Still Getting It Wrong: The Continuing Failure of Special Education in the Baltimore City Public Schools
Kalman Hettleman.The Abell Foundation February 2002
Kalman Hettleman.The Abell Foundation February 2002
Paul Shaker and Elizabeth HeilmanPolicy Perspectives, American Association of Colleges for Teacher EducationJanuary 2002
Final Report, David Myers, Paul Peterson, et al.Mathematica Policy Research and the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance February 2002
The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is less than two months old but it's already yowling and a lot of people are nervous about it, not unlike new parents unsure how best to soothe a crying infant.This is an enormous piece of legislation that possibly nobody has read from cover to cover.
Heated arguments about the most effective form of reading instruction continue to polarize the teaching community, but yet another review of the research has found beyond dispute that "teaching that makes the rules of phonics clear will ultimately be more successful than teaching that does not." So conclude five professors of psychology, linguistics and pediatrics in a cover story in this month
Two years ago, the Cincinnati Public Schools launched a teacher evaluation system in which teachers were measured against 17 standards, with the results to be linked to compensation and career advancement for individual teachers. Last week, the district announced that teachers who rated the highest under the evaluation system also produced the greatest gains in student achievement.
President Bush's commission on special education, charged with recommending areas of reform to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), held hearings in Houston this week. Some expected the hearings to be attended only by representatives of special education advocacy groups opposed to any changes in IDEA, which is soon up for reauthorization.
If you spent last week on another planet and missed the press coverage of oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court on the Cleveland voucher program, you can catch up with the help of The Economist ("School Vouchers: A Supreme Opportunity," February 23, 2002.)
The National Commission on Service-LearningJanuary 2002
If you feel amused or provoked by anything you read in the Education Gadfly, write us at [email protected]. From time to time we will publish correspondence that we think might interest other readers.
Michael Cohen, Jobs for the Future and The Aspen InstituteDecember 2001
Paul E. Barton, Educational Testing ServiceJuly 2001
David K. Cohen and Heather C. Hill2001
General Accounting OfficeFebruary 1, 2002
The big problem with the usual approaches to improving schools is that we fiddle with all kinds of things except the one thing that really matters, which is instructional practice, according to Harvard's Dick Elmore. Putting pressure on schools to improve won't work unless teachers know what to do at the level of practice, and Elmore says they don't.
For years, the advocates of standards-based reform have held up Advanced Placement tests and the International Baccalaureate as models: a clearly defined syllabus; a teacher who is prepared to teach that syllabus; a course based on the syllabus; an end-of-course examination.
The problem is now well established.
Just because the D.C. public schools are failing to provide special education services for many children doesn't mean the school district isn't spending pots of money on special ed. A pair of articles in this week's Washington Post shed unhappy light on where some of that money is going.
American Youth Policy Forum and the Center on Education Policy2002
John Gardner, American Education Reform CouncilJanuary 2002
Brian Stecher and George Bohrnstedt, CSR Research ConsortiumFebruary 4, 2002
General Accounting OfficeJanuary 31, 2002
The White House budget released last week contained good news for school choice supporters. It includes a tax credit that would pay up to $2,500 a year in private school tuition for parents of children whose public schools are failing.
A front-page story in The New York Times this week described a big increase in the number of people seeking jobs as teachers nationwide, prompted by the sinking economy and a wave of soul-searching after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Until now, most of us believed that ed school professors were in principle opposed to the concept of a "canon" of great books. It turns out that this is not so, at least not if we consider the recent statements of Arthur Levine, president of Teachers College, Columbia University.
In last week's Gadfly, I described a bit about modern Singapore and how its world-beating education system is structured. Today I offer ten observations based on what struck me most during a brief visit. First, ethnicity is indeed powerful, but a country's education culture and standards can trump ethnic differences.
The Oakland Military Institute, the charter school opened by Mayor Jerry Brown last August, is having a tough first year. The seventh-grade curriculum chosen by the school has turned out to be too difficult for the students; nearly one-third of them scored D averages and wound up on academic probation.
In a recent editorial in the Gadfly, I criticized New York Times reporter Diana Jean Schemo for her hostile coverage of reading instruction. In two articles, she managed to convey her misunderstanding of the phonics/whole language issue and to cite researchers with an axe to grind against any kind of phonetic instruction.
The California State Board of Education has proposed new regulations that would undo the reform of bilingual education enacted by the state in 1998 after voters passed Proposition 227. That ballot measure limited native language instruction in public schools to a single year, unless parents requested a waiver.