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Flexibility and NCLB
With dozens of states throwing toddler-style tantrums vis-??-vis NCLB's rules and expectations, the Bush Administration is offering them a "new, common sense approach" to compliance.
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I'll have the fish, with a side of lunacy
As students at Palm Springs Middle School were being let out for the day, they encountered a big blue fish with a simple message: Please don't eat me. Freda Fish (get it, free-da-fish?) was asking students to "Look not Hook" and handed out a pamphlet from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, "The Secret Lives of Fish." Unfortunately for Freda, the kids weren't buying it.
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Ascending scale for new SAT?
Several weeks ago, we echoed The Economist in worrying that "the new SAT, with its writing requirement and junking of the analogy section, might signal a return back to something like the old WASPocracy, since it will reward students who have been rigorously coached in essay-writing" (see
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Always a finalist, but never a Broad
This week, the Broad Foundation announced the five finalists for its 2005 Prize for Urban Education, the "largest education award in the country given to a single school district." The nominees are: Aldine Independent School District (near Houston), Boston Public Schools, New York City Department of Education, Norfolk (Virginia) Public Schools, and the San Francisco Unified School District.
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Too many alternatives
Last week, the Dallas Morning News reported a sharp rise in the number of charter schools seeking "alternative education" status from the Texas Education Agency (TEA) in light of the stiffer expectations of the state's accountability system.
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. . . or improving NCLB?
Instead of riddling NCLB with state-specific loopholes, it would make infinitely more sense to acknowledge that that important statute needs a handful of carefully designed reforms. And then enact those reforms. But what would they be?
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Ranking the ed schools
U.S. News has released its annual ranking of graduate programs, with a section on education schools, accompanied by a crackerjack essay that faults the ed school sector as a whole.
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From the Capital to the Classroom: Year Three of the No Child Left Behind Act
Center on Education PolicyMarch 2005
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Moving Into Town - and Moving On: The Community College in the Lives of Traditional-age Students
Clifford Adelman, Office of Vocational and Adult Education, U.S. Department of EducationFebruary 2005
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Dismantling NCLB . . .
On Saturday, the Washington Post featured an op ed by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings declaring her "willingness to work with states to make [NCLB] fit their unique local needs." Today, Spellings will announce-at a special meeting with state chiefs at Mount Vernon, near Washington-the particulars of the plan, which will include allowing states that can prove they've made progress towa
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Hoist on their own petard
Caught stealing from your union? You might find that your best friend is . . . your union. Wayne Kruse, former president of the Lawrence Education Association, was charged with stealing $97,000 in dues from the Kansas NEA.
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A better way to grade schools
As winter turns toward spring, we turn toward a perennial spring event: student testing. With that testing comes the inevitable anxiety as states brace themselves for the annual status races. My state, Wisconsin, is no exception. We look ahead to this testing season with concern about how our performance data will measure up to results from other states, other districts, other schools.
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Beating the Odds: A City-by-City Analysis of Student Performance and Achievement Gaps on State Assessments
When we flagged this report some weeks back, we had seen only the executive summary. Now we have the full 240-page tome and are impressed enough to mention it again.
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Teacher can't teach
Over the past half-century, the number of pupils in U.S. schools grew by about 50 percent while the number of teachers nearly tripled. Spending per student rose threefold, too. If the teaching force had simply kept pace with enrollments, school budgets had risen as they did, and nothing else changed, today's average teacher would earn nearly $100,000, plus generous benefits.
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Where in the world?
Recent discussions about inadequate high schools have focused on improving math and English. But topics like geography remain in desperate need of attention as well. Several years ago, a poll reported that only 13 percent of Americans ages 18-24 could find Iraq on a map, and scores on the 2001 geography NAEP were dismayingly low for high school students.
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A Profile of the American High School Sophomore in 2002: Initial Results From the Base Year of the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002
National Center for Education StatisticsMarch 2005
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Why Our Schools Are Failing: What Parents Need to Know About Australian Education
Kevin Donnelly, Menzies Research Centre2004
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Head Start reform a non-starter?
The Department of Health and Human Services is under fire for not doing enough to ferret out financial mismanagement, fraud, and abuse in Head Start programs.
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Holding back hard-charging high schoolers
If only every school had this problem. School officials at the affluent New Trier High School in northern Chicago, a high-performing public school that sends 95 percent of its graduates to four-year colleges, are discussing plans that they hope will decrease student intensity.
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Back to school to see Dewey's legacy
Roger Shattuck, a distinguished literary and cultural critic from Boston University, has a fascinating story in the New York Review of Books about serving on a local school board in Vermont.
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A dogfight in California
It's a no-rules steel cage match to the death in California, pitting the California Teachers Association against Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Union members are expected to approve a proposal to increase member dues by $180 over three years, a levy that will add a staggering $54 million to the $11 million war chest the union has assembled to fight the Governor's education proposals.
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A foolproof plan
A Bronx teacher at notoriously bad Middle School 142 was charged this week with coercion, falsifying business records and other crimes following the discovery that he paid a former homeless man two dollars to take his state certification exam. The teacher, Wayne Brightly, was "tired of flunking" and was scared of losing his $59,000 salary if he failed again.
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Value-Added Assessment of Teacher Quality as an Alternative to the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards: What Recent Studies Say
George K. Cunningham and J. E. Stone, JAM PressMarch 2005
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The Saudi connection
The New York Sun reports that Saudi Arabia has given Columbia University's Middle East Institute annual grants of $15,000 since 2002 to support "outreach" programs, which allow Columbia faculty and graduate students to instruct many of New York's public school teachers about how to teach Middle East politics.
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Ravitch takes a stand
In the New York Times, Diane Ravitch - as is her wont - yells "Stop!" to the tide of governors, policy wonks, and technology moguls who have recently fingered high schools as the weak link in American K-12 education.
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RIP, SAT
The old SAT is dead, but The Economist offers a proper eulogy, crediting it for "producing one of the great silent social revolutions in American history - the rise of the meritocracy." In the 1930s, Harvard president James Bryant Conant determined to break the WASP stranglehold that populated America's top colleges and universities with the feckless children of wealth.
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Spelling bee returns!
Last month we reported that a Rhode Island school district had cancelled its annual spelling bee on the dubious grounds that it violated NCLB. Well, we're happy to report that the district bowed to public pressure and held the competition, but not without some changes.
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Inside the Black Box of High-Performing, High-Poverty Schools
Patricia J. Kannapel and Stephen K. Clements, Prichard Committee for Academic ExcellenceFebruary 2005
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