When I began my career as a public school teacher some 25 years ago, I had no crystal ball to see how education theory and practice would evolve. Back then, no one talked about charter schools, highly qualified teachers, or value-added assessments. But in retrospect, I recognize that I was witness to choice in action.
Margaret Spellings's November 18th announcement of an NCLB "growth model" pilot project capped a busy year of new-found flexibility for the Secretary and her policy minions.
Four years ago, when Congress enacted NCLB, it showed uncommon wisdom in requiring all states to participate in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
Even if you don't believe that principals should have unfettered choices when it comes to hiring new teachers (see here), surely few people would defend a system whereby principals have no choice over the individuals who teach in their
Sensitive readers: Avert your eyes. The Lexington Herald-Leader reports that 15-year-old Davie Miles of Kentucky's Nicholas County High School urinated in his gymnasium's ice machine. Some 30 students and staff reportedly consumed ice from the dispenser before the contamination was reported and the machine was quarantined. Panic ensued shortly thereafter.
Paul Hill's National Charter School Research Project at the University of Washington recently issued a wide-ranging, nicely balanced appraisal of the charter-school movement circa 2005 - emphasizing how loosely coupled it is, how different from state to state and school to school, indeed how it's not fairly termed a national movement at all.
It's been an eventful two weeks for education in the nation's courtrooms. A lawsuit organized by the National Education Association - that argued that NCLB improperly forced school districts to spend their own funds to implement the law - was dismissed by a federal judge in Michigan.
National Association of State Boards of EducationOctober 2005 Henry I. Braun, Educational Testing Service September 2005
United States Government Accountability OfficeNovember 2005
Parents who contend that schools are failing their special needs children will now have to do more than make the claim in order to get the additional services they desire. They'll have to prove their case.
No Child Left Behind was recently highlighted by two conservative columnists, David Brooks and George Will. In the Times, Brooks tweaked NCLB by arguing that the future is in human capital - that is, the cultural, social, moral, cognitive, and aspirational aspects of each individual. Skills and knowledge, "the stuff measured by tests," are but one part of this.
While gubernatorial races hogged election-day press coverage, a couple of local races in Michigan and California have raised eyebrows. In the Great Lakes State, 18-year-old Michael Sessions is making a case for "hands-on" learning. Why study civics? Just do it! He won the Hillsdale mayoral race, as a write-in candidate, by two votes.
In Penfield, N.Y., high-flying math whiz Jim Munch looked to be the poster child for constructivist math curriculum. He scored a 5 on the A.P. Calculus exam, and hopes to become a theoretical mathematician. Turns out, he succeeded in spite, not because of, his school's progressivist training.
My friend, colleague, and boss Gaynor McCown died this week, leaving this earth far too soon at the age of 45. Gaynor started as Executive Director of The Teaching Commission during the same month that I started at the National Council on Teacher Quality. She set up a lunch so that we could meet and talk about how our two organizations could work together.
OK, school reformers, it's pop-quiz time. Take out your # 2 pencils and circle the answer with which you agree.To boost teacher quality, policy makers should:a. Allow principals to hire the best teachers they can find, regardless of credentials; or
National Association of Secondary School Principals2005 National Association of State Boards of EducationOctober 2005
Greg ForsterThe Milton and Rose D. Friedman FoundationOctober 2005
The National Association of Charter School Authorizers is looking for talent.
Several of Ohio's Big 8 cities elected new mayors last week, but none with more radical school reform ideas than Cincinnati's Mark Mallory. Last February, while serving as a state senator, Mallory proposed a plan to allow Cincinnati's mayor not only to appoint the city's superintendent, but also to name all the school board members.
We seek to make information about school choice more accessible. Toward that end, we now have an Excel spreadsheet that lists charter school information for Dayton, Cincinnati, Columbus, and Cleveland. It contains the schools' contact information, latest student counts, financial data, and academic ratings.
There has been a lot of talk lately about value-added assessment in Ohio (including a high profile conference by Battelle for Kids last month). The day is nearing when the Buckeye State goes "value-added." A pilot run is set for next school year and full-scale implementation is set for 2007-08.
In Ohio, approximately 42 percent of school districts have student enrollments less than 1,500.
In the first issue of the Ohio Gadfly, we said that the Thomas B. Fordham Institute is a charter school sponsor; in fact, it's the Institute's organizational cousin, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, that's responsible for our efforts on that front.
School Choice Demonstration Project, Georgetown UniversityThomas Stewart, Ph.D., Patrick J. Wolf, Ph.D., and Stephen Q. Cornman, Esq.October 2005
There was no hero to rush to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's aid Tuesday as California voters pummeled all four of his ballot propositions with "nos." Two of these rebukes were particularly painful for education reformers. Proposition 74 would have lengthened from two to five years the time required for a public school teacher to earn tenure.
For 40 years the United States has struggled to find the right approach to academic standards for K-12 education. Oversimplifying, this quest was catalyzed by the Coleman Report (1966) and A Nation at Risk (1983). The former said we can't rely on fiddling with school inputs to boost school outcomes, while the latter said our outcomes are sorely inadequate.
State capitals have been abuzz with talk of teacher merit pay. Unfortunately, that talk has rarely translated into action (see here) - until now.
Amidst the clean-up efforts in Louisiana, Governor Kathleen Blanco has proposed a plan to allow New Orleans' failing schools (an astonishing 102 of the city's 117 schools) to re-open as charters, free from the miserable New Orleans school board's overbearing regulations.
After months of heated debate, the Kansas State Board of Education officially thumbed its nose at the scientific community. Under the state's newly adopted science standards, Kansas schoolchildren will now be taught (we're not making this up) that not all scientific occurrences have "natural" explanations.
