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.
Institute for Research on Education Policy and Practice2007
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.
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.
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.
