Vouchers for Special Education Students: An Evaluation of Florida's McKay Scholarship Program
Jay Greene and Greg Forster, Manhattan Institute's Center for Civic InnovationJune 2003
Jay Greene and Greg Forster, Manhattan Institute's Center for Civic InnovationJune 2003
Lee D. Mitgang, The Wallace Foundation2003
Paul E. Peterson and William G. Howell, Harvard UniversityJune 12, 2003
This month and last, as also happened during May-June 2002 in what threatens to become a new seasonal ritual, efforts to adopt state graduation testing are under fire. Nevada has announced that 12 percent of its 12th graders may not graduate. Florida reports that 13,000 students may be denied diplomas, while the number in Massachusetts is said to be 5,000. Parents are reportedly furious.
The level of combat in the teacher certification wars escalated this week as the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence (ABCTE) announced that the field test of its "Passport to Teaching" certification exam had been compromised by leaks to ABCTE opponents. (This new test is being developed as an alternative to traditional education school certification.
One more area in which American schools and districts are less than transparent: the budget. In this working paper, presented at a recent Brookings conference on "The Teachers We Need," the University of Washington's Marguerite Roza and Paul Hill work from the bottom up to construct real school-by-school teacher salary figures in four districts, rather than relying on district-wide averages.
Controversy is brewing over President Bush's choice of sociologist Robert Lerner as the next Commissioner of Education Statistics and the Senate may well fuss about him during the confirmation process. He happens to be a first rate scholar with two decades of distinguished work under his belt, much of it in education and much of it relying on - believe it or not - federal education statistics.
Having introduced sweeping legislation to revamp the Head Start program on May 23 (the School Readiness Act of 2003), House Republicans have spent the past three weeks slowly rolling back its most important reforms.
Steve Farkas, Ann Duffett, and Jean Johnson, Public AgendaMay 3, 2003
Susan M. Gates, Jeanne S. Ringel, Lucrecia Santibanez, Karen M. Ross, and Catherine H. Chung, RAND Education2003
"It may still be a man's world," writes Michelle Conlin of Business Week. "But it is no longer, in any way, a boy's." Conlin runs through an increasingly familiar counter argument to the 1990s social science focus on how girls were supposedly being shortchanged by education.
Education Commission of the StatesMay 2003
Gene Bottoms and Kathleen Carpenter, Southern Regional Education BoardMay 2003
Plenty has been written about charter schools and how they are (and aren't) doing, but practically nobody has looked carefully at the organizations that give birth to them, raise them, oversee them, hold them accountable, and decide whether or not they will get their charters renewed.
In March, a group of five education reform-minded Yale undergrads, who had won first prize and $25,000 in cash in the Yale Entrepreneurial Society's 50K competition, published the inaugural edition of Our Education, a journal of education reform put out by the student-led nonprofit "Students for Teachers." [For the Gadfly's review of this journal, go to
In contrast to the general sense among school administrators that they are besieged by lawsuits, it turns out that courts tend to rule in favor of schools over both parents and teachers, the two groups most like to sue schools or districts. Since the 1985 Supreme Court case New Jersey v.
Last week, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce took up the Ready to Teach Act (H.R. 2211), the first of any number of bills that will feed into reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. This one seeks to align teacher-training programs with the high standards for accountability and results mandated by No Child Left Behind.
In recent weeks, opportunistic charter school adversaries have been having a field day - using state budget crunches and low test scores to fuel the anti-charter fire. In Massachusetts, for example, the state Senate passed a three-year moratorium on the creation or expansion of charter schools, claiming that they are "draining" limited funds from the public school system.
The Milken Family Foundation has created a new (electronic) newsletter tied to its pathbreaking Teacher Advancement Program, but also addressing broader issues of teacher quality. The inaugural issue contains an interesting overview of teacher "pay for performance": where it's been tried, what's happened, what can be learned.
Ruth Curran Neild, University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of EducationApril 11, 2003
American Association of School Administrators and National Association of State Boards of EducationApril, 2003
Kathryn McDermott et. al., MassINC2003
Parent Leadership Associates2003
Patte Barth, The Education TrustWinter 2003Education Watch: Achievement, Attainment, and Opportunity from Elementary School Through CollegeThe Education TrustWinter 2003
The U.S. Department of Education announced on Tuesday that, because Georgia is not administering end-of-course tests this year, it has the dubious honor of being the first state to have funding withheld for failure to comply with the 1994 amendments to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).
Responding to President Bush's call to improve Head Start, the 38-year-old federal program designed to increase educational opportunities for low-income preschoolers, House Republicans introduced a reform plan designed to close the school "readiness gap" that exists between low-income youngsters and their more affluent peers when they begin kindergarten.
Jeff Jacoby, columnist for the Globe, uses - of all things - the Jayson Blair scandal to jump off to a pretty boisterous condemnation of teacher unions.
Standards and choice, say the authors of this very brief policy brief, should go hand-in-hand in raising educational achievement. Robert Holland and Dan Soifer of the Lexington Institute applaud Virginia schools for increasing the number of students who have passed the state's rigorous Standards of Learning (SOL) assessment tests.