schoolinfosystem.org
Jon Hilsenrath & Rafael Gerena-Morales: Climbing out of poverty hasn’t been as easy as getting on the bus. She says her life is now drug-free and more stable, and her children are growing up in a better environment. Yet in many ways, her struggles traveled with her. “You really need to have a focus to […]
Marie Gryphon: Only by empowering parents to choose their children’s schools can Mayor-elect Fenty achieve his goal of a quality education for every child. He should increase public school choices, lift the arbitrary cap on the number of charter schools allowed in DC, and expand the district’s nascent but promising school voucher program. Poor teaching […]
Erin Richards: In a school with more non-Catholics than Catholics, a more universal identifier is average income: More than 80% of the students receive vouchers to attend St. Joan, and almost the same number qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. “Our girls face a huge amount of challenges,” says Teddi Kennedy, the school’s director of […]
The prime motivator for taking MMSD’s high schools from an academically rich curriculum to the one-room schoolhouse model has been to close the minority achievement gap. Thus, I read with interest the following NYTimes letters: A Racial Gap, or an Income Gap? (7 Letters) Published: November 24, 2006 To the Editor: In emphasizing race-based achievement […]
Stacey Childress, Richard Elmore and Allen Grossman writing in the Harvard Business Review: One of the biggest management challenges anywhere is how to improve student performance in America’s urban public schools. There has been no shortage of proposed solutions: Find great principals and give them power; create competitive markets with charters, vouchers, and choice; establish […]
Alan Borsuk: State schools Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster proposed Thursday that Wisconsin provide $5,000 annual bonuses to highly qualified teachers to teach in high-needs schools such as most of those in the Milwaukee Public Schools. Burmaster also said the next state budget should include $1.6 million for pilot projects in Milwaukee schools that want to extend […]
Samuel Freedman: WHEN Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel I. Klein gained unprecedented power over the vast archipelago of public education in New York more than four years ago, they were the beneficiaries of three beliefs widely held in the city. The first was that the system of decentralized control, ended after 35 years […]
Many of you probably read John Stossel’s polemic in the Sunday Wisconsin State Journal (9/3/06). I’d reprint here, but I don’t want to give it a wider readership than it already has. Instead I want to say few words about a central fallacy in the thinking of Stossel (and many others who wish to destroy […]
Alan Borsuk: The new episode, starring William Andrekopoulos and debuting in many schools near you on Sept. 5, will feature: Increased pressure on teachers, students and schools, as well as on the mission leader, to get better results from kids. More competition from schools outside MPS, including voucher and charter schools. Smaller staffs in many […]
Diana Jean Schemo: WHEN the federal Education Department recently reported that children in private schools generally did no better than comparable students at public schools on national tests of math and reading, the findings were embraced by teachers’ unions and liberals, and dismissed by supporters of school voucher programs. But for many educators and policy […]
Jim Wooten: School reform matters especially in Atlanta. The city may or may not be in the midst of a return-to-the-city movement. Certainly, condos and apartments are going up everywhere. But until the problem of a laggardly school system is cured, people with children won’t return, unless they have alternatives. Atlanta’s revival will be limited […]
NY Times Editorial: The national education reform effort has long suffered from magical thinking about what it takes to improve children’s chances of learning. Instead of homing in on teacher training and high standards, things that distinguish effective schools from poor ones, many reformers have embraced the view that the public schools are irreparably broken […]
Frederick Hess & Andrew Rotherham: Perhaps the most encouraging trend in public education today is the growing willingness of educators and policymakers to embrace choices and customization, while turning away from the notion of one-size-fits-all corporatism that dominated 20th century school reform. In education, though, no good deed long goes unpunished. In a barely coherent […]
Thomas C. Reeves [PDF]: In Wisconsin, as elsewhere, teachers and administrators are eager to avoid being branded deficient and suffer potential financial losses. Department of Public Instruction officials in Wisconsin reported recently that the cost of tests taken in late 2005 included a $10 million contract with CTB/McGraw Hill, a well-known testing company that designed […]
Clint Bolick: Yet Arizona is not an aberration. Already in 2006, a new Iowa corporate scholarship tax credit bill was signed into law by Gov. Tom Vilsack; and in Wisconsin, Gov. Jim Doyle signed a bill increasing the Milwaukee voucher program by 50%. Gov. Ed Rendell may expand Pennsylvania’s corporate scholarship tax credit program, as […]
Alex Johnson: President Bush’s No Child Left Behind initiative put almost every imaginable part of the U.S. education system under a microscope, establishing national standards for teacher training, student testing and basic funding. But glaring in its omission from the program is any significant examination of that most basic of classroom tools, the textbook. As […]
A longtime reader emailed David Brooks most recent column: Around 1970, Walter Mischel launched a classic experiment. He left a succession of 4-year-olds in a room with a bell and a marshmallow. If they rang the bell, he would come back and they could eat the marshmallow. If, however, they didn’t ring the bell and […]
Nefertiti Denise Jones: My 5-year-old daughter, Elizabeth Virginia, now attends a private school that teaches foreign language and arts and offers after-school music and dance classes. But tuition is forcing me to look at Atlanta Public Schools next year for kindergarten. When I first started researching where to send Elizabeth next year, I was looking […]
Matthew Ladner: Oprah Winfrey recently used two days of her program to highlight the crisis in American public schools, focusing attention on our appalling dropout problem. The visuals were quite stunning. In one segment, a group of inner-city Chicago students traded places with a group of suburban students to compare facilities and curriculums. In another, […]
Amy Hetzner: If his school couldn’t exceed the SAGE ratios, Burdick K-8 School Principal Robert Schleck said his school probably would have dumped the program. “There’s different models that are being used throughout the city,” he said, noting that in some SAGE classrooms, groups of students are pulled into the hallway or other locations during […]
OnPoint: Parents in Milwaukee want school vouchers and the governor’s signing up. Hear about one city’s big experiment with vouchers.
Amy Hetzner: As state politicians and interest groups argue over whether to lift the enrollment cap in Milwaukee’s voucher school program, the cap in another school choice initiative is quietly slated to expire. Under state law, the 2006-’07 school year will be the first time in Wisconsin’s open enrollment public school choice program in which […]
Shay Riley: I am a staunch advocate for school vouchers, and a recent controversy help reaffirm my support. Residents of Ladera Heights – an affluent, mostly black community in Los Angeles metro – have organized for a territory transfer proposal to leave Inglewood’s school district of not-as-affluent blacks and Hispanics and join Culver City’s mostly white, middle-class […]
Reason Magazine: Fifty years after Milton Friedman first proposed the idea of education vouchers, school choice proposals come in all shapes and sizes. We asked a dozen experts what reforms they think are most necessary and promising to improve American education. We also asked them to identify the biggest obstacles to positive change. Here are […]
Jon E. Hilsenrath: The unusual spat has put a prominent economist in the awkward position of having to defend one of her most influential studies. Along the way, it has spotlighted the challenges economists face as they study possible solutions to one of the nation’s most pressing problems: the poor performance of some public schools. […]
Maya Portulaca Cole posted the following thoughts on the listserve of MAFAAC: Reading through a recent article about the Portland, OR school system from In These Times, titled, “All for One, None for All: Schoolchoice policies sacrifice universal education in favor of personal freedom,” I’m reminded of our own city and worry for its future. […]
Young, Gifted and Black, by Perry, Steele and Hilliard is a little gem of a book. (Hereafter, YGB). The subtitle is “Promoting High Achievement Among African-American Students”. Though specifically addressing African-American kids, the descriptions and proscriptions proposed can be applied to all – important, given the continual poor showing of U.S. students generally on international […]
Daniel de Vise: Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele released his blueprint for education reform yesterday, a series of 30 recommendations that call for schools to be graded and teachers to be paid for performance. Members of the 30-person Governor’s Commission on Quality Education in Maryland recommended efforts to promote charter schools but rejected school […]
More than half of eighth-graders fail to achieve expected levels of proficiency in reading, math and science on national tests.
The Economist: So the challenge is different. But the solution once again is to be found in the education system—particularly America’s rotten public schools. Republicans are, generally speaking, reluctant to spend more money—partly because they represent people in richer school districts and partly because so much cash has already been wasted (America spends much more […]
This information was given to Madison school board members via Joe Quick, Legislative Liaison. Editorial on closing schools
Sam Dillon: In Seattle, at a recent debate on charter schools at the University of Washington, sparring was intense. “How long do I have to allow my kids to go to the public schools?” asked Henterson S. Carlisle, a teacher whose two children attend his school in the Seattle public system. “At what point can […]
The Economist, in a pre-election series, takes a look at our education system: Some schools are thriving; others have been left behind AMERICA’S system of education ranges from the superb to the awful. Its universities, especially at the graduate level, are the best in the world, gaining some 60% of all Nobel prizes awarded since […]
Harvard’s Lant Pritchett writes in a new paper for the Copenhagen Consensus Project: There are many ways to press forward this kind of systemic reform, Mr Pritchett argues. Vouchers and a �market� for education might work well in some circumstances, but other approaches could achieve good results too in some cases: school autonomy (as granted […]