As readers may recall, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation keeps one eye focused on education reform issues at the national level and the other trained on K-12 education developments in Dayton, Ohio, where the Foundation had its origins and is engaged in a number of projects.Dayton is more interesting than you might think for education reformers.
The new federal education law, the No Child Left Behind Act, demands in many places that programs funded by federal dollars be supported by "scientifically based research," but among practitioners, and even some researchers, there is great uncertainty about what this means. To clarify what scientifically based research is and to explain why it is so crucial, the U.S.
While opponents of standardized testing continue to attract attention in the media, a national survey released by Public Agenda this week found that support for turning back the clock on the standards movement is virtually nonexistent among parents (2 percent), teachers (1 percent), employers (2 percent), and college professors (1 percent), with very large majorities among each group also viewi
Jerry Ellig and Kenneth Kelly, Texas Review of Law & PoliticsSpring 2002
The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is less than two months old but it's already yowling and a lot of people are nervous about it, not unlike new parents unsure how best to soothe a crying infant.This is an enormous piece of legislation that possibly nobody has read from cover to cover.
Heated arguments about the most effective form of reading instruction continue to polarize the teaching community, but yet another review of the research has found beyond dispute that "teaching that makes the rules of phonics clear will ultimately be more successful than teaching that does not." So conclude five professors of psychology, linguistics and pediatrics in a cover story in this month
Paul Shaker and Elizabeth HeilmanPolicy Perspectives, American Association of Colleges for Teacher EducationJanuary 2002
Final Report, David Myers, Paul Peterson, et al.Mathematica Policy Research and the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance February 2002
Jerry P. Gollub, et al.National Academy of Science, Committee on Programs for Advanced Study of Mathematics and Science in American High SchoolsFebruary 2002
Kalman Hettleman.The Abell Foundation February 2002
President Bush's commission on special education, charged with recommending areas of reform to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), held hearings in Houston this week. Some expected the hearings to be attended only by representatives of special education advocacy groups opposed to any changes in IDEA, which is soon up for reauthorization.
Two years ago, the Cincinnati Public Schools launched a teacher evaluation system in which teachers were measured against 17 standards, with the results to be linked to compensation and career advancement for individual teachers. Last week, the district announced that teachers who rated the highest under the evaluation system also produced the greatest gains in student achievement.
If you spent last week on another planet and missed the press coverage of oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court on the Cleveland voucher program, you can catch up with the help of The Economist ("School Vouchers: A Supreme Opportunity," February 23, 2002.)
Just because the D.C. public schools are failing to provide special education services for many children doesn't mean the school district isn't spending pots of money on special ed. A pair of articles in this week's Washington Post shed unhappy light on where some of that money is going.
The big problem with the usual approaches to improving schools is that we fiddle with all kinds of things except the one thing that really matters, which is instructional practice, according to Harvard's Dick Elmore. Putting pressure on schools to improve won't work unless teachers know what to do at the level of practice, and Elmore says they don't.
Michael Cohen, Jobs for the Future and The Aspen InstituteDecember 2001
The National Commission on Service-LearningJanuary 2002
For years, the advocates of standards-based reform have held up Advanced Placement tests and the International Baccalaureate as models: a clearly defined syllabus; a teacher who is prepared to teach that syllabus; a course based on the syllabus; an end-of-course examination.
If you feel amused or provoked by anything you read in the Education Gadfly, write us at bulletin@edexcellence.net. From time to time we will publish correspondence that we think might interest other readers.
General Accounting OfficeFebruary 1, 2002
The California State Board of Education has proposed new regulations that would undo the reform of bilingual education enacted by the state in 1998 after voters passed Proposition 227. That ballot measure limited native language instruction in public schools to a single year, unless parents requested a waiver.
The White House budget released last week contained good news for school choice supporters. It includes a tax credit that would pay up to $2,500 a year in private school tuition for parents of children whose public schools are failing.
The Oakland Military Institute, the charter school opened by Mayor Jerry Brown last August, is having a tough first year. The seventh-grade curriculum chosen by the school has turned out to be too difficult for the students; nearly one-third of them scored D averages and wound up on academic probation.
In a recent editorial in the Gadfly, I criticized New York Times reporter Diana Jean Schemo for her hostile coverage of reading instruction. In two articles, she managed to convey her misunderstanding of the phonics/whole language issue and to cite researchers with an axe to grind against any kind of phonetic instruction.
