Durham, North Carolina, allows its public-school students a variety of educational choices: pupils in the district have been free to apply for any open spot at any public school. But now, it seems, that wise policy may be changed.
The childhood obesity epidemic has lately been much in the news.
A post from guest blogger and Fordham Vice President for Ohio Programs & Policy Terry Ryan .
Terry posted earlier today on the pressure mounting on attorney general Marc Dann to quit office in light of recent scandals. He's just resigned.
An essay that every high-school freshman should be required to read but isn't is "Politics and the English Language" by George Orwell.
Here in D.C., the politics of education reform seem tame compared to what our Fordham team in Ohio faces, a point made clear in this Columbus Education Association interview with Governor Ted Strickland.
Gadfly readers will recall last June's much-debated Thomas B. Fordham Institute study, Golden Peaks and Perilous Cliffs: Rethinking Ohio's Teacher Pension System, which called for overhauling the State Teachers Retirement System (see here).
The state's autism voucher program provides up to $20,000 a year for special instruction for an autistic child.
While the Empire State was agog over Spitzergate, New York's union-friendly state assembly quietly passed a bill that will preemptively quash any attempts by school districts to factor student test-scores into tenure considerations.
First Lady Frances Strickland's February 27 interview in The Gadfly sparked this response from Dayton educator Mike McCormick, superintendent of the Richard Allen Schools:
Ohio can boast of praiseworthy gains over the past decade in making school funding more equitable across districts. The next step must be to make funding fairer within districts, according to a new report-Fund the Child: Bringing Equity, Autonomy, and Portability to Ohio School Finance-from the Thomas B.
Charter opponents often claim that charter schools in Ohio are unaccountable. But this claim is wrong and utterly indefensible.
Last month, the Ohio Department of Education (ODE) released the value-added achievement test data for the state's public schools. This data, from the 2006-07 school year, shows student academic growth (in math and reading, grades four through eight) over time.
Ohio's State Teachers Retirement System (STRS) has serious problems that won't go away without fundamental changes to the system.
Advocates for Children and YouthDecember 2007
Center for Collaborative EducationNovember 2007Ohio is a hotbed of high-school reform initiatives, including:the KnowledgeWorks- and Gates-funded Early College High Schools like DECA in Dayton (see here);
As lawmakers in Washington hash out the details of the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), both accountability and standardized testing are facing mounting criticism and skepticism. This backlash is felt in the Buckeye State, where some would like to move our academic accountability system away from the state's current achievement tests.
Anti-charter-school wolves are circling in Ohio, howling about low test scores but ignoring the fact that the same low scores are shared by many district schools (see here).
Today's New York Times published an article headlined "Ohio Goes After Charter Schools That Are Failing," noting that more than half of the state's 328 charter schools received either a D or F on the state's report card issued in August (see here).
Ohioans continue to vote for charter schools with their feet.
LBJ high school in Austin, Texas, is no longer one school. This year, it was separated into two: the Liberal Arts and Science Academy (LASA), a former magnet program that enrolls higher-achieving students, is upstairs, and the traditional LBJ is downstairs.
When it comes to student success, Ohio is kidding itself. Our state's precipitously low academic expectations leave students ill-prepared to compete in the global economy. This is the disturbing conclusion of several major, in-depth assessments of our students' academic performance.
The deadline to submit feedback on Congressmen George Miller's and Buck McKeon's draft NCLB proposal has come and gone. Still, it's never too late to have an impact on the reauthorization debate--if you're Al Shanker, that is.
The political strategy of George Miller and Buck McKeon, respectively the chairman and top Republican on the House Education and Labor Committee, has now come into focus: to get an NCLB reauthorization bill through Congress, appease the suburbs and those who represent them. This approach is smart and savvy and sometimes leads to good policies--but may also leave lots of kids behind.
Backers of a proposed constitutional amendment to mandate increased state public-education funding failed to get the 402,000 signatures needed to get their proposal on the November ballot. Yet, the debate about adequacy in educational funding is sure to go on and the group pushing the effort, Campaign for Ohio's Future, may very well try again in 2008.
Despite a decade of school reform efforts in Ohio, students in the state's largest cities still struggle to meet basic academic standards and are nowhere close to achieving the goals of the federal No Child Left Behind law, according to an analysis of the latest Ohio school report-card data.
As a fairly regular Gadfly reader, I often find myself nodding in agreement at the wisdom and insight that it delivers.
Districts have long resisted plans to pay teachers based on their performance. So it's little surprise that Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer encountered flak when he proposed to pay students based on theirs.
