The $100,000 Teacher: A Teacher's Solution to America's Declining Public School System
Brian Crosby, Capital Books, Inc.2002
Brian Crosby, Capital Books, Inc.2002
Consortium on Chicago School ResearchMelissa Roderick, Mimi Engel and Jenny NagaokaFebruary 2003
Former teachers often say they left the classroom because of a lack of "administrative support." Often what they mean is that school administrators failed to back them up when they tried to enforce classroom discipline or punish students for cheating or plagiarism. An article in the Baltimore Sun illuminates both sides of this struggle.
Teach for America (TFA) has begun asking school districts to contribute $1500 for each teacher they hire from the program. The national program--which recruits top college graduates, trains them over the summer to teach in high-need schools, places them in classrooms, and supports them while they teach--spends about $8,000 to develop each TFA corps member.
Bring back Richard Rothstein! The space his education column formerly occupied in the Wednesday New York Times is often filled nowadays by the grumpy Michael Winerip, who seems bent on proving that everybody in America hates the No Child Left Behind act. His latest contribution was last week's column reporting "pervasive dismay" with NCLB across the land.
Performance-based pay should be tried. If one were to offer substantial pay premiums for teachers in poor, low performing schools, market-based pay might be successful. By substantial, I mean at least a 25% increase in pay over the existing salary schedule. For example, my district, LAUSD, starts credentialed teachers at $41,000.
With the reauthorization process finally creaking into motion for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), lawmakers of both parties--and both houses of Congress--say this is now a top priority for 2003.
The U.S. Department of Education has issued guidance on how the requirements of the No Child Left Behind act should be interpreted as affecting charter schools.
In his online Class Struggle column, Jay Mathews praises a new book by Tom Toch called High Schools on a Human Scale: How Small Schools Can Transform American Education. While small schools are in vogue today, boosted in part by many dollars from the Gates Foundation, skeptics wonder whether size alone can determine school effectiveness.
While many inner-city Catholic schools struggle to survive, and more than a few shut down, three innovative models of Catholic middle and high schools are spreading across the country. In Cristo Rey high schools, which now exist in four cities and will soon expand to six more sites, students earn much of their tuition by working in banks, law firms, and other businesses needing clerical help.
The largest but perhaps least well known of Florida's three voucher programs is providing scholarships to private schools for more than 15,000 children this year and has exhausted the $50 million that policymakers allowed for it.
People for the American Way Foundation andDisability Rights Education & Defense Fund (DREDF)March 6, 2003
Samuel Meisels, Sally Atkins-Burnett, Yange Xue, Donna DiPrima Bickel, Seung-Hee Son, Education Policy Analysis ArchivesFebruary 28, 2003
Students for Teachers, Yale UniversitySpring 2003
Rarely does a newly introduced bill deserve comment before it's even gotten to the stage of hearings, but you should know about this one. Senator Lamar Alexander--former U.S. Secretary of Education, Governor of Tennessee, president of that state's flagship university, and chairman of the National Governors Association--used the occasion of his "debut" speech on the Senate floor to introduce S.
Katherine Boles and Vivian Troen, Yale University PressMarch 2003
Anne T. Henderson, ParentLeadership Associates2002An Action Guide for Community and Parent Leaders: Using NCLB to Improve Student AchievementPublic Education Network, 2002
Darrel Drury and Harold Doran, New American SchoolsJanuary 2003
In a recent Gadfly (http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=13#305), I sketched the main findings of Hoover's Koret Task Force in Our Schools & Our Future: Are We Still at Risk?, a reflection on what's happened to American education in the two decades since A Nation at Risk was issued in
In several publications, the Fordham Foundation has helped to expose some of the suspect claims made by "intelligent design" advocates as they've tried to insert their neo-creationist perspective on evolution into science instruction in K-12 schools. Readers interested in this controversy may want to check out this month's issue of Commentary magazine.
Why is Edison Schools, a start-up firm that advanced a great idea to address a pressing need, an outfit with many talented people and lots of investor capital, still struggling to succeed in its core business of managing schools?
We learn from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, from surveys by the National Geographic Society, and from a hundred other sources that American students' knowledge of history and geography is lamentably thin, that their understanding of their nation's past is weak, and that their comprehension of the world outside U.S. borders is skimpy indeed.
Sylvan Learning Systems, the nation's top K-12 tutoring company, announced last week that it will sell its tutoring centers and focus entirely on higher education (operating colleges overseas and on the internet), an area which the company believes has greater long-term potential for growth.
The cash-stressed New York City school system is spending about $70 million this year on paid sabbaticals for 1000 veteran teachers, the New York Post reported last week. The teachers are on six- and twelve-month leaves of absences, taking college courses part-time.
First elected to the Milwaukee school board in 1995, independent labor organizer John Gardner is best known for his passionate support of Milwaukee's voucher experiment.
Pew Forum on Standards-Based Reform2002
Randall Reback, University of MichiganNational Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, Teacher's College, Columbia UniversityDecember 3, 2002
The American Federation of Teachers December 2002
The Governor's Commission on Teaching Success, OhioFebruary 20, 2003
With many states being forced to slash education budgets because of the overall economic downturn, opponents of charter schools are trying to seize the opportunity to kill new charter laws, to put a moratorium on the granting of new charters, and to reduce funding for already cash-strapped existing charter schools.