And you thought trying to compute high school graduation rates was complicated. Try figuring out the percentage of students who need "remedial" work once they enter the hallowed halls of higher education.
Jay P. Greene and Marcus A. WintersManhattan Institute's Center for Civic InnovationJanuary 2007
Brian Gill, Ron Zimmer, Jolley Christman, Suzanne BlancRAND CorporationFebruary 2007
It’s no secret that my colleagues and I at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation have been critics of the Dayton Public Schools (DPS) over the past decade and have done our best--not good enough--to help create sound educational alternatives for kids whose prospects were blighted by the system’s disabilities.
A new bill making its way through the legislature in Arizona would provide state charter schools with the same amount of funding as traditional public schools. The proposed legislation would increase per-pupil funding by $852 for charters serving K-8 students, and $993 for charter high schools. All additional funding would be provided by the state.
One of the toughest challenges facing charter schools, in Ohio and elsewhere, is the demands of serving children with special needs. Charter schools, like their district counterparts, educate any and all students who come to them (a fact still lost on many critics).
Fordham’s Dayton office is looking for a talented Project Administrator to join its small team of dedicated Ohio staffers. The Project Administrator will support Fordham’s charter school sponsorship efforts and perform general office management duties.
As we reported a few weeks ago ("Nothing easy in the Big Easy,"), every day brings new challenges to New Orleans's schools.
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.
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 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.
Connecticut Coalition for Achievement NowJanuary 2007
Kevin DonnellyHardie Grant Books2007
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
If you thought whole-language reading instruction had been relegated to the scrap heap of history, think again. Many such programs (proven to be ineffective) are still around, but they're hiding behind phrases like 'balanced literacy' in order to win contracts from school districts and avoid public scrutiny. Louisa Moats calls them out in Fordham's new report, Whole-Language High Jinks.
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.
Human-robot interaction may have been occurring a long time ago, but until now we've seen few practical uses for robotics in education.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 is one issue that brings together all educators, regardless of their affiliation with charter, district or private schools.
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.
