Earlier this week, the New York Times featured an editorial on gifted education, noting that even our best students were in the middle of the pack in the recent PISA results. (Mike Petrilli pointed this out two weeks earlier.) The Times went on to discuss how our younger students generally fare better on global tests than our older students, indicative of our failure to nurture high flyers as they progress in education, and made four recommendations for improving gifted education: increasing government funding, expanding accelerated learning (including the possibility of online and video learning in rural areas), early college admission, and psychological coaching (citing research that suggests gifted kids should receive mentorship in order to learn how to handle stress, setbacks, and criticism). Stay tuned for additional lessons on how our international peers educate their high-ability youngsters.
Large school districts in California worry that they will lose out on state funding because of a new rule about verifying students’ poverty status. Part of California’s revamped school-funding system significantly weighted by income, this particular rule requires parents to turn in documentation on their own income status that the district then compiles. The problem is, parents seem reluctant to divulge such personal information or are confused about the paperwork.
The Louisiana legislative auditor this week said the state’s voucher program has too few quality controls. Namely, auditor Daryl Purpera said the legislature should ensure that schools are “academically acceptable” before they can even participate in the program (schools presently must administer the state assessment and can face sanctions for academic failure but there’s no pre-screening mechanism on the front end). It seems like this auditor wishes the legislature had given him the power to regulate the program, not the education commissioner, who came to a better, more balanced way to regulate the academic performance of private schools in the public interest.
