Governor Ted Strickland is gathering ideas from businesses, academics, various interest groups, and even some ordinary Ohioans on K-12 education reform. At a recent regional Northeast Ohio "shareholder" meeting, everything from a single, uniform statewide property tax to making teachers work 12 months a year was suggested.
D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee will fire somewhere between 24 and 30 principals at the end of the school year, in large part because under the rules of NCLB she's required to restructure 27 chronically-failing schools.
Sunday's Daily News revisits New York City's ridiculous "rubber room" policy, which was also featured a year ago in a Village Voice article. A taste:
A group based in Dallas wanted to give schools in the state of Washington $13.2 million to strengthen their AP courses, but the plan fell through because state collective bargaining laws require that teacher pay be negotiated between unions and school districts.
The Heritage Foundation's Ed Feulner is a heckuva smart guy and he's usually right (as well as Right). His take on A Nation at Risk, and the country's response to it, however, is only half right.
After months of jockeying with control-freak governor Ted Strickland, Ohio state education superintendent Susan Tave Zelman is on her way out, perhaps to the University of Oregon as ed school dean.
The Sacramento Bee's editorial page weighs in on the racial remix controversy at Will C. Wood Middle School, coming to the defense of the school's principal:
Reid Lyon, the Godfather of Scientifically Based Reading Instruction (so says Eduflack), provides a ton of important insights into RF's interim evaluation study in this
Clay Christensen, author of The Innovator's Dilemma and a Harvard business professor, is coming out with a new book that's sure to create a buzz in the K-12 space, Disrupting Class:
The Styles section features a piece about online services that let parents track their kids' grades in real time.
Looks like the United Federation of Teachers is not going to back down on the Absent Teacher Reserve issue.
The Washington Post reports that the Institute of Architects has recognized a new building on the campus of the Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C., "as one of the 'top ten green projects' of 2007":
This month's issue of The New Criterion is all about education. There's lots on the value of the classics/liberal education/learning for learning's sake from smart folks like Roger Kimball, Victor Davis Hanson, and James Piereson.
The political maneuvering of Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick might offer a preview of an Obama administration, says Jon Keller in the Wall Street Journal. If he's right, education reformers should be wary:
Naomi Schaefer Riley writes in the Wall Street Journal about obstacles beyond??lousy??instruction in the classroom??that often prevent students in urban public schools from attending college: Letters of recommendation that are poorly written (when they're written), guidance counselors who can't b
Regarding the just-released study of Reading First's effectiveness, Mike tells USA Today that
The media gleefully reported the news that a big interim Reading First study??from the U.S. Department of Education's Institute for Educational Sciences (IES) found the program to have no impact on reading comprehension.
Sometimes you read a story that makes you wonder what the world is coming to.
The newest edition of The Gadfly is out and jammed with choice offerings, especially an essay that concludes "that for long-term sustainability and academic success, a charter school has better odds if it enrolls at least 300 students. " The small-school crowd won't like it.
In his latest riposte, Liam argues that I've ignored the ethical dimension of the student-pay debate.
Greg Toppo has a thorough piece in USA Today about school lunches. Long story short: They're disgusting.
That seems to be the premise of this Washington Post op-ed by a first-year Yale Law School student (
Today in The Gadfly, I write about George Orwell's claim that bad writing and bad thinking are mutually reinforcing. I focus on the most egregious cases: sentences punctuated by text-message spellings and abbreviations and plagued by rotten grammar and rampant ambiguity.
Florida Governor Charlie Crist stands with the state legislature, which just passed an anti-bullying law. "I'm against bullying, too," he said. And I'm against purposeless laws that waste everyone's time.
If you need further evidence of the coarsening of our culture, then read Ian Shapira's piece in Monday's Washington Post.
A causal link between increased teacher absences and decreased student achievement exists. So it's no wonder that school leaders are looking for ways to keep educators in the classroom. "We have terrible attendance," said Van V.
The benefits of a value-added approach to school accountability, one that measures the test-score gains of individual students from year-to-year, is that it doesn't unfairly penalize schools that enroll large numbers of disadvantaged students. But it has drawbacks.
