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Too little too late
From: U.S. Department of Education [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, June 26, 2008 5:06 PM To: U.S. Department of Education Subject: FYI - Reading First Letter from Secretary Spellings
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Math teachers that matter
Don't miss this important new study by the National Council on Teacher Quality regarding the preparation of competent elementary-school math teachers. Titled No Common Denominator, it finds, after reviewing a national sample of ed-school-based undergraduate teacher prep programs, that fewer than 15 percent of them require enough of the right kinds of courses. It names names, too!
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Is common sense really all that common?
How dismaying to read about the 17 girls at Gloucester (MA) High School who, some say, made a pact to become pregnant together. What about finishing high school? Going to college?
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Classrooms to nowhere
Construction workers hurting from the roiled real estate market should head to Los Angeles, where the school district is feverishly adding square footage even as its enrollment declines. The Los Angeles Unified School District has lost 57,000 students over the past decade; fewer families are moving to the city and the Latino birth rate has fallen.
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Texas for excellence
Perhaps a few Texans have been reading our report on the flaccidity of most alternative-certification programs for teachers.
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The broader and bolder Deval Patrick
This is school-reform week in the Bay State, where Governor Deval Patrick is finally announcing a series of policy proposals that would amount to the biggest changes in state education law in fifteen years. What's not clear is whether these will be, ahem, changes we can believe in, or whether the legislature will even find the money to fund any of them.
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Ensuring Equal Opportunity in Education: How Local School District Funding Practices Hurt Disadvantaged Students and What Federal Policy Can Do About It
Center for American ProgressJune 2008
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Hard Times at Douglass High: A No Child Left Behind Report Card
Directed by Alan Raymond and Susan RaymondHome Box OfficeJune 2008
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Voucher victory
Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal (see above) earned a victory last week when the state legislature voted to implement a voucher program for New Orleans that he supports. The bill, which received bipartisan support, introduces a venture that will start small (maximum participation is 1,500) and offer vouchers only to students in grades k-3. But its accountability measures are promising.
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Onward, charter soldiers
New Orleans, June 25, 2008: In all the obvious ways, this week's National Charter Schools Conference resembled other major conclaves in big-city convention centers: thousands of people being beckoned by hundreds of "exhibitors" with their stands, stalls, slick pitches, and free samples, as well as by dozens and dozens of "break out" sessions on every imaginable topic.
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Separating the good, bad, and ugly
Kristen Graham of the Philadelphia Inquirer begins her reportage about the city's experiences with private operators of public schools with this sentence: "In a blow to the Philadelphia School District's historic privatization experiment, the School Reform Commission voted yesterday to seize six schools from outside managers and warned them that they are in danger of losing 20 others i
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Re: Practical consequences
The often educational Sherman Dorn believes that this recounting betrays an ahistorical mindset because "the early 1970s [were] a time when everyone was complaining about the misbehavior and immorality of youth." If the topic of discuss
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Hess and Greene against vouchers
Not really. But Rick Hess and Jay Greene do??see problems with Florida's Amendment 9, which teachers' unions and their allies are trying to keep off November's ballot.
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Are the public schools for all kids, or just some kids?
Fordham hosted a panel event this morning about our recent report, High-Achieving Students in the Era of NCLB.
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American nerds in pictures
We assiduously avoided putting a nerdy kid on the cover of our high-achieving students report.
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Practical consequences
Talk radio is always interesting--it can be hard to get a word in edgewise! But the callers can sometimes bring clarity.
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The devil's in Deval's details
Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts unveiled his education reform plan yesterday--sorta.
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Schoolchildren
Re Amber's fine post: The mayor of Gloucester, Massachusetts, announced that no evidence exists to support the claim that a group of young girls agreed to get pregnant and raise their babies together (althoug
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On Faust and faith-based charter schools
Charles C. Haynes of the First Amendment Center turns in a strong counter-argument explaining why religious charter schools are a "Faustian bargain" that aren't "worth the spiritual costs":
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A teacher responds
Regarding my review of Hard Times at Douglass High, a teacher (Mr. McDermott) who was featured in the documentary leaves a comment on Flypaper:
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Of backpacks and diaper bags
The story of the 18 pregnant girls who made a pact to become pregnant at Gloucester High School in Gloucester, Massachusetts, has been all over the news in the last several days. Everyone hearing the story has been understandably dismayed.
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Indicator overload?
A group of charter school organizations including the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, issued a report t
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The Wire it's not
Over at National Review Online, Liam reviews the HBO documentary Hard Times at Douglass High, which chronicles the plight of a failing Baltimore high school.
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Smoke and mirrors?
Mayor Bloomberg will announce today that test scores are way up in New York City. But no one, it seems, thinks the gains are legitimate.
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Hard Times at Douglass High
About the short review that Coby kindly mentions: I wrote it for a lay audience, one not tuned in to every shift in k-12 minutiae, and so I didn't dive into the issues as much as perhaps I could have.
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Metaphorically speaking
A??reader (a teacher, it seems) writes??to the St. Petersburg Times: Did Jeb Bush really say "our education system is an eight-track system living in an iPod world"?
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