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An inexorable march?
The point has been made but deserves reiteration: how predictable to read, in last week's Gadfly, that national standards supporters are already starting to move for a national
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Staying Focused on Results
Now that the battle over adoption of the Common Core ELA and math standards is largely over (with more than three quarters of students in America now in Common Core states), attention is turning sharply?and appropriately?in the direction of implementati
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The Gray Lady, Part 2: The Other Shoe Drops
In my previous post about the New York Times, I intentionally ignored a small elephant in the room (skunk at the garden party?), one best described in a recent Whitney Tilson email blast?? I quote, ?He's baaaaaack??
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Who's accounting?
Katherine writes, ?In the past, too many states set standards and administered assessments that had no real teeth.? Teachers then ignored these edentulous standards, ignored these gummy assessments, at least until the ?few weeks leading up to test administration.?
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The little statute that couldn't
Remember that small law named No Child Left Behind? While Washington has been swept up in talk of RTT, SIG, i3, and a host of other acronyms, the one we all love to hate is still going strong. So are its infamous supplemental educational services (i.e., free tutoring), required when a school has been failing for three or more years in a row.
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NYC students: undeniable progress under Mayor Bloomberg
In a guest editorial here last week, Sol Stern observed that New York State had significantly raised the bar for meeting proficiency requirements on state tests and that fewer students are meeting the new standard (“The testing mess,” August 5, 2010).
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Addressing summer reading setback among economically disadvantaged elementary students
Richard Allington, Anne McGill-Franzen, Gregory Camilli, Lunetta Williams, Jennifer Graff, Jacqueline Zeig, Courtney Zmach, Rhonda Nowak; University of Tennessee, KnoxvilleJournal of Reading PsychologySeptember 2010, forthcoming
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Childhood and adolescent onset psychiatric disorders, substance use, and failure to graduate high school on time
Joshua Breslau, Elizabeth Miller, W-J Joanie Chung, and Julie B. Schweitzer; UC Davis School of MedicineJournal of Psychiatric ResearchJune 2010
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Engendering learning
They say boys are from Mars, and girls are from Venus, and Imagine Southeast Public Charter School in D.C. couldn't agree more. Part of a growing experiment in single-sex education, Imagine is a "dual academy," which means it serves both boys and girls, but keeps them separated in different classrooms except for special occasions.
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Education news nuggets
What is the biggest challenge in education? For these colleges, it's not the race gap.
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Devilish doings
Spend time in education-policy circles and you will hear it, that most uninspiring phrase: The devil is in the details. When uttered, heads nod. Everyone gets it. The devil is in the details, which means, I have no clue how in the devil's dwelling this idea will work. Occasionally, a substitute is called in?e.g., it's all about the implementation?yet the denotation is unchanged.
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Aloha Furlough Friday ? Throw the Bums Out
There's a movement afoot in Hawaii to do away with the elected school board. That according to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser:
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Local food movement, continued
Yesterday I noted that the most exciting efforts to improve school food are occurring locally, not nationally. A tip-top example is the goings-on in Washington, D.C., where a fresh D.C.
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Quotable and notable
?One of the nice things about single-gender classes is that we require more training in general for these teachers. And there is more buy-in from teachers this way. ?Try some of these things and see what happens,' we tell them, and then they'll listen to more substantial training about classroom effectiveness.''
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Low-performing schools need more than self-help jargon
Have you ever wanted to grow your ?emotional intelligence including managing your gremlin,? while receiving training in ?resilience? or ?creativity??
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Putting charter theories to the test: an examination of student mobility in Dayton
Fordham’s hometown of Dayton is famous not only for the Wright Brothers but also for being a school choice mecca.
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Strategic Communications for Portfolio School District Reform
Sam Sperry, Center on Reinventing Public Education July 2010 This working paper by the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) discusses the diverse needs of three “portfolio” school districts – Denver, New York, and New Orleans – when it comes to communications and marketing practices.
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Charter schools bracing for funding cuts, still seeking parity
Ohio charter schools could face funding cuts of 10 percent, 15 percent, or more in the next biennial budget. But the state budget crisis also will give charters an opportunity to talk about the current financial inequities between them and district schools.
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Embracing System Reform: Lessons from Five Award-Winning Schools
Heather Zavadsky, American Enterprise Institute (AEI)July 2010
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Substantial savings possible by increasing student-teacher ratios
Ohio’s faces an unprecedented $8 billion budget deficit next year. With 40 percent of state revenue invested in K-12 education, Ohio’s public schools will surely have to endure a fair share of the cuts. To his credit, Governor Strickland has taken action, asking the Cincinnati-based KnowledgeWorks Foundation to investigate options for cost-savings and efficiencies in education.
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Back in my day, college students studied more (this isn't a cranky anecdote - it's true)
Think your college student is holed up in the library, studying away for dozens of hours? Think again. According to a recent policy brief by AEI there has been a dramatic decrease in student study time since the 1960s. In 1961 the average student at a four-year university studied about twenty hours a week. Fast forward fifty years and students are studying only fourteen hours a week!
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2010 KIDS COUNT Data Book
Annie E. Casey FoundationJuly 2010The Annie E. Casey Foundation recently released its annual Kids Count Data Book, an analysis of various indicators related to child/youth wellbeing, such as infant mortality rates, teen birth rates, and the number of teens not enrolled in high school.
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Education news nuggets
These days it seems some schools are trying everything to serve up some student gains.
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The Gray Lady Goes Back to School ? Is that Good for Education?
At first I thought it was my imagination. Could the New York Times be covering education again?? I mean, really covering. Not just David Herszenhorn putting out regular education stories about Congress; or Sam Dillon and Tamar Lewin following Arne Duncan and Barack Obama to their million-and-one-speeches.
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The public thinks that poor kids make for bad schools
That's one upshot of a fascinating new Education Next article out today. It examines whether respondents are right when they tell pollsters that their local schools are worthy of an A, B, C, D, or F grade.
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Liam Julian, back for more!
Longtime Flypaper readers may remember the early days of the blog, when Liam Julian would send up five or six penetrating posts in a single 24-hour period.
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I am not a ?special interest?
So begins a mass e-mail from Organizing for America: When teachers demand job protections, generous benefits, and salary increases in the midst of a recession...well, that's expecting special treatment, indeed. Michael ?
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An elitism worth celebrating
Tony Judt died last week, at age 62. Readers of the New York Review of Books, especially, will miss his recurrent and beautiful essays, which had appeared in every issue of that publication since January. His final NYRB piece, ?Meritocrats,?