There was much to praise in Judge Sharon Gleason's late June decision rejecting claims that Alaska's schools are underfunded, and noting that traditional concepts of "local control" must be abandoned when schools repeatedly fail to educate kids. But there was much to criticize, too. In her ruling in Moore v.
In a globalizing economy, America's competitive edge depends in large measure on how well our schools prepare tomorrow's workforce.And notwithstanding the fact that Congress and the White House are now controlled by opposing parties, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are bent on devising new programs and boosting education spending.
Who knows schools better, outside consultants or internal operatives (principals and teachers)? The British government is betting on the latter. It's experimenting with a program that pairs principals ("head teachers") of successful schools with their counterparts in less-successful ones.
Last Saturday in Newark, three young people--two of them enrolled in college, one just months away--were fatally shot, execution-style, on the playground of Mount Vernon School, where six-year-olds attend class during most of the year.
The editors at the Indianapolis Star have written many a perceptive piece about the shortcomings of Indiana's schools (see here and here, for example). Their latest pair of education-related editorials is similarly spot-on.
National Center for Education StatisticsJuly 2007
U.S. Government Accountability OfficeJuly 2007
