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From one Ed Week blogger to another
A post from guest blogger and Fordham board member Diane Ravitch.
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New from Nintendo
Video games supposedly made America's youth lazy and fat; maybe video games can make them active and lean.
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The British on race in America
Yesterday's Sunday Times (UK) featured a piece on New York City's student pay-for-performance plan, spearheaded by Harvard ec
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AP and IB stealing market share
Washington Post reporter Daniel de Vise writes today that high schools are scaling back "honors" courses as they boost their AP and IB offerings.
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More on Ayers
Nothing is more emblematic of the rampant intellectual incoherence and moral equivalence of our age than the current debate about whether Bill Ayers is a "terrorist." Dean Millot at Edbizbuzz calls Mike a "McCarthyite"--one of the most vicious slanders in the po
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Real restructuring
The Wall Street Journal recently ran a story titled "No Child Left Behind Lacks Bite." Not in Washington, D.C., it doesn't.
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McKipp: Over 10,000 students served
Plenty of bad ideas make their way from the business world to education, but here's a good one: replicate successful school models via franchising. That's the argument made by business writer Julie Bennett in an essay in the new Education Next.??
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The problem with "local control"
To see but one example of why we can't trust local school boards to lead meaningful reform efforts, see this post from the National School Boards Association (NSBA).
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The effects of competition
For those??who doubt that competition has positive effects on public-school systems, this article , from the Houston Chronicle , is instructive.
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Your BlackBerry is racist
Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist/political cartoonist??David Horsey comments on the now-disbanded Office of Equity, Race, and Learning Support of Seattle Public Schools.
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South Carolina races to the bottom
With overwhelming votes in its House and Senate, South Carolina is racing to revamp its state assessment system and, apparently, lower its standards dramatically. The Spartansburg Herald Journal says:
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Flypaper cited in Chronicle of Higher Ed
Flypaper is the source for this Chroncle of Higher Education story, which profiles McCain's education team. We revealed McCain's edvisors last week, here.
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Blurry lines
To further illustrate the point that contamination may have occurred among Reading First and presumably "non" Reading First schools, a point I made in my piece in??today's Gadfly,??Connie Choate, the director of Arkansas Reading First, writes:
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Nope, not a silver bullet
The American Enterprise Institute's education scholar, Rick Hess, has a new piece out about mayoral control of district schools. Basically, Hess concludes that mayoral control is no panacea for a city's educational problems... so cross it off your "Educational Panacea" list.
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The Blaine game
Nice to see that at least one state is trying to exorcise its anti-Catholic demons . If??the country cares about saving its Catholic schools , it should hope Florida's efforts are elsewhere replicated.
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Get the newest Gadfly
This week's Gadfly is now available for public consumption. Fordham's nascent research director, Amber Winkler, makes her Gadfly debut with a smart editorial about Reading First (she says it's not yet dead).
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Don't scoff at voc ed
Check out this New York Daily News column about career and technical education (formerly vocational education).
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Make way for the United Way?
It's not quite as bad as Marion Barry embracing vouchers, but is it necessarily a positive development that the United Way has selected dropout prevention as one of its three key initiatives?
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We're good mentors
It's tough to capture a summer internship at Fordham. Expectant mothers often email us tabula rasa resumes on behalf of promising blastocysts, in fact, to be updated as??Embryonic Emmy??and Zygote Zach grow and garner accomplishments over the impending score. This summer, however, we have an unexpected internship opening!
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Bloggers summit features anti-blogging bloggers
Someone once wrote, "You can't trust Alexander Russo to report on a school bake sale and give an accurate account of the price of brownies," so one hesitates to put much stock in this post.
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Funding fundamentals
School Funding's Tragic Flaw ,??a new paper from Education Sector's Kevin Carey and Marguerite Roza of the Center on Reinventing Public Education is a nice, quick introduction to the reasons that school funding is often inequitable and unfair and??under-funds the neediest schools.
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College is not for everyone, but success can be
It is generally agreed that academically able American high school graduates should attend college, regardless of their financial circumstances. That's a time-honored education goal in this country and a worthy one.
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"College ready" was never the purpose
Regarding last week's Gadfly piece "Wishing for a Massachusetts miracle?": The rush to college readiness is muddying the original intent of the graduation requirement of the Massachusetts Ed Reform Law.
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Demanding schools
The Economist aimed its reporting lens last week on charter schools in New York City and Chicago. In the Big Apple, demand for charter schools has overwhelmed supply, especially in Harlem: at the Harlem Success Academy Charter School lottery, 3,600 applied for 600 available spots.
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Hammer time in California
Arnold Schwarzenegger revels in his role as an unconventional politician. How many other Hummer-driving, global warming-fighting Republican governors can you name? Yet his big promises, like those of so many elected officials, can evaporate when the heat rises. Observe how his "Year of Education" was scrapped as California realized it was in a fiscal crisis.
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Let him curse; he's black
The NAACP believes that Anne Arundel County, Maryland, is suspending too many black students.
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Raising standards right
I appreciated Gadfly's recent coverage of Massachusetts ("Wishing for a Massachusetts miracle?"). About 18 months ago, the Massachusetts Board of Education raised the state graduation standard, but in a flexible way.
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Reading First: Not dead yet
The interim evaluation of Reading First has all sorts of people upset for all manner of reasons.
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A Nation Accountable: Twenty-five Years After A Nation at Risk
U.S. Department of EducationApril 2008