After much squabbling and power grabbing, the New York state legislature has given mayoral control of New York City's schools back to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, thirty-eight days after the six-year old measure expired.
Here's one way school districts can cut costs and increase student learning: embrace "grade skipping" for their most advanced pupils. So argue Laura Vanderkam and Richard Whitmire in a recent Ed Week commentary.
We predicted that Deborah Gist would bring her hard-knock reformer skills to Rhode Island, possibly manifesting in an overhaul of that state's timeworn, ineffectual teacher evaluation system. This seems to be exactly what she plans to do.
Excellent Ed Week article on Detroit schools Baltimore schools CEO thinks his district can become a national model
The debate in education at the local and state level is far from placid (as Mike recently described it), and is sometimes incredibly toxic because the issues affect our children and our collective future.
Everyone knows that Internet plagiarism is a big problem, but now it looks like it has infected the education policy world. To what do I refer? The Alliance for Excellent Education, which is always trying to rip off Fordham's best ideas!
An op-ed by Cleveland State University education professor Karl Wheatley in today's Cleveland Plain Dealer argues that the pursuit of improved student achievement in our public schools is l
I'm just back from vacation, and while Checker spent his holiday reading about how the founders brought our country together, I dug into how "The Big Sort
Jay Mathews on the amazing Rafe Esquith MA charter advocates aim to put cap lift on the ballot
Checker writes at Forbes.com on the role that both quality and quantity must play in American education.
During these tough economic times, one expects to hear news of budget shortfalls, such as Ohio's South-western school district's $5 million budget hole
The fifth video in our Fun Fact Friday! series looks at how information affects peoples' support for teacher pay increases. Don't miss our first , second , third and fourth videos.
It's August but some interesting stories are still out there... Ed Week's Klein with info on the Innovation Fund
Although the decentralized nature of public education in this country has its drawbacks--i.e.
Marguerite Roza and Raegen MillerCenter for American ProgressJuly 2009
Christopher T. Cross, Taniesha A. Woods, and Heidi Schweingruber, eds.Center for Education, National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences2009
Two editorials in the past week point to a widening realization across the political spectrum that U.S. teacher unions serve their members, not students. The Wall Street Journal illustrates this point with a piece about two episodes that clearly place union demands at odds with school quality.
Vacation gave me the opportunity to catch up with a bit of early American history, particularly the eventful last two decades of the 18th Century.
The New York State Regents shenanigans will be just one of the big issues with which newly minted State Chancellor of Education David Steiner needs to contend.
When recently released graduation rate statistics were greeted by the business community with a hefty dose of skepticism, Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott decided to call on employers, and the Texas Association of Business in particular, to voluntarily stop hiring folks who haven't made it through that teenage rodeo--high school.
When you get 30 out of 50 questions wrong on a test, you're supposed to fail. But not on the this year's American History portion of the New York State Regents Exam. According to Marc Epstein, the once-revered but now "hopelessly manipulated" Regents tests are plagued by a host of problems that make their results meaningless at best and fraudulent at worst--and the U.S.
Earlier this summer, Terry wrote about the disconnect between DC and the states when it comes to education policy.????
Quotable "If we could Twitter Julius Caesar, we'd be good." --Terisa King, teacher at Richard Milburn Academy, talking about the need to make difficult language in literature more understandable for students.
Ohio's budget problems and efforts to reformulate education policy reminded former Ohio Gov. Bob Taft of his days as the state's chief executive from 1999 to 2007. Like Gov. Ted Strickland, Taft had his own economic and education pains that included disagreements with members of the Ohio General Assembly.
In June 2009, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) released A New Model Law For Supporting The Growth of High-Quality Public Charter Schools.
President Obama put the graduation-rate debate front and center in March, when he noted that the nation's high-school dropout rate had tripled since the 1970s (see here). The media and education community scrambled to react to the president's claim.
Celeste K. Carruthers, Urban Institute & National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education ResearchJune 2009
Executive Office of the President, Council of Economic AdvisersJuly 2009
