Displaying 16651-16680 of 17817 results
Commentary
4.9.2003

Colorado to enact statewide voucher plan

Kathleen Porter-Magee

Last week, the Colorado Senate narrowly passed a pilot voucher bill that, when signed, will mark the first voucher plan enacted since last year's landmark Zelman decision. The Colorado House, which passed a similar version of the bill on February 19, is reviewing the Senate amendments.

Commentary
4.9.2003

Consolidation is a Bad Idea

John T. Wenders

Arkansas, Arizona, South Dakota, Kansas, Vermont, Iowa and Idaho are presently weighing proposals to reduce the number of school districts within their borders by consolidating some of them into larger units.

Commentary
4.9.2003

Core Knowledge publishes summary of effectiveness evidence

Parents, principals, and policymakers who want to know what research shows about the effectiveness of the Core Knowledge (CK) curriculum will find a useful summary in an article in the Core Knowledge Foundation newsletter. It summarizes three large studies that compare the academic performance of students in CK schools with pupils in control groups.

Commentary
4.9.2003

Kaplan to launch online ed school

Kaplan, Inc. will open a "virtual" school of education in 2004, to be led by former New York City chancellor Harold Levy. The school hopes to attract working adults and midcareer professionals who will take their classes via distance learning and also have clinical experiences in K-12 classrooms.

Commentary
4.9.2003

English-only Pupils Learn More English

Just five years after California voters approved Proposition 227, which replaced bilingual education with English-only programs for most California LEP students, the number of English learners who scored "proficient' on the state's language test has risen significantly.

Commentary
3.26.2003

Teach for America asks districts to pay for teachers

Teach for America (TFA) has begun asking school districts to contribute $1500 for each teacher they hire from the program. The national program--which recruits top college graduates, trains them over the summer to teach in high-need schools, places them in classrooms, and supports them while they teach--spends about $8,000 to develop each TFA corps member.

Commentary
3.26.2003

The Law People Love to Hate--and Pretend to Love

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

Bring back Richard Rothstein! The space his education column formerly occupied in the Wednesday New York Times is often filled nowadays by the grumpy Michael Winerip, who seems bent on proving that everybody in America hates the No Child Left Behind act. His latest contribution was last week's column reporting "pervasive dismay" with NCLB across the land.

Commentary
3.26.2003

Urban Catholic schools innovate to survive

While many inner-city Catholic schools struggle to survive, and more than a few shut down, three innovative models of Catholic middle and high schools are spreading across the country. In Cristo Rey high schools, which now exist in four cities and will soon expand to six more sites, students earn much of their tuition by working in banks, law firms, and other businesses needing clerical help.

Commentary
3.26.2003

Voucher program in Florida has long waiting list

The largest but perhaps least well known of Florida's three voucher programs is providing scholarships to private schools for more than 15,000 children this year and has exhausted the $50 million that policymakers allowed for it.

Commentary
3.26.2003

Performance pay desirable for high-need schools

Performance-based pay should be tried. If one were to offer substantial pay premiums for teachers in poor, low performing schools, market-based pay might be successful. By substantial, I mean at least a 25% increase in pay over the existing salary schedule. For example, my district, LAUSD, starts credentialed teachers at $41,000.

Commentary
3.26.2003

IDEA reauthorization is set in motion

Kathleen Porter-Magee

With the reauthorization process finally creaking into motion for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), lawmakers of both parties--and both houses of Congress--say this is now a top priority for 2003.

Commentary
3.26.2003

Are small schools really better?

In his online Class Struggle column, Jay Mathews praises a new book by Tom Toch called High Schools on a Human Scale: How Small Schools Can Transform American Education. While small schools are in vogue today, boosted in part by many dollars from the Gates Foundation, skeptics wonder whether size alone can determine school effectiveness.

Commentary
3.26.2003

Big city districts gaining on state tests

A new report from the Council of the Great City Schools (CGCS) finds that the nation's largest school districts are making significant gains on state tests, often improving faster than rural and suburban districts. Eighty-seven percent of grades in big-city districts posted gains in math between 1997 and 2002, and 44 percent improved faster than the state average.

Commentary
3.26.2003

Teachers complain that principals won't back them up on discipline

Former teachers often say they left the classroom because of a lack of "administrative support." Often what they mean is that school administrators failed to back them up when they tried to enforce classroom discipline or punish students for cheating or plagiarism. An article in the Baltimore Sun illuminates both sides of this struggle.

Commentary
3.19.2003

The Hijacking of Teacher Reform

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

In a recent Gadfly (http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=13#305), I sketched the main findings of Hoover's Koret Task Force in Our Schools & Our Future: Are We Still at Risk?, a reflection on what's happened to American education in the two decades since A Nation at Risk was issued in

Commentary
3.19.2003

Top provider of tutoring services changing hands

Sylvan Learning Systems, the nation's top K-12 tutoring company, announced last week that it will sell its tutoring centers and focus entirely on higher education (operating colleges overseas and on the internet), an area which the company believes has greater long-term potential for growth.