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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.
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Secretary of unpopularity?
Seems that not a few people want to punch Britain's Schools Secretary, Ed Balls, in the face.
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News Flash: Textbooks are biased, inaccurate
One would think this topic wouldn't deserve treatment from the Associated Press's national desk???or be picked up in 200 media outlets worldwide (so far).
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I am different, I struggle, hear me
Trot on over to Eduwonk, where guest blogger J.B. Schramm, Founder and CEO of College Summit, is turning in some substantive posts. He ends each day by pasting excerpts of student admission essays:??
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What's the difference?
Mike is probably correct that the Wilson and Dilulio textbook is receiving scrutiny and press attention because its authors are conservatives. And no doubt lots of left-leaning texts escape similar inspection.
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More on stats
Per my earlier post, here's yet another example, from economist Steven Levitt, of statistics being incorrectly interpreted. One could unearth scads of such instances.
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About those dented cars
Coby's post is thought-provoking. At what point does despair negate the effect of incentives?
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Teaching aid of the day
Periodically, a new album from DBLF Studios, features 119 songs, one for each of the elements on the periodic table, as well as a bonus track called "DBLFesium." And yes, each song is actually about the element it's named after. For instance, here's a sampling of the lyrics from track no. 16, "Sulphur": The lake of fire, yep that's me
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The dented cars theory
This Boston Globe article from a couple Sundays ago highlights the thinking of philosopher Charles Karelis, who teaches at George Washington University.