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Reform lessons from the UK
A pair of excellent articles in Education Week by Lynn Olson point to the UK for lessons on the pitfalls of standards-based reform on the one hand, and value-added analysis on the other.
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Rocky mountain charter reforms
Big news for Colorado charter schools. That state's legislature has just passed two bills packed with useful charter law reforms. One creates a Colorado State Charter Institute to sponsor charter schools, removing local districts from their monopoly over that key role.
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Growth in School Revisited: Achievement Gains from the Fourth to the Eighth Grade
Richard J. Coley, Educational Testing ServiceNovember 2003
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Learning Partnerships: Strengthening American Jobs in the Global Economy
The Albert Shanker Institute and the New Economy Information ServiceApril 20, 2004
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The Empirical Curriculum: Changes in Postsecondary Course-Taking, 1972-2000
Clifford Adelman, Institute of Educational Sciences, U.S. Department of Education April 2004
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Individual Growth and School Success
Martha McCall, Gage Kingsbury, and Allan Olson, Northwest Evaluation AssociationApril 2004
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Get your ed reform fix daily
A rosebud to our friends at the Progressive Policy Institute for the launch of "Eduwonk," a daily blog on education issues. It's peppered with smart and witty comments on the education news of the day, perfect for those who just can't wait the full seven days for the next Gadfly. Check it out at http://www.eduwonk.com.
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Hoping for too much from vouchers
Sobering thoughts from Frederick Hess on why the new D.C. voucher program won't have the hoped-for effect of reforming the public school system by exposing it to competition. In fact, the new program shields public schools from real competition by capping enrollment at 3 percent of the school-age population, while actually adding dollars to the woeful D.C.
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Back and forth on charters
Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform is her usual blunt self in a recent exchange with the editors of USA Today, who bemoan financial, curricular, and administrative scandals among charter schools and call for greater accountability for them.
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Picky Parent Guide: Choose Your Child's School with Confidence, the Elementary Years (K-6)
Bryan C. Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel, Armchair Press May 2004
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The Nation shifts paradigms
Writing in The Nation, Stanford professor Claude Steele makes a number of points about the "ability paradigm," his term for the testing system that assesses the academic readiness and achievement of individual students, guides placement decisions (such as whether a student will go on to the next grade level or a competitive college), and guides political and social decisions as to how
Commentary
This is your brain on phonics&
The Wall Street Journal this week highlighted a new study (by acclaimed reading expert Sally Shaywitz) published in the journal Biological Psychiatry that used magnetic resonance imaging to measure the brain activity of poor readers and gauge the brain wave effects of an intensive phonics program.
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Panel says no to Yecke
In Minnesota, a state Senate committee voted yesterday along party lines to reject the nomination of Cheri Yecke to be state superintendent. Her apparent sin? Being too "controversial," which is code for getting useful things done.
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Scoring points on Columbine
As we know, K-12 education is beset by snake oil and flim-flam. Usually, we don't bother to comment, on grounds that life is too short, that it's best not to draw attention to nonsense, that it's bad for our digestions, etc.But sometimes, there crops up an example of meretriciousness so obnoxious we must take note. Thus it is with "High Test Scores?
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The High School Transcript Study: A Decade of Change in Curricula and Achievement
Robert Perkins, Brian Kleiner, Stephen Roey, and Janis Brown, Westat and National Center for Education StatisticsApril 2004
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Inquirer and Gadfly wrong on teacher data release
The suggestion that the Pennsylvania Department of Education is "refusing" to release district-by-district data or public information is just not accurate ("Secrecy vs. sunshine"). The controversy began when the School District of Philadelphia asked the Department to produce an interim report.
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NCLB bringing change to the windy city?
The Sun-Times reports that Chicago students who used the school-choice provision of No Child Left Behind to transfer from weak to stronger schools showed gains in reading and math. Further, the transfers didn't harm either the schools they left or the schools they entered, according to a study performed by the Chicago Board of Education at the paper's request.
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Rocky Mountain high-er education
The Colorado legislature has passed, and Governor Bill Owens is expected to sign, a bill creating a voucher program for higher education in that state. The new program will give Colorado students $2,400 to spend on up to 140 credit hours at state colleges and universities. It will also loosen some of the arcane?and ruinous?funding regulations that Colorado colleges labor under.
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Adam Smith Institute
As its name suggests, this is a free-market research institute, based in London, that includes a strong education-policy program and has issued a number of provocative papers and reports by the likes of James Tooley and Chris Woodhead. Though (understandably) UK-oriented, much of what it has to say has broader applicability, so you may want to become acquainted.
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Taking short cuts on teacher quality
After months of increasingly shrill criticisms directed at No Child Left Behind, recent news out of Pennsylvania (see "Secrecy vs. sunshine" below for more) offers a painful but healthy reminder of what motivated anyone to pass such a law in the first place.
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Washington Education Association snubs its own
Last Saturday, the Washington Education Association's (WEA) political action committee voted to withhold support for Terry Bergeson, a former WEA president, now running for a third term as the state's school chief.
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Robin Hood files for bankruptcy
On Tuesday, lawmakers in Texas began a special 30-day session to discuss Republican Governor Rick Perry's sweeping new school finance and property tax cut plan. The proposal would reform the current system, which takes money from "property rich" districts and distributes it to "property poor" districts.
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Secrecy vs. sunshine
Some of us expect the greatest education reform benefit that No Child Left Behind is likely to yield to be the onrushing flood of information about school, district, and state performance.
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D.C.: Back to the drawing board
This week, the District of Columbia City Council rejected Mayor Anthony Williams's proposal to take control of the District's public school system (the wretchedness of which we have spilled much electronic ink documenting; see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=124#1554,
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Fighting violence in schools the PC way
After the massacre at Columbine High School five years ago, lawmakers and school boards across the land scrambled to prevent similar atrocities. In California, that led to Assembly Bill 537, the California Student Safety and Violence Prevention Act of 2000.
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How District Leaders Can Support the New School Strategy
Bryan Hassel, Valaida Fullwood, and Michelle Godard Terrell, Public ImpactJanuary 2004 Facilities Financing: New Models for Districts that are Creating Schools NewBryan Hassel, Katie Walter Esser, Public ImpactFebruary 2004
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Tax credits over vouchers?
Brian Anderson, editor of the estimable quarterly City Journal, argues here that tax credits for private school tuitions have a brighter political future than vouchers. He's also sensitive to new roadblocks placed in the way of vouchers by the Supreme Court's ruling in Locke v.