Commentary
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The manufactured crisis
It's back-to-school season, which means it must be time for a prominent news outlet to decry the teacher-turnover "crisis." Enter the New York Times, whose front-page story quotes all the usual suspects saying all the usual things. "The problem is not mainly with retirement," explains the president of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future.
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Quantity Counts: The Growth of Charter School Management Organizations
National Charter School Research Project, University of WashingtonAugust 2007
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But I can sing!
All California asks of its twelfth-graders is to pass an exit exam (you get six tries!) that tests ninth-grade standards in reading and seventh-grade standards in math. Ninety-three percent of the class of 2007 passed it. Results from that class also showed rising success rates for African-American, Latino, and poor youngsters.
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Error prone, college bound
It is no longer sufficient for ambitious high school seniors, bent on impressing college admissions committees, to distinguish themselves through their accomplishments. Now they're being encouraged to make creative errors. Steven Roy Goodman is an independent college counselor who advises his clients to purposefully screw up their applications. "Sometimes it's a typo," he said.
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Hip, hip, hoo-Rhee
Michelle Rhee, the District of Columbia's dynamic new schools chancellor, is already impressing parents, teachers, and the ever-cynical media with her no-nonsense style (she wants to fire bureaucrats and slim down the central office) and refreshing sense of urgency.
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A happy anniversary
Huzzah for Florida Virtual School (FLVS), which just turned ten! Such celebratory language is appropriate, for the Sunshine State, home to many school reform innovations, has yet again provided a successful model for reinventing k-12 education for the 21st century.
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Why not get what you deserve?
Executives get bonuses when their companies excel, so why not give teachers a bump in pay when their students do the same?
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Not so fast: real research must supplant shell-game analyses
The debate over charter schools in the Buckeye State continued last week when the Coalition for Public Education (CPE)-a group that has filed numerous lawsuits against charters and the charter school program over the years-held a news conference to unveil its
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Third Frontier is doomed without a school system to match
In 2005, Ohio voters overwhelmingly approved a plan to spend an extra $1.6 billion in bond money (increasing the program to $2 billion over 10 years) to support high-tech science research and industries in the state (see here).
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Turn your vision for public education into reality
The Mind Trust-a non-profit group supporting education innovation in Indianapolis-is offering Education Entrepreneur Fellowships to extraordinary individuals to develop strategies and launch initiatives that will transform public education. Learn more here.
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Time lie
The idea is simple: Allow low-performing schools to extend learning time by using money previously allotted to students for out-of-school tutoring. It's also simply wrong. A more blatant attack on the small amount of choice NCLB gives to parents and their children would be difficult to conceive.
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Try this
What can we learn from the recent pronouncements by Jack O'Connell, California's state superintendent of public instruction, that race, not poverty, is the cause of the most distressing achievement gaps in his state and the nation?
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Turning around turnarounds
One of the indisputable successes of NCLB is that it shines a bright light on the dimmest schools in the country. A decade ago, underperforming schools were free to languish in relative obscurity.
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Not-so-special ed
Schools are under increasing pressure to boost the test scores of their special education students. And according to the Wall Street Journal (which is running a series about mainstreaming), many schools have responded to that pressure not by working harder, but by exploiting loopholes.
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Outsmarted
The debate about "mainstreaming"--whether students are best served in "regular" settings instead of segregated, specialized ones--is typically reserved for discussions of special education (see below). But this week's Time magazine considers mainstreaming (and its opposite) in the context of America's most gifted children.
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Highly questionable reasoning
True or false: NCLB considers teachers going through alternate routes to certification (like those employed by Teach For America) to be "highly qualified." False, charges a new lawsuit filed by "a coalition of pare
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A is for amnesia
Someone call Jay Greene--officials are now naming schools after nonexistent historical figures! Our fourth president officially has a middle initial in Ogden, Utah, though it would be news to him. Seems someone submitted the name "James A.
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Teacher transparency
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution wants to know why people in positions of authority are keeping parents in the dark about the quality of their child's teacher, whom they will meet next week for the first time. "Many of those parents have no real idea of the teacher's capabilities," the editorial board explains.
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Where we stand
We provoked a bit of a stir with last week's piece, featured in the Wall Street Journal and Gadfly, titled (by the Journal's editors) "Not By Geeks Alone." Most of that stir was intentional.
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Nonprofit no-no
In 2005, Demarcus Bolton learned that he was one of 20 Atlanta high-schoolers who would receive a $1,000 scholarship from City Councilman H. Lamar Willis's charitable foundation. Two years later, Bolton remains scholarship-less. After calling Willis's office repeatedly, he finally gave up. "I just let it go because I was tired of being lied to," he said.
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Pay-for-Performance Teacher Compensation: An Inside View of Denver's ProComp Plan
Phil Gonring, Paul Teske, and Brad JuppHarvard Education Press2007
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NCLB: The big questions
As Gadfly recently noted , prospects for Congressional bi-partisanship for the renewal of NCLB are eroding. George Miller and Buck McKeon appear to hold very different views--this month, anyway--as to what's wrong, what's right, and what needs fixing, and how NCLB 2.0 should differ from the first iteration.
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From Baltic Avenue to Boardwalk, where does it end?
It's tough to know what to make of them, those who cling to the idea that social engineering will cure the ailments of public education's sickest parts. John Edwards belongs in that camp.
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All you can be
Call it double-time, academic style. In March, the Pennsylvania National Guard launched a three-week GED prep class, completed in basic training, for those who signed up to serve but didn't finish high school. The program isn't easy (students are in class nine hours a day, and rise at 4:45 a.m. for physical training) but seems to be working. Of the 120 enrolled so far, 85 have received GEDs.
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Road to effective change eludes public schools
The powerful forces bearing down on Ohio and public education here were nicely encapsulated in two recent Dayton Daily News articles.