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.
Last week, Fordham and the FDR Group, a respected national survey research organization, released "Ohioans' Views on Education 2007"--a revealing look into the attitudes of Buckeye residents on a host of pressing education issues at the state and federal level.
Elizabeth Logan is 41 years old, makes $69,000 annually, and has been teaching elementary school for 20 of those years. But none of those facts was enough to stop her from (allegedly) stealing a third-grader's winter coat and attempting to sell it on eBay.
Ohio’s children need more high quality educational options. We at Building Excellent Schools (BES) want the opportunity to work in Ohio, training leaders to found strong charter schools. This would seem a match made in heaven, right?
Ask folks interested in the business of education to name the top reform efforts across the country, and it’s a sure bet Teach For America (TFA) will rank among them.
The advent of spring means a lot of things, not least of which is the release of Sports Illustrated's eagerly awaited and top-selling yearly swimsuit issue.
Charter schools are no longer in their infancy. They're gangly, pimply, headstrong, unpredictable teen-agers. It's been 15 years since the first school in Minnesota opened its doors. Back then, say veterans of the early charter wars, the struggle was simply to keep the spark glowing, to make sure that lawmakers gave charters a chance to open and prove their worth.
On February 13, 2007, Achieve, Inc., presented to the Ohio State Board of Education a study of education policy, entitled Creating a World-Class Education System in Ohio.
When it comes to preparing Ohioans for the demands of the modern workplace, “Good enough is no longer good enough,” write the co-chairs of the Science and Math Education Policy Advisory Council (SAMEPAC). Especially when those demands arise in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) disciplines.
Perhaps it makes perfect sense that Batman would turn up in a place called Cave Creek. Still, three schools in this Phoenix suburb were placed on lockdown for 45 minutes last week after a Desert Arroyo Middle School student reported seeing Batman (or a person mimicking the Caped Crusader) run across campus, hop a fence, and vanish into the desert.
An authority on Vietnamese education I don't pretend to be, but a recent trip yielded a couple of surprises.
Ohio’s college pipeline has sprung a leak--and both high schools and colleges are struggling to make good on the promise to educate (and graduate) their students.
School reforms come and go. But educational determinism, it appears, goes on forever. By which I mean the view that schools are essentially powerless to accomplish much by way of learning gains, no matter what is done to or about them.
Detroit Public Schools has lost more than 50,000 students over the past eight years, almost a third of its population, to charter schools, private schools, and the suburbs. Still, it has closed only 35 of 267 schools, about 7 percent. With education funding in Michigan tied to attendance, something had to give.
Interest in classical humanism, the "traditional" liberal arts, has fallen sharply in recent decades, and nowhere more so than in American K-12 education.
Edited by Robin J. Lake and Paul T. HillCenter on Reinventing Public Education's National Charter Research ProjectDecember 2006
Educational philanthropists spend about $300 million each year on education initiatives--yet too little of this investment is aimed at reshaping education policy. The Ohio Grantmakers Forum (OGF), at least, is trying to change that with Education for Ohio's Future.
The cheers (and some jeers) have faded and the votes from November's elections have finally been tallied (in most places). Yet still uncertain are what the election results mean for Ohio's education program. While Gadfly makes no claims of prescience, several results may bear a weighty impact on education in the Buckeye State.
