Angry at recent announcements heralding $39 million in district budget cuts, the Cincinnati Federation of Teachers (CFT) is fighting back. CFT launched an advertising campaign against the board of the Cincinnati Public Schools (CPS), alleging gross mishandling of the district’s budget by board members.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have generously supported Fordham’s charter school sponsorship efforts in Ohio. In doing so, the Gates Foundation requested that we share some of our experiences and the knowledge gained monitoring nine charter schools.
Overseeing the academic, fiscal and operational components of a charter school is a significant responsibility for individuals who serve as governing authority members. To assist them in their efforts, the Thomas B.
With so much rhetoric (some of it misleading, and much of it espoused by the state’s teacher unions) surrounding Ohio’s charter school program, it’s easy to overlook key elements of both the program and the 300+ schools that comprise it.
Governor Strickland’s budget (introduced as House Bill 119) may not offer any carrots to supporters of school choice in Ohio (see here), but his proposals to
When it comes to reforming and improving Ohio’s education system, there is more than enough drama in Columbus--as well as a fair share of proposals aimed at moving our education system backward. Two bills, in particular, are prime examples of the latter.Representative Wolpert’s Condition
This latest piece of the New York Times' series on middle schools finds this: There's no clear-cut formula for discerning who can handle the hormone-crazed kids in America's middle schools. But one Bronx principal has the right idea. Middle school teachers, he said, must "have a huge sense of humor and a small ego." That sums it up pretty well.
Mayoral control in New York City is hitting some bumps in the road. Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein regularly trumpet their "historic gains" in test scores. They say that since the mayor gained control, scores have gone up by 12 percent in reading and 19 percent in math.
Eleven-year-old Alex Sorto, a student at Eastern Middle School in Silver Spring, Maryland, believes that eating broccoli will help boost test scores at his school. For now, however, Eastern's administrators are eschewing vegetables in favor of peppermints.
We've had the standards-and-accountability movement, the school choice movement, and even the small schools movement. Are we finally witnessing the rise of an autonomy movement?
In last week's editorial ("How to end the reading wars?") Michael J. Petrilli argued that Reading First has been a "massive failure in terms of sustaining, much less widening, the reading-education consensus." Not true.
Performance pay for k-12 teachers is stalling in Florida, mostly because teachers hate the proposed plan. A few states to the left, however, some Arkansas schoolteachers are warming to the merit pay idea.
Two of the worst federal education policy ideas in memory have made their way up Capitol Hill in recent days, one in a fuel-efficient hybrid occupied primarily by Democrats, the other in a gas-guzzling pickup full of Republicans.
I just read your piece about the "Reading Wars." I think part of the problem rests with the heavy-handed deliberation process that the National Reading Panel undertook to try to end the reading wars in the first place.
Institute for Research on Education Policy and Practice2007
When Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa decided to reform his city's schools, he likely didn't know what all he was getting into. An incident last week, when the mayor took a cadre of journalists to visit an L.A. high school and a student spray painted his bus with graffiti, is representative.
Call it what you want--buyer's remorse, reverting to form, Hoekstra's rebellion--but Congressional conservatives aren't going to accept NCLB version 2.0 without a fight. Rather, they're bent on emasculating or repealing it.
Mitchell B. PearlsteinCenter of the American ExperimentJanuary 2007
Exxon Mobil is concerned about U.S. math and science education, so it has decided to pay kids to study. The company is pouring $125 million (a bit more than one day's profits) into the National Math and Science Initiative, which will reward students by paying them cash for each English, science, or math AP test on which they receive a score of 3 or higher.
The Beastie Boys once spurred angst-ridden teens to fight for their right to party.
Martin R. West and Paul E. Peterson, EditorsThe Brookings Institution2007
This month's Atlantic includes a thoughtful article by Jonathan Rauch about how to end the culture wars: "slug them out state by state." He points to the cautionary tale of Roe v. Wade, which nationalized an intensely controversial issue:
Those who care about the education of Ohio’s neediest children are stuck between two vexed options--the proverbial rock or hard place. The first are traditional district schools with decades of evidence--low test scores, high drop-out rates--of how poorly they meet many children’s needs.
In the debate over Indiana’s K-12 education funding, House Democrats are seeking a freeze on funding for charter schools. The result would be “de facto moratorium” on any new charters, insisted Dan Roy, Indianapolis’s director of charter schools.
If a recent University of Washington study is to be believed, reforming Ohio’s education system could cost from $1.2 to $2.4 billion more annually--a 16 to 31 percent increase in state P-12 education spending. And that’s just the state’s share (47 percent of current funding).
It’s no secret that data-driven decision making figures prominently in high-performing schools. What it entails and how to implement it successfully are the subjects of this report commissioned by the New Schools Venture Fund, a venture philanthropy firm working to improve and reform public education.
According to this new study, urban area charter schools appear to be safer than their traditional district counterparts.
Last week we invited readers to submit their own ideas for the forthcoming education X PRIZE. Here are a few of the responses.
If there was the slightest doubt that Steve Jobs is one of the most courageous men of our time, it was dispelled dramatically on February 16th. There he was at a high profile education conference when, in what I believe was a spontaneous outburst, he decided to take on teacher unions.
