It's no surprise that Ohio's economy is in crisis, but you might be amazed at the price tag for some of Gov. Strickland's new education mandates. Terry points out the implications of decreasing class size in grades K-3 alone (to 15:1), which will cost $784 million per year by 2014.
???Teacher effectiveness??? has made its way to the top of the education policy agenda, supplanting the focus on ???highly qualified???
RIP snow days. Viva virtual learning. The mid-Atlantic may have lost electric power, its dignity, and a week of work days when the white fluffy stuff blanketed the region in early February. But it didn’t lose learning time, at least for some students with enterprising teachers. Using internet chats and document uploading websites, teachers across the D.C.
This has been a tough winter for Ohio and its cities, and I don’t mean because of the weather… In last week’s Ohio Education Gadfly, we pointed out another rating system that, although not education-specific, is still somewhat disheartening.
???????The overriding question is how will having a teachers union improve on our ability to educate all of our children and make sure they're ready to graduate from college? We respect that they represent the interests of teachers; we represent the interests of students.???????????
This has been a tough winter for Ohio and its cities, and I don't mean because of the weather. Ever since the December release of math test results from NAEP's Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) ???
Ask Americans if they support “public schools,” and you will get a resounding “yes.” At the heart of our abiding commitment to the idea of public education is Horace Mann’s ideal of the “common school”: a place whose doors are open to everybody, and where all children, regardless of social class, race or eth
Since the troubled birth of charter schools here in 1997, school districts have had a love/hate relationship with them. Some district officials have sought to embrace them as part of their larger reform efforts, while others have done everything in their power to kill them off. A few leaders have actually done both simultaneously.
Can a school district sell a school building and prohibit the buyer from opening a school in that building?
In a recent poll of elementary school principals commissioned by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), a majority of principals reported that recess has a positive impact on student achievement.
???????Value-added??????? measures of academic progress are undeniably important, and we've cheered their addition to school assessment and accountability systems.???? At the school level, knowledge about how much progress a child is making can help teachers and school leaders make smart decisions about instruction.????
Here’s what we know about previous attempts to fix America’s most persistently failing schools. Turnarounds in other fields seldom work. Turnarounds in education have even lower success rates. Despite decades of effort, we still don’t have a reliable playbook for turning a very low-performing school into a good school, much less a great school.
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal wants to cut the red tape keeping local schools and districts from achieving greater student success with his new four-year waiver proposal--but he’s attaching one big string. Under his plan, basically any state law or regulation that does not concern federal requirements, student safety, accountability, or graduation rules is on the table. The twist?
Here’s a piece of unsurprising news: More students are failing Advanced Placement exams. We could have told you this last spring, when we surveyed AP teachers about the push to offer the program’s rigorous content to more students.
When 17-year-old Brandon Frost wore his Indianapolis Colts jersey last Friday to support his hometown football team, his school’s principal was less than receptive. See, Frost had moved three years ago from Indiana to rural Louisiana, where Maurepas High School principal Steve Vampran had relaxed the student dress code for Black-and-Gold Day in honor of the New Orleans Saints.
This third edition of the NCTQ Yearbook takes another well-deserved look at the teaching profession, boasting a revamped set of goals and indicators even more rigorous than last year’s. The headline? States are floundering in all areas.
The pointy-headed analysts over at SRI International, working under the auspices of the Dept of Ed, have released an interesting survey of data systems in twelve nationally-representative school districts.
This pair of policy papers tackles the untouchable: the much despised, but politically sacrosanct, Title I formula.
Be sure to check out the latest edition of the Ohio Education Gadfly for some good snow day reading. With DC experiencing more precipitation than Ohio (a rare event) and the east coast getting hammered- we know some of you out there are buried indoors (and if you venture out, be sure to dress the part).
Yesterday morning I visited McGregor Elementary, a school in Canton, Ohio, serving students in preschool through sixth-grade, and doing it very well. The building sits practically across the street from the sprawling Timken Co. steel plant, nestled in a neighborhood you might describe as working class.
In 2008, the Ohio Department of Education (ODE) released data showing that more than 80 percent of Ohio schools achieved “below expected growth” in fifth-grade reading. A year later, ODE data showed that 98 percent of schools made “above expected growth” in sixth-grade reading. What’s going on here?
Ohio is facing roughly an $8 billion deficit as it heads into a new biennium, so it should come as no surprise that Governor Strickland is lobbying for whatever federal money might be available to help fill the hole.
Ohio State University President Gordon Gee has been in the press lately for his ideas to ???reinvent??? higher education (including changes to the way professors are awarded tenure).
This week saw the release of President Obama’s annual budget request, which outlines a proposal for overhauling the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), a.k.a. No Child Left Behind.
It’s a shame that President Obama’s 2011 budget request is likely to be roundly ignored by Congress, because it’s a pretty decent blueprint for the direction in which the federal government should head on education.
A New York Times bestseller currently declares “free” to be a “radical price,” and incomparably better than “inexpensive.” Perhaps said book was on E.D.
Literacy purists bemoan ‘kids these days’ and their inability to understand and appreciate the beauty and substance of written language. What with instant-messaging and texting, they just don’t want to learn grammar and syntax.
Think your child is going to school too young? Don’t move to Sweden. In Mother Svea, children enter preschool as young as twelve months.
What role should the feds play in school choice? That is the question teased out in this report, one of four from the Brown Center on various aspects of the federal role (the other three are forthcoming).
