I enjoyed reading Mike Petrilli's recent article "Parties like its 1999" (November 29, 2007). But I wonder if the lens Petrilli uses to evaluate the education proposals of presidential candidates fails to factor in a consideration of the federal role versus the state role in education.
George Will doesn't much like the federal government, and he certainly doesn't much like the federal government getting involved in education. So it comes as no surprise that he doesn't like No Child Left Behind. More precisely, he loathes it.
Universities have long complained that far too many of their incoming students are ill-prepared for the rigors of college; the problem is particularly acute for low-income and minority students. Several institutions are actually doing something about it.
2007 may be known as the year when the "soft bigotry of low expectations" made a comeback. It started with Education Week's dubious "Chance-for-Success Index" (motto: demography is destiny) and is finishing with another doozy from Michael "No Excuse Left Behind" Winerip.
A version of this editorial appeared as an op-ed in the December 11, 2007, Columbus Dispatch.
More than a year ago, the Strive education partnership was formed with much fanfare in the Queen City to create a scholarship program much like the Kalamazoo Promise in Michigan.
On November 30, the Fordham Foundation, in partnership with the Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools, the Ohio Department of Education, the Franklin County Education Service Center, and the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, sponsored a charter-school board governance training program for about 85 charter school board members, operators, and sponsors.
Ted Strickland has hung his success or failure as governor on fixing Ohio's school funding system. A quarter of the way through his term, he has yet to announce a timeline for his fix, let alone the specifics of a plan. Republican state Sen.
Regarding a November 28 review by Emmy L. Partin:If I were writing your article, I would have to have called it, "Schools Are Worse than You Can Imagine!" And it would apply to publicly-funded schools nationwide along with many of the private schools.
Guess why U.S. schoolchildren are said not to know enough about global warming? As with everything else that may or may not be wrong with young Americans, just blame NCLB. So says the North American Association for Environmental Education's recent study, Environmental Literacy in America.
The holidays are here just in time, because seven of the District of Columbia's inner-city Catholic schools are in need of a Christmas miracle. Like their peers nationwide, they face a crippling financial crisis that threatens to bring their heralded work to an end.
Jackie Robson shows why the U.S. is the globe's innovator. She's a gifted 14-year-old who skipped high school, attends Mary Baldwin College, lives in a dormitory and takes classes such as Folk Dance and Japanese 101. When reflecting on her middle-school experience, Jackie says, "Most of the stuff throughout the year I knew already.
Last week, U.S. News and World Report, the most widely known source of college and grad-school rankings, decided to try its hand at ranking America's high schools.
"If you can't beat ‘em, sue ‘em," has become an unofficial American motto, and one that the teachers unions shrewdly employ across the land, pretty much wherever they lose in the legislature. This week's example comes from the Badger State.
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and DevelopmentDecember 2007
D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty is spending political capital like it grows on trees. At least that's how it seemed last week, when Fenty announced his plans to close 23 District schools and received serious backlash from the city council.
Which is scarier: a high-school student who can't read or a fifth grader with a beard? Since 2002-03, Texas has required third and fifth graders to pass a test in order to move on to the next grade level. The law, brainchild of then-Governor George W.
If you live in New Zealand and you feel like chicken tonight, perhaps you should settle for The Other White Meat. That's because 17-year-old Kiwi Jane Millar, while working toward her IB Programme Diploma, conducted a science experiment that showed that several local supermarket chickens contained anti-biotic resistant bugs.
Suburban parents aren't buying what school reformers are selling, argues budding conservative writer RiShawn Biddle in The American Spectator. "For middle-class parents, vouchers and charters are unappealing because they have already exercised choice--in the form of buying pricey homes in suburban neighborhoods.
It's tough to view the results from the 2006 administration of the Progress in International Reading Literacy Test (PIRL), released yesterday, with anything other than alarm.
Senator Barack Obama unveiled his education plan last week, and used the opportunity to promote his presidential campaign theme of bringing people together.
In an age of Britney Spears, Tom Cruise, and the Beckhams, it's nice to know there are still some people out there who understand that life is not a narcissism carnival. Principal Jim Friel of New Hampshire's Franklin Middle School is donating his kidney to one of his students--13-year-old Morgan Corliss.
Jay Mathews is a superb education journalist with a particular passion for the Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate programs. He regularly scrutinizes them and their workings (and any studies, commentaries, etc. about them) with the care that an expert gastroenterologist brings to a colonoscopy.
If Rebecca Segall-Wallace is right, lots of otherwise fortunate New York City youngsters are wondering, "Who is John Galt?" Segall-Wallace writes in yesterday's Wall Street Journal that some of the Big Apple's toniest private schools, while happy to compete ferociously in athletics, disavow "thought competition" as treacherous and refuse to support students who want
National Endowment of the ArtsNovember 2007
Gary W. PhillipsAmerican Institutes for ResearchNovember 2007
Teacher retirement systems across the country are receiving much attention as of late. Lawmakers and leaders of Ohio's state teachers' pension plan need to read a feature in the new issue of Education Next (see here) by economists Robert Costrell and Michael Podgurksy.
December 5, the National Charter School Research Project at the Center on Reinventing Public Education is hosting a luncheon to release the 2007 edition of Hopes, Fears, & Reality: A Balanced Look at American Charter Schools.
The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation has issued its "Sponsorship Accountability Report 2006-07" for the nine charter schools it sponsors in Dayton, Cincinnati, and Springfield (see here).
The Toledo Public Schools teachers union has proposed that the district's lowest-performing school should be teacher-run."Our proposal is that there would be no administrators and it will be totally teacher-led," said Francine Lawrence, Toledo Federation of Teachers president, told the Toledo Blade's Ignazio Messina.
