Creating Seamless Educational Transitions for Urban African American and Hispanic Students
Richard Noeth and George Wimberly, ACT2002
Richard Noeth and George Wimberly, ACT2002
Amanda Datnow, Lea Hubbard and Hugh Mehan2002
Marie Gryphon and David Salisbury, CATO InstituteJune 10, 2002
Paul A. Herdman, New American SchoolsApril 4, 2002
Paul E. Barton, Educational Testing ServiceMay 2002
Deborah Nelson, Consortium for Policy Research in EducationMay 2002
Teachers nationwide are scrambling to create lesson plans in observance of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, turning for help to new university workshops like "Understanding the World After September 11" and tolerance-heavy lesson plans such as a National Council for the Social Studies lesson about "Osama," a young Iraqi immigrant to the US who is teased at school because of his name.
A remedial reading program with basic phonics instruction and sentences like "Dad had a sad lad," is being taught to 35,000 middle and high school students in the Los Angeles Unified School District this year, much to the embarrassment of students in the program, who landed in these classes due to their low Stanford 9 reading scores.
Is Success for All (SFA) the leading example of evidence-based education in America or is it all smoke and mirrors?
That many of our vast public school systems are all but ungovernable doesn't stop the powers that be from searching far and wide for messiah-like figures to lead them. Philadelphia's latest quest for the perfect executive led the City of Brotherly Love to select Paul Vallas, who rides in from Chicago to see whether he can lead another troubled urban system out of educational perdition.
Writing in the summer 2002 issue of Manhattan Institute's City Journal, California State University classics scholar Victor Davis Hanson examines the decline of civic education in America, tracing much of it to the degradation of history and the triumph of multiculturalism and relativism, and suggests (in fairly general terms) what would be needed to revive it.
In an editorial in last week's Gadfly, Checker Finn blasted the AFT's new report "Do Charter Schools Measure Up?" A point-by-point refutation of the key conclusions of the AFT's study will be posted later today by the National Association of Charter School Authorizers at
Nearly two thirds of blacks would enroll their children in a charter or private school if given the chance, according to a poll by the Black America's Political Action Committee. Conducted during the week before the Zelman decision, the poll also showed that the majority of blacks surveyed gave public schools a "C" grade or lower when asked to evaluate their condition.
With rewards and punishments now tied to test scores, states can't afford to risk complaints about bias in their test questions, so sensitivity guidelines adopted in the 1960s to address the "culturally lopsided" view of America presented in the reading passages of standardized tests have now stretched to cover "almost everyone in almost every situation." Testing companies avoid mentioning anyt
In "A Knowledge Base for the Teaching Profession: What Would It Look Like and How Can We Get One?" James Hiebert, Ronald Gallimore and James Stigler acknowledge that the U.S. teaching profession does not draw heavily upon a shared base of solid "craft knowledge" grounded in the analysis and communication of what effective teachers have learned. "Practitioner knowledge," they call it.
"Making School Reform Work" is the slightly misleading title of an essay by Checker Finn on the subject of educational accountability in the summer 2002 issue of The Public Interest. It distinguishes three distinct forms of accountability and seeks to evaluate them.
Most failing schools desperately need new principals, but talented leaders are in short supply. Maryland superintendent Nancy Grasmick has inaugurated an effort to bring well-regarded principals from suburban districts to lead failing schools in inner city Baltimore.
In "Serving Students With Disabilities in Charter Schools: Legal Obligations and Policy Options," Paul T. O'Neill, Richard J.
If private school vouchers are offered to all parents living in poor districts (as opposed to being offered only to low-income families), this would lessen income segregation across school districts. That's because many families presently stretch their budgets to pay inflated housing prices in good public school districts.
Standard & Poor'sNovember 30, 2001
The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation2002
William J. Fowler Jr., ed., National Center for Education StatisticsJuly 2002
National Center for Education StatisticsJune 21, 2002
Yesterday brought the official release of a much-hyped and professionally leaked "study" of U.S. charter schools by the American Federation of Teachers, timed to coincide with the union's convention in Las Vegas. In a word, it reeks.It reeks of error, distortion and untruth about charter schools, how they're working, what effects they're having, what we know about them.
It is generally agreed that the Supreme Court's decision in the Zelman case issued on June 27 approving the constitutionality of vouchers that would enable parents to receive tax funds to pay tuition to send their children to religious schools as well as to other private and public schools is a landmark change in American constitutional and educational history.
State accountability systems are shining a harsh spotlight on failing schools, and education officials in several states are striving to help those schools turn around.
This fifty-page paper by Cynthia Prince, issues director at the American Association of School Administrators, contends that "offering financial incentives to teachers willing to take on more challenging assignments is essential if we are to staff every school with highly qualified teachers....Changing the way that teachers are paid is critical if we are to attract and hold teachers in the scho
Getting the incentives right in the high-stakes game of college admissions is always a challenge, but two recent changes-one in the SAT's disability policy, the other in the admissions system of the University of California-are raising eyebrows.