The political maneuvering of Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick might offer a preview of an Obama administration, says Jon Keller in the Wall Street Journal. If he's right, education reformers should be wary:
Naomi Schaefer Riley writes in the Wall Street Journal about obstacles beyond??lousy??instruction in the classroom??that often prevent students in urban public schools from attending college: Letters of recommendation that are poorly written (when they're written), guidance counselors who can't b
Regarding the just-released study of Reading First's effectiveness, Mike tells USA Today that
The media gleefully reported the news that a big interim Reading First study??from the U.S. Department of Education's Institute for Educational Sciences (IES) found the program to have no impact on reading comprehension.
Sometimes you read a story that makes you wonder what the world is coming to.
Greg Toppo has a thorough piece in USA Today about school lunches. Long story short: They're disgusting.
That seems to be the premise of this Washington Post op-ed by a first-year Yale Law School student (
The newest edition of The Gadfly is out and jammed with choice offerings, especially an essay that concludes "that for long-term sustainability and academic success, a charter school has better odds if it enrolls at least 300 students. " The small-school crowd won't like it.
Today in The Gadfly, I write about George Orwell's claim that bad writing and bad thinking are mutually reinforcing. I focus on the most egregious cases: sentences punctuated by text-message spellings and abbreviations and plagued by rotten grammar and rampant ambiguity.
Florida Governor Charlie Crist stands with the state legislature, which just passed an anti-bullying law. "I'm against bullying, too," he said. And I'm against purposeless laws that waste everyone's time.
In his latest riposte, Liam argues that I've ignored the ethical dimension of the student-pay debate.
If you need further evidence of the coarsening of our culture, then read Ian Shapira's piece in Monday's Washington Post.
The benefits of a value-added approach to school accountability, one that measures the test-score gains of individual students from year-to-year, is that it doesn't unfairly penalize schools that enroll large numbers of disadvantaged students. But it has drawbacks.
A causal link between increased teacher absences and decreased student achievement exists. So it's no wonder that school leaders are looking for ways to keep educators in the classroom. "We have terrible attendance," said Van V.
In the Big Apple, teachers who are "excessed"--i.e., replaced with teachers deemed more effective by principals--are put into an "Absent Teacher Reserve," which currently houses some 600 educators, all of whom receive full salaries and benefits and cost the city $81 million this year. To be clear: These 600 teachers are paid for doing nothing.
Gadfly has generally supported experiments that pay students for good attendance or test scores. And Baltimore's "Stocks in the Future," which gives middle school students up to $80 to invest in the stock market and lets them keep their earnings, is a model of what smart pay-pupils-for-performance programs should look like.
Life gives you lemons, make lemonade. Life gives you students, make them teachers. That, at least, is the innovative policy used by Chalfonts school, in the U.K., which has dealt with teacher shortages by paying 16-, 17-, and 18-year-olds $10 for each 50-minute class they teach. Generally, the older pupils teach classes of 11- to 16-year-olds.
Melissa Roderick, Jenny Nagaoka, Elaine AllensworthConsortium on Chicago School ResearchMarch 2008
The Forum for Education and DemocracyApril 2008
The requirement that states disaggregate test-score results by race is one feature of No Child Left Behind that receives near-universal praise. So dividing the data focuses communities on closing the achievement gap, for example, and it doesn't allow shiny test-score averages to hide the poor performance of particular student subgroups.
Starting today, I'll do a weekly roundup of New York City union boss Randi Weingarten's most ridiculous statements from the week past.
Coby will no doubt disagree with this interpretation. But his conclusion reminds one of that advanced by "post-partisans," those who think we should move beyond our (in Coby's words) "heated, theory-driven arguments" and find that hallowed, middle ground.
Ben Stein is really doing himself a disfavor by promoting his new documentary thusly.
So why did Miami-Dade superintendent Rudy Crew turn down a principal's offer to work for a $1 salary?
When a school experiments with paying students for their good grades or attendance, as Coby suggests a school should if its leadership so chooses, it makes not simply a pedagogical or policy decision but an ethical one, too.
The New York Times offers a piece today about the progress of providing good??public??education in New Orleans.
No, not Reverend Wright, but our favorite ed school professor, Bill Ayers. * Friend of Barack Obama
