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Urban catholic schools face a crisis, not extinction
There's more coverage of Fordham's Catholic schools report today, including a front-page
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Priority number 11
No, it's not good that the "financial know-how" of American high school seniors has "gone from bad to worse." Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is fired up about it:
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Fifth-grade economists
Mike is right: financial literacy is important, but schools can't teach everything. In fact, we wrote as much several months ago in The Gadfly.
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Back to the Bedouins
This week's Economist contains a special report on "digital nomadism," the ability to work, and to connect to family or friends, from just about anywhere.
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More on financial literacy
Mike has a fair point that schools can't do everything. He might have added that it's hard to picture most high school teachers being able to confidently explain variable interest rates or balloon payments, or any students bothering to listen.
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Private School Choice
Who Will Save America's Urban Catholic Schools?
America's urban Catholic schools are in crisis. Over 1,300 of them have shut down since 1990, mostly in our cities. As a result, some 300,000 students have been displaced--double the number affected by Hurricanes Rita and Katrina. This report, which includes a comprehensive survey of the attitudes of U.S. Catholics and the broader public towards inner-city Catholic schools, examines this crisis and offers several suggestions for arresting and perhaps reversing this trend in the interests of better education.
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Discipline in black and white
Why is it necessary to measure student behavior by race? Test scores are in this way disaggregated to prevent schools from ignoring struggling low-income and minority students, who in the past were often written-off as beyond hope.
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Saving Catholic schools
Fordham's new Catholic schools report, released today, is here. USA Today covers it here.
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Re: More dented cars
Coby writes: Many KIPP schools are better than most urban schools because they alleviate more of the burdens of poverty. There should be more such schools.
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Idol gives back... to the past?
I'll admit to watching some of last night's Hollywood-glitzy American Idol Gives Back show.
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Textbooks
National Review's Phi Beta Cons blog is engaged in discussion of the same topic that we are. See here and here.
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And another one
Via The Gradebook: Florida could be next to join the American Diploma Project, which Fordham helped develop several years ago.
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This Week's Fordham Factor: Catholic schools
Mike and Christina discuss Fordham's latest report, Who Will Save America's Urban Catholic Schools? httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAzVVeX34g8
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Controversy? In our fair textbook?
Inaccuracies in school textbooks make Gadfly cringe. So does bias. Too many widely-used textbooks are sloppy and error-filled, not to mention banal. Many are also slanted, mainly to the left.
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Local control Obama?
Free-lancer Alexander Russo recently investigated Barack Obama's involvement in Chicago's "local school council" debates of the mid-1990s. At issue was whether the councils (Russo calls them "mini school boards") should have had the power to fire principals, which several did for dubious reasons.
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Saving Catholic schools
Since 1990, some 300,000 children have been displaced from Catholic schools that closed during this period--twice as many as were impacted by hurricanes Rita and Katrina. Most of these youngsters live in America's inner cities, most are poor, and their beloved schools closed not because of physical destruction or flooding, not because of poor performance, but for lack of funding.
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Doing time at Cheektowaga
Deborah Meier, of New York University's school of education, believes the school district in Cheektowaga, New York, which bars underachieving and misbehaving middle-school students from extracurricular activities, is "like prison." Odd that Sondra LaMacchia, whose 14-year-old daughter Cortney attends a Cheektowaga middle school, doesn't appear similarly distressed.
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Fat Philly
Five elementary schools in Philadelphia jettisoned machines that dispense soda for those that dispense juice, cracked down on candy sales and junk food, and gave prizes to pupils who ate roughage. Mirabile dictu, after two years their students were less fat! So concludes a study that will be released in the April issue of Pediatrics.
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A czar is born
A recent New York Times article about the ambitions of United Federation of Teachers (UFT) boss Randi Weingarten is hardly revelatory to those of us in the ed biz, where everyone knows Weingarten is close to taking the helm at the American Federation of Teachers. But the Times piece includes some interesting bits nonetheless.
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Making a Difference?: The Effects of Teach For America in High School
Zeyu Xu, Jane Hannaway, Colin TaylorThe Urban Institute and the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education ResearchMarch 27, 2008
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Life Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives
Christopher Gergen and Gregg VanourekJossey-Bass 2008
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Spin Cycle: How Research is Used in Policy Debates: The Case of Charter Schools
Jeffrey R. Henig2008
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Unsettling
This ongoing story is understandably unsettling to lots of people. The more one learns about this school, the more one is convinced it's unlawful. Ritual washing and Friday prayers? I know Kuhner doesn't like it....
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Fit to print
About this and this (the possibility that New York's principals would be disallowed from considering student test scores when evaluating whether teachers should receive tenure), the New York Times
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Adopt an Iraqi
Surprisingly that wasn't one of Angelina Jolie's suggestions when she spoke yesterday at a Council on Foreign Relations panel about the impact of??the war??on Iraq's children. Find out what she did recommend here.