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).
This fifth edition of the annual National Charter Research Project series wants to know if charter schools will go mainstream.
Since 2005, the Data Quality Campaign has been encouraging states to beef up (or in some cases, create from scratch) their longitudinal data systems to conform with a list of ten “Essential Elements.” These include, for example, a statewide student identifier that tracks kids, a statewide teacher identifier that trac
The title of this paper says it all--when female elementary school teachers are anxious about mathematics, their female students pay the academic price. The study looked at seventeen first- and second-grade female-led classrooms at the beginning and the end of the school year.
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 Timk
Ohio has the sixth-highest charter school enrollment in the nation ???????? about 90,000 children attend a Buckeye State public charter school.????
Late last week, word leaked that the Obama administration has secretly selected the peer reviewers for its $4.35 billion Race to the Top (RTT) fund but has no intention of publicly revealing the identities of these fifty-eight august personages.
There’s been much talk about the Supreme Court’s decision last week in Citizens United v.
Florida has been “reconsidering” its state constitutional class size amendment since…2002, a.k.a. the year it was passed by voters.
From the south side of Chicago to Harvard, Australia, and back, Arne Duncan’s unconventional path to Secretary of Education has the makings of a screenplay. Or at least a New Yorker article.
When it comes to Race to the Top, most states have put on their Sunday best, bought new ties, and submitted their applications. Others refused or showed up in pajamas. Then there are those who didn’t even have the chance to participate.
You often hear it (rhetorically) asked: If teachers’ unions are such a negative force in education, then why don’t the right-to-work states perform better academically? Alabama has the answer: Being right-to-work doesn’t mean that teachers and their unions are politically impotent.
LOL, txting is tot. nbd, so says the prelim fndings of a nu stdy from Coventry University. In fact, students who used the most phonologically-based text abbreviations--such as “nite” instead of night--were the best spellers.
