Last week, Policy Matters Ohio released a report on charter school accountability. The primary finding was that when charter schools are operated by management organizations, for-profit and non-profit alike, too often the management organizations are running the show, not the independent boards that are legally the schools
Cheryl Almeida, Cecilia Le, Adria Steinberg, Roy CervantesJobs for the FutureSeptember 2010
If you’re clamoring to know what Americans think about myriad K-12 education issues, then you’ve just struck gold. Three recent surveys provide a plethora of opinion data on issues ranging from charter schools and teachers unions, to taxpayer-funded increases in education spending and hot-button issues like teacher evaluations.
Social networking and school reform. An unlikely pair? Not any more, given Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent donation of $100 million to struggling public schools in Newark, New Jersey. Check out the New York Times’ coverage of the announcement here.
Today Fordham released results from a national survey of education school professors in the US.
Jonah E. Rockoff & Benjamin B. Lockwood Columbia Business SchoolFall 2010
Our recent study, Needles in a Haystack: Lessons from high-performing, high-need urban schools, lifted up the successes of, and tried to extrapolate lessons from, urban schools that serve large numbers of poor kids well. But poverty exists beyond city borders.
A great school is a great school is a great school. It may be big, it may be small. Brockton High School is one of the largest in America and is now producing very strong (not yet stellar) results. More remarkably, it used to produce dreadful results.
Two pieces in today's Washington Post are worth noting: Dana Milbank's ?A sadder but wiser Axelrod packs his bags,?
Is there such a thing as too much knowledge? Not exactly sure, but don't let these guys find out.
This story ? front page of today's NYT ? ought to shake some gremlins out of the code-cracking trees:? ?4,100 Massachusetts Students Prove Small Isn't Always Better.?? All roads keep leading to ?. the basics. ?Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow
Love her or hate her, Diane Ravitch is back to Bridging Differences (the blog she shares with Deborah Meier) with a list?of discussion
?Excellent teachers value most the opportunity to work with other talented teachers under a strong and fair principal.? ?Robert Schwartz, Academic Dean of Harvard's Graduate School of Education
For once, Davis Guggenheim is right. For once, Mike is wrong. Almost nobody uses their own kids as tools of school reform?and nobody should. You don't send your child to a school to improve the school.
It's all right here, courtesy of the Joyce Foundation. -Mike Petrilli
It's great TV ? er, Internet.??Watch the live streaming video here. During the President's interview with Matt Lauer, Obama said a few things that caught my attention.? ?Money without reform will not solve the problem,?
The highly publicized career of Arnold Schwarzenegger as the governor of California is quickly coming to a close.? It was only a short seven years ago that the former body-builder and action movie superstar was elected to the highest political office in his home state.? Sadly, one of the last moves he may make as the ?Governator?
?Surely schools can deliver more than one message. In addition to ?get a job,' we might add ?get a life.''' ?Jim Haas, Adjunct Professor, Master of Arts in Teaching program at Webster University-Kansas City
I hate to steal Mike's thunder, but he's not the first person to pose this thesis of socioeconomic integration. Indeed, UVA professor Jim Ryan has a whole book about it, one that I reviewed for Gadfly a few weeks back. He traces the history of desegregation in the U.S.
The controversial New York Times education reporter ? see here ?
One of the more important contributions to the culture that movies like Waiting for `Superman' (my beef is the quote marks) make is bringing us back to debating?the?fundamentals.? Whether or not the film cracks the education code or compels people to take up arms, it is sure interesting reading what people read into it.
The National Academies just released a new report, ?Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited: Rapidly Approaching Category 5,? which isn't really new at all: its authors are the same people who wrote the 2005?publication ?Rising Above the Gathering Storm?
Lindsay Johns, a writer and ?hip hop intellectual,? turns in a keen article in Britain's Prospect magazine. He writes to defend the Western canon and, more specifically, to make the point that the canon is just as relevant to black students as to white.
Education Next's recent article on middle schools (?Stuck in the Middle?) reminds us how difficult it is for middle schools to serve students well.
The Times says that the Mark Zuckerberg donation to the troubled New Jersey city school system is ?good news.?? And Oprah is bringing the Facebook founder on her show today to talk about it.
NYT Columnist Bob Herbert receives a needed tongue-lashing from Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson in this morning's Times. Responding to Herbert's?post-D.C.
?Designing effective incentives for teachers is a mighty complex task, full of many subtle decisions and much uncertainty. This study, like the ones before it, and the ones that will surely follow it, is highly inconclusive.? [Referring to Vanderbilt University merit pay study]
