Commentary
Practices from the Portfolio, Volume I
NewSchools Venture Fund & FSG Social Impact AdvisorsMarch 2008
Commentary
Tendentious on tenure
Perched atop a soap box in the New York Daily News, United Federation of Teachers boss (and upcoming AFT chieftain) Randi Weingarten steps up her ongoing assault on logic and reason. Schools Chancellor Joel Klein wants to consider student test scores when awarding tenure to teachers. Almost everybody in the real world (i.e., outside the field of education) concurs.
Commentary
ANAR and the denial industry
Denial of hard facts and unwelcome implications runs the gamut. At its outer edge, we find a few sorely misguided folks denying that the Holocaust occurred, doubting the wickedness of Stalin, contending the greatness of Lincoln. Once upon a time, the Catholic Church denied Galileo's discovery that the planets revolve around the sun.
Commentary
Battle of Britain
In the United Kingdom today, over 8,000 schools were shut down by a strike of the National Union of Teachers, angry because its members' pay, which has risen 19 percent in real terms since 1997, is scheduled for only a 2.45 percent bump next year. Thus, no school for little Nigel.
Commentary
All you need is love
Finally, we know what separates great teachers from their more-middling peers: "unconditional love." So writes educator Mark Ryan in an op-ed for The Arizona Republic, a respected newspaper that doesn't usually print pieces about love, joy, sunshine, and kittens. But this is a time of hope, we're told, and Ryan's article fits the bill.
Commentary
Value-added isn't a panacea
Regarding the April 17th story, "Failing schools usually are," the research is consistent and clear: there is a low statistical correlation between the performance of schools measured by point-in-time, year-end test scores (as used in NCLB to measure "Adequate Yearly Progress") and those measured by ho
Commentary
Outback setbacks
Seems Australia's new government has pulled a bait and switch, promising citizens Down Under significant education reform and then forgetting about most of it.
Commentary
Revisions required
You have to hand it to U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings and her team: they are hardly dawdling during their Administration's closing months.
Commentary
Separated at birth?
Marvin's and Mike's mothers coordinated on the phone last night before laying out their sons' outfits. (Click the photo for a bigger version.)
Commentary
Bennett on Benedict
Anticipating tomorrow's White House summit on inner-city children and faith-based schools, former Secretary of Education William J.
Commentary
I've always wanted to have a neighbor just like you...
Yesterday, on the Wall Street Journal's expanded opinion pages, Alan Ehrenhalt reviewed Bill Bishop's new book, The Bi
Commentary
How high can we go?
One of Thomas Sowell's points, that college education is being watered down because too many people are obtaining it, is a fine one.
Commentary
To each his own
The obvious rejoinder to Mike's post is that when people cluster in "communities of sameness, among people with similar ways of life, beliefs and in the end, politics," they also cluster among people of the same race and socioeconomic status.
Commentary
Innovate here but not here
Mike tells me (as he runs out the door to catch a flight) that he's already answered my question about standards and tests thusly:
Commentary
About those NCLB proposals...
You have to hand it to U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings and her team: they are hardly dawdling during these last months of the Administration.
Commentary
In the State of No Brainers, there are few new ideas, save one
State leaders have not taken education reform seriously enough, nor have they moved fast enough to implement change, although one improvement they should definitely consider is modernizing the way students are funded, argues a new briefing paper from The Ohio Grantmakers Forum (
Commentary
Clear as mud
Both the House of Representatives and State Board of Education took a look this month at Ohio's obscure and antiquated mechanisms for financing the education of students who have difficulty speaking and writing English.
Commentary
Cornhuskers finally see the light
Nebraska's governor this month signed into law a bill requiring the state to begin administering statewide, uniform assessments to measure students' academic progress.
Commentary
Tennessee district has lessons to teach
School principals and administrators take note: the Education Sector's newest report, The Benwood Plan: A Lesson in Comprehensive Teacher Reform, shows readers how drastic improvements can be made with just a little bit of elbow grease and creative school-based reforms.
Commentary
School size and the Goldilocks phenomenon
Like Goldilocks's search for the perfectly sized chair in the classic children's fable, educators have long sought the perfectly sized school.
Commentary
Your count, my count, how much do the kids count?
The Ohio Department of Education (ODE) is on the hook for a potential payout of tens of millions of dollars to school districts whose students opted to attend charter schools unless the Ohio Supreme Court rules on behalf of the state.
Commentary
There they go again
More paying kids for studying. (Newt Gingrich's idea, according to NPR.)?? Bad idea.
Commentary
Work to do, says Herbert
New York Times columnist Bob Herbert tells us that American schools aren't very good: "We've got work to do."
Commentary
There Liam goes again
Why does Liam have such a beef with paying poor teenagers to work on their studies rather than flip hamburgers at the local Mickey D's?
Commentary
The new, improved, less flexible No Child Left Behind
Nancy Zuckerbrod at the Associated Press previews today's regulatory actions by the U.S. Department of Education here .
Commentary
Race to the bottom
Principal Jana Fields knows that No Child Left Behind looks at school test-score data by subgroup. She knows that the scores of black students are evaluated separately from those of white students, that the scores of Asian students and those??of Hispanic students are gathered in their own, specific cluster.
Commentary
Earth Day 2008
We at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute fight to improve K-12 schooling in America, but that doesn't mean we're ignoring the environment: httpv://youtube.com/watch?v=loZjzAwHDaQ
Commentary
Commentary
Spurring innovation
As the world awaits the education X PRIZE, the folks at PETA prove that the X PRIZE Foundation isn't the only group that can offer rewards for innovative solutions to pressing problems.
Commentary
Our fifteen minutes of fame is up
Flypaper is no longer the newest blog in the edu-neighborhood. We send our greetings to jaypgreene.com, a direct link to one of the most fertile minds in education reform.