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.
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.
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.
Saul Geiser and Veronica Santelices, Center for Studies in Higher Education, University of California at Berkeley2004
This is no April Fools item. Teachers in America's leftist heartland, Berkeley, California, have announced that they will not assign their students written homework until they receive a pay raise. The local teachers' union initiated the strike and is requiring teachers not to "volunteer" outside of their contracted hours.
Cheri Pierson Yecke, Center of the American ExperimentFebruary 2005
A year ago, responding to an outrageous piece by People for the American Way (as they pretentiously and falsely style themselves), I wrote in this space that a little "pork" in federal appropriations wasn't such a bad thing (see here). These Congressionally-earmarked projects, I argued,
Don't cancel your subscription to the New York Times just yet. Education reformers (and people of contrarian spirit everywhere) should be pleased with the announcement that reporter and columnist John Tierney is taking over William Safire's patch of the most-watched journalistic real estate in the world: the Times op-ed page.
The latest California Field Poll shows that, while many of Governor Schwarzenegger's reform proposals - the Govern-ator has dubbed this the "Year of Reform" in the Golden State - garner only lukewarm support, his idea of teacher merit pay (see here) is a genuine hit.
With legislatures across the country in full swing, school-choice proposals - both vouchers and tuition tax credits - are being debated all over. Parents rallied on the State House steps in South Carolina in support of Governor Mark Sanford's tax credit for home school and private school students. As Sanford said, "This is simply about recognizing that competition has made every product . . .
Like going steady in elementary school, everybody's talking about it, but nobody's actually doing it. We mean, of course, mounting a major challenge to NCLB.
Naida C. Tushnet et al., WestEdDecember 2004
Nelson Smith, Progressive Policy InstituteFebruary 2005
Anti-testing types have taken up the cause of Mia Kang, a 14-year-old Texan who defied teachers and counselors and turned in a little essay announcing her opposition to standardized testing instead of completing a mandated practice TAKS test. She has vowed not to participate in the real thing this spring, even at the risk of not graduating from high school.
Center on Reinventing Public EducationMary Beth Celio and James HarveyJanuary 2005
Conference after summit after symposium on high school reform have been held already this year (see Checker's editorial, "The Blind Men and the High School" for a laundry list of potential reforms). This week, Achieve and the National Governors Association chime in.
We appreciate the attention given to the U.S. Department of Education's priority published in the Federal Register on January 25 related to scientifically-based evaluation ("Science and nonscience: The limits of scientific research," February 17).
Gadfly has seen education fads come and go and rarely comments on them, life being too short for trivia and nonsense.
In a recent roundtable discussion excerpted in Philanthropy magazine, Kaleem Caire (project director at Fight for Children, Inc., and a mover/shaker in the District of Columbia's school choice movement) and Phoebe Boyer (executive director of the Tiger Foundation in New York City) provide perceptive insights on how philanthropies in those cities are driving education reforms.
These are interesting observations by Justin Torres. It may be true that in voucher cities, Catholic schools educate large numbers of non-Catholic children. And he is right to ask about their reason for existence if they are not educating Catholic children in the Catholic faith.
Last week, the Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn announced that 26 Catholic schools will be closed in Brooklyn and Queens, about 15 percent of what was once a thriving parochial school system in those boroughs. Days later, the Archdiocese of New York announced it will close six schools in Manhattan and the Bronx.
According to Daniel Weintraub of the Sacramento Bee, in California schools the phrase 'English Learner' is "finally starting to mean what it says." The latest results from the California English Language Development Test show that 47 percent of English Language Learner (ELL) students in the Golden State scored either "advanced" or "early advanced" (meaning at or approaching fluency) in 2
The Wisconsin Senate last week moved to ease the enrollment cap on Milwaukee's successful voucher program. (See http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=168#2039 for more on the debate.) The bill would raise the current limit of 15 percent of Milwaukee's K-12 students by 1,500 for one year, to 16,500 students.
Jay P. Greene and Marcus A. Winters, Manhattan InstituteFebruary 2005
This week, Time reports that teachers have the toughest time managing their . . . students' parents.
