The latest in Jay Mathews's Washington Post series on innovative teachers features Rafe Esquith, a middle school teacher in Los Angeles who has created an oasis of excellence inside his educationally arid public school.
The European Union, in what Gadfly can only call a retrograde move, recently awarded a grant to a school in Italy that teaches young Italian women the skills they need to become game show hosts and showgirls.
Myles Mayfield, Allen Schirm, and Ruria Rodriguez-Planas, Mathematica Policy Research August 2003
Paul T. Hill, Center on Reinventing Public Education September 2003
Life is getting harder for charter schools and those seeking to start them. In Massachusetts, word comes this week that new charter applications are down more than 50 percent--just 14, compared to 35 last year.
Daria Hall, Ross Wiener, and Kevin Carey, Education Trust2003
Earlier this year, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced a somewhat unusual addition to its K-12 portfolio: nearly $19 million over five years to expand the "Cristo Rey" schools nationwide.On the surface, this announcement appeared to be no more than a new element in the $450 million Gates Foundation effort to promote
Observing Congressional vote-counting for the beleaguered D.C. voucher bill, one of America's sagest observers of the school choice scene asked the other day if I had noticed that the tireless and costly grass-roots efforts of innumerable pro-choice organizations seem to be having absolutely no effect on the willingness of individual Senators and Representatives to vote for the measure?
We welcome a new player on the education-choice team, the Hispanic Council for Reform and Educational Options, or Hispanic CREO. The group was launched today at the National Press Club, with a follow-up conference in Washington and the release of a new study on Hispanic students and choice, authored by Jay Greene of the Manhattan Institute.
The latest issue of National Review contains a special section on education, featuring Victor Davis Hanson (a contributor to Fordham's recent publication Terrorists, Despots, and Democracy: What Our Children Need to Know) on the Iraq War and college campuses.
YMCA, Dartmouth Medical School and the Institute for American Values2003
Standardized tests may be under attack in America but they turn out to be a godsend for Russian parents. That nation's college entrance exams, relics of the Communist era, are specific to each university and usually involve professors drilling applicants in an oral exam.
In August, the Marysville, Washington school superintendent refused to comply with 30 union demands, including across-the-board raises that would have cost the district $14 million. And so, on September 1st - the first day of school, chosen to cause maximum chaos - Marysville teachers began what is about to become the longest strike in the state's history.
Christopher B. Swanson, Education Policy Center, The Urban InstituteAugust 2003
Christopher Mazzeo, National Governors Association's Center for Best PracticesSeptember 2003.
Julian R. Betts and PPIC's Andrew C. Zau and Lorien A. Rice, Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC)2003
Karl T. Kurtz, Alan Rosenthal, and Cliff Zukin, National Conference of State LegislaturesSeptember 2003
"If men were angels," Madison wrote in Federalist #51, "no government would be necessary."
The debate over the D.C. voucher bill took a nasty turn in recent days, with Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA) accusing the GOP of using the voteless District as a guinea pig.
Colleges and universities pride themselves on being havens of diversity where the best and brightest of every race, creed, and color come together to teach, study, and conduct research. However, as any non-P.C. academic is apt already to have learned in painful ways, this commitment to diversity is generally skin-deep.
Among the many arguments that voucher opponents level against the D.C. voucher program is the supposed drain they would cause in the District's public school budget. This argument is nonsense, especially in D.C., where Congress is ready to sweeten the pot with quite a lot more money for the regular public-school system.
Tom Loveless, Brown Center on Education Policy, Brookings Institution and RAND CorporationOctober 1, 2003
How to describe the bizarre chain of recent events in Michigan? It began when philanthropist Robert Thompson offered to build 15 charter schools in the educational wasteland of Detroit, at a cost of $200 million.
Jennifer King Rice, Economic Policy Institute2003
Joseph Viteritti, Political Science QuarterlySummer 2003
"Facts are stubborn things," John Adams famously wrote, "and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence." Nowhere is that truer than in education, where passions and wishes often take the place of hard information.
