Charting a Path to Graduation and Striving for Student Success
Jason C. Snipes, Glee Ivory Holton, Fred Doolittle, and Laura SztejnbergMDRCJuly 2006
Jason C. Snipes, Glee Ivory Holton, Fred Doolittle, and Laura SztejnbergMDRCJuly 2006
Standards-based reform is one of the two driving engines of education improvement in the United States and has been at least since 1989.
A.A. Milne had it right: The greatest joy of childhood is the freedom to do nothing. But one can't do nothing forever, as Christopher Robin reminded Pooh in the last of Milne's classic children's stories."I'm not going to do nothing no more," Christopher Robin said."Never again?" asked Pooh.
Rocker Eddie Van Halen had a famously tough time concentrating in class and now, thanks to a provocative study by Thomas Dee of Stanford, we know why. Eddie Van Halen's teacher was a woman.
Advocates of educational choice always wonder why, if the goal of education is lofty learning by students, people quarrel so fiercely about the means of getting there. Case in point: Jake Heichert, a high school senior from St. Paul, who designed his own lesson plans and curricula.
Two-thirds of schoolchildren in America attend class in states with mediocre (or worse) expectations for what their students should learn. That's just one of the findings of Fordham's The State of State Standards 2006, which evaluates state academic standards. The average state grade is a 'C-minus'--the same as six years earlier, even though most states revised their standards since 2000.
Education policy leaders from across the political spectrum flesh out and evaluate several forms that national standards and testing could take.
Textbook publisher Pearson Scott Foresman is now offering an interactive software program in history and social studies aligned to state standards, i.e. programs whose content will differ from place to place. Not the worst idea, provided the state's standards are worthy and that students can trust the images on their computer screens.
Last month, University of Chicago law professor Richard Epstein penned a provocative Wall Street Journal op-ed showing how both the conservative and liberal blocs on the Roberts Supreme Court inconsistently apply basic Constitutional principles in support of their own policy preferences.
See Jane. See Jane study. See Jane's mom insist she take five AP courses, study six hours each night, perform 20 hours a week of community service, and earn a black belt in karate, all to impress Stanford's admissions officers. See Jane have a nervous breakdown. The Washington Post's Jay Mathews doesn't doubt Jane's story, but he doesn't think it typical.
Beth Waldron complains about the money that parents spend on back-to-school supplies. She longs for the days when her parents bought her paper, pen, and pencils and sent her on her way. Today, she carps, it costs an average of $86 to outfit a child for school. Surely you jest, Beth. How are modern kids to make it through the year on a paltry 86 clams?
Steven Glazerman, Christina Tuttle, and Gail BaxterMathematica Policy Research June 2006
Katrina brought a lot of devastation, but also a chance to convert New Orleans into America's shining example of school reform. Of course, the city schools were already well down the road to collapse before the hurricane arrived last year (New Orleans had 55 of the 78 worst schools in Louisiana); the devastation simply accelerated the timetable for reform.
Center for Education PolicyAugust 2006In this, its fifth annual report on state high-school exit exams, the Center for Education Policy delivers no big news but lots of interesting snippets. CEP reached four broad conclusions in this year's study:
Polls are focused measures of public opinion and policymakers and--especially--politicians tend to take them seriously. But a poll is like a piece of plastic sheeting: if transparent and free of bias, public opinion shines through; if colored by a particular agenda, certain wavelengths of public opinion are filtered out.
Parents, teachers, and school administrators in Dayton are no doubt confused over the state report card results and the paradoxical message they convey. While Performance Index scores are rising--along with some charters' and Dayton Public's ratings--the number of area schools meeting Average Yearly Progress (AYP) targets is declining.
It's no secret that the state's education funding system is broken--the Ohio Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional four times. But how to fix it?
With last week's release of Ohio's report card data, many teachers, school leaders, and district officials are reflecting on accomplishments well-earned, and charting a course to raise student achievement this school year. In the same spirit, the State Board of Education is studying the current achievement data with a close eye on the future.
Ohio's largest cities are rapidly shrinking. According to recent U.S. Census figures, Cincinnati was the biggest loser, hemorrhaging 6.8 percent of its total population--over 22,000 residents--from 2000 to 2005, a larger percentage than any other city in the nation.
We reported a while back on the Commission on the Future of Higher Education, which was established by Margaret Spellings to evaluate whether the nation's colleges were, among other things, producing educated graduates and charging affordable rates.
As a nation, we're generally uncomfortable talking about religion in the public square, in part due to our long history of church-state separation, in part because religion is considered a private matter.
Backward reeled my mind upon discovering that the New York Times's liberal education writer Diana Jean Schemo and conservative icon Charles Murray (writing recently in the Wall Street Journal) share essentially the same defeatist view of education: that schools aren't powerful enough instruments to boost poor kids' achievement to an appreciably higher academic plan
James Harvey and Lydia RaineyCenter on Reinventing Public EducationJune 2006
Clothing companies are salivating over this year's back-to-school buying binge. And why not? Brand Keys, a market research company, forecasts a 15 percent rise in back-to-school clothing sales.
Two heavy-hitters recently jumped into the NCLB reauthorization fray. Florida Governor Jeb Bush and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg joined forces in a Washington Post op-ed to defend NCLB from its critics and offer some suggestions for improving it.
Winding down his tenure as governor, Florida's Jeb Bush received, courtesy of the Miami Herald, a lengthy and mostly fair assessment of his education policies' successes and failures.
Let's say you're training to teach in a tough inner-city school. Where do you go for advice to help you succeed?
U.S. Department of Education: National Center for Education StatisticsAugust 2006
United States Government Accountability OfficeAugust 2006