According to Gotham Schools, ED Senior Advisor Jon Schnur will NOT be joining the Obama administration despite his leading education role during the campaign, transition, and early days of the Duncan regime.
I'm reminded again and again of America's need for an independent education-achievement "audit agency" to sort out the claims and counterclaims about student performance and school achievement and when it has risen and when it has flat-lined or fallen--and why.
Ohio's governor and House of Representatives are supporting a state budget bill that would add billions of dollars in state spending on public education over the next decade and would mandate more decisions about public education at the state level.
Pedro Noguera attacks David Whitman's book, published by Fordham last year, in
Our Advanced Placement report has garnered quite a bit of national attention in the past two days as it addresses the question of whether the program's expansion is affecting its quality.
Arne Duncan spoke to a packed room last night at the Education Writers Association conference, and got some chuckles by promising not to use his three favorite words during the speech: extraordinary, dramatic and incent.
This guest post was written by Fordham research intern Katie Wilczak. She attended the House hearing yesterday morning.
Mike Umphrey, an AP English Teacher in Polson, Montana, (and a loyal Flypaper reader!) offers??a great response to my post from a few days ago: My main reaction tends to be "Bah, humbug."
Say you're a parent in a school district whose population is largely Haitian, African-American, and Hispanic. And say this district's board is dominated by Orthodox Jews who don't send their children to public schools and aren't happy about paying both high taxes and huge private school tuition bills. And say the board just voted to close an under-enrolled district school to curb costs.
Within the education establishment, it's taken as an article of faith that schools should face budget cuts only after all other options have been exhausted. How about public safety? That's the debate playing out in Prince George's County, Maryland, a big Washington suburb now facing a massive budget shortfall.
Jessica S. Howell, Michal Kurlaender, and Eric GrodskyCalifornia State University, SacramentoApril 2009
The Advanced Placement (AP) Program is enjoying a growth spurt in the United States. Over the past five years, the number of high-school students taking at least one AP exam increased more than 50 percent. There's probably no education program in America that's been expanding faster.
What's the best way to improve a negative perception? Change the reality feeding it. That's the constructive tack being taken by the new leaders of the Arizona Charter Schools Association (ACSA) as they crack down on their state's surfeit of low-performing charters.
Anna NicoteraNational Alliance for Public Charter SchoolsApril 2009
Over the past five years, the number of students taking at least one Advanced Placement exam rose by more than half. This news is celebrated but is there a downside? To find out, Fordham commissioned the Farkas Duffett Research Group to survey AP teachers in the US. The AP program remains popular with its teachers. But there are signs that the move toward "open door" access to AP is starting to cause concern.
NAEP long-term trend scores were released yesterday, and the results are quite positive.
Maybe the Obama administration has brought bipartisanship to Washington...just not the kind they had in mind. In this letter, a bipartisan group of US Senators chastises Secretary Duncan for denying DC scholarships to new students and urges ED to reconsider.
An interview with Steve Farkas, President of the Farkas Duffett Research Group . Fordham commissioned the FDR Group to research and write its latest report "Growing Pains in the Advanced Placement Program: Do Tough Trade-Offs Lie Ahead?"
Fordham's latest report is out this morning; it focuses on the dramatic expansion of the Advancement Placement program in recent years. In 2002-2003, 1 million students participated in AP by taking at least one exam. Five years later, nearly 1.6 million did???a 50+ percent increase.
Certain segments of the edu-sphere like to call those of us at Fordham silly (though, I'll admit, colorful) names, like "
President Barack Obama's "first 100 days" come to an end today, as you may have noticed from the barrage of fawning press coverage (
Yesterday in the Ohio Senate Education Committee, school funding expert and Buckeye (OSU class of '66 and '72) Paul Hill offered testimony about how Ohio can go about reforming its system of school funding while at the same time raising student perf
Read more about our new Advanced Placement Program report in this piece in the New York Times.
Here are a few excerpts from award-winning School Choice Ohio (see here) essays written by students who received EdChoice scholarships this year. Students wrote concerning how their learning opportunities have helped them. The topic was "Voices of School Choice."
Education in Ohio is full of irony, and nothing is more ironic than the connection of charter schools to the state's school funding debate that was triggered by the DeRolph Supreme Court decisions in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
