrift (and please don't save it)

Ohio is teeming with chatter about education reform, thanks in no small part to recent efforts by teacher unions and various other school district associations to place a constitutional amendment on the ballot to “fix” education funding.

Correction

In the January 10th editorial “Focus on Instructional Time, Not School Days,” we asserted that over six years ("say from 1st to 7th grade"), students in Houston Independent School District spend a full year more in school than their peers in Cleveland.

Texas lead 'em

They say everything's bigger in Texas. And now, that adage is starting to apply to education expectations, too. Dallas's Superintendent Michael Hinojosa has redefined the role of the principal to involve less paper pushing, more academic oversight, and creative problem-solving.

Top o' the pack

No Child Left Behind's reauthorization process has barely begun, yet the surfeit of coverage and commentary is enough to make Gadfly think about flying south for winter's remainder.

Quality doubts

Some parents in Michigan were none too pleased by the conclusions reached in Education Week's Quality Counts 2007: From Cradle to Career, especially by the report's "Chance-for-Success Index," which m

Freedom Writers

Paramount PicturesJanuary 2007

Class divisions

There's been plenty written about the overloaded high school kid who maintains a 4.0 GPA in a full line of A.P. courses, has swim practice before school and cello practice after, and is president of the class Sudoku Society and the Young Francophiles Club.

The English Reader: What Every Literate Person Needs to Know

Diane Ravitch and Michael RavitchOxford University Press2006

Fenty not feigning takeover

When Adrian Fenty paid a visit to New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg late in 2006, he received some candid advice on taking control of K-12 city schools. Bloomberg urged the then want-to-be mayor to act quickly, and unilaterally. "You don't run things by committee," he told him. "You don't try to come to consensus when it's our children's future."