Education Next articles from December 22 2001

Education Next archives from December 22 2001

The new education market: examining the early responses of public schools to competition. (From the Editors).(Brief Article)
December 22, 2001... After the September 11 terrorist attacks, President A Bush asked Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge to devote his energy to finding ways to strengthen the country's domestic security. Before the tragedy, Ridge had worked equally hard at...

Correspondence.
December 22, 2001... Hurrah for Houston Congratulations to Education Next for its trio of articles on the positive reforms in the Houston Independent School District, carried out in large part by Secretary of Education Rod Paige while he was the district's...

When schools compete: does school choice push public schools to improve? (Forum).(Brief Article)
December 22, 2001... For competition to fulfill its promise as a reform strategy, traditional public schools must feel challenged. The officials who run the schools and the teachers who helm the classrooms must feel as if their jobs and perquisites are in jeopardy...

The work ahead: creating a truly competitive market in education will require nothing less than a complete overhaul of the rules and culture of public schooling. (Forum).
December 22, 2001... What if Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Computer, and Michael Armstrong, CEO of AT&T, operated in a market where revenues depended hardly at all on attracting or losing customers? What if competition exerted minimal pressure and if market threats...

A work in progress: Michigan's potent combination of interdistrict choice and charter schooling is forcing traditional public schools to take notice. Whether they respond is often a different story. (Forum).
December 22, 2001... Between the traffic reports and familiar pop songs, drive-time radio in Lansing, Michigan's capital city, has a new feature: slickly produced advertisements for the East Lansing Public Schools. With the number of children living in East Lansing...

Finishing touches: More than a quarter of all public schools in Arizona are now charter schools. Some districts have lost more than 20 percent of their students to charters. Guess who's concerned? (Forum).
December 22, 2001... If school vouchers bettered the educational opportunities only of children who use the vouchers to attend private schools or schools in another district, many reformers would be left holding cups half empty. For the animating theory of school...

Round and round they go: take my urban school district, please. (Forum).(Brief Article)
December 22, 2001... IN THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY, PROGRESSIVE REFORMERS LOOKING TO PROTECT URBAN school districts from the politics of city hail built sturdy firewalls between mayors and school boards. As the nation's cities and their schools entered a period of...

Old wine, new bottles. (Forum).
December 22, 2001... In Baltimore, the mayor's lack of success at school reform led to a state takeover of the city's schools, In Washington, D.C., mayoral control has begun to stabilize the system. So what does this tell us about the ability of city hall to run a...

Can't let go: just a few years back, school-based management was the rage in Cleveland. Except that the central office wasn't all that interested in relinquishing control. (Forum).
December 22, 2001... IN THE MID-1990s CLEVELAND'S PUBLIC SCHOOLS teetered on the edge of collapse. Nearly $100 million dollars were questionably accounted for, and the district was on the verge of bankruptcy. The board of education was tangled in petty patronage,...

Her worship: cities look for a savior to transform their school systems, but lasting reform takes a sustained, community-wide effort. (Forum).
December 22, 2001... PERHAPS NO EVENT REPRESENTED THE TREND IN URBAN SCHOOL politics better than Harold Levy's becoming chancellor of the nation's largest school district, New York City, in May 2000. The previous chancellor, Rudy Crew, a veteran educator with...

School home. (Feature).
December 22, 2001... Fearing conformity, violence, secularism, or simply bad teaching, more and more parents are taking their children's education into their own hands. And more and more of their children are entering the nation's finest institutions of higher...

A steeper, better road to graduation. (Feature).
December 22, 2001... Students learn more and their high-school diplomas become more valuable when they must pass a curriculum-based exit exam like France's Baccalaureate in order to graduate. So why isn't the United States following Europe's and East Asia's lead?...

Fixing federal research: education demands a first-rate R&D shop. The Department of Education isn't it-yet. (Feature).(research and development)
December 22, 2001... Federal funding and direction routinely lead to research and development breakthroughs in science, medicine, and defense, among other fields. Witness the recent debate over federal funding of stem-cell research, during which supporters of...

Rising tide: critics of school choice have grossly underestimated the public school system's ability to respond to competition. (Research).
December 22, 2001... THE MOST SCATHING CRITIQUE OF VOUCHER programs and charter schools is that they may bleed traditional public schools of their best students and most active parents, leaving the children who are left behind even worse off. Moreover, as the...

The looming shadow: Can the threat of vouchers persuade a public school to turn itself around? (Research).
December 22, 2001... The case of Florida suggests yes THE FLORIDA A-PLUS PROGRAM IS A SCHOOL ACCOUNT-ability system with teeth. Each public school is assigned a grade based on the performance of its students on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT)...

Choice words: religious schools, parental choices. (Book Review).(The Ambiguous Embrace: Government and Faith-Based Schools and Social Agencies, Schools, Vouchers, and the American Public, and Choosing Schools: Consumer Choice and the Quality of American Schools)
December 22, 2001... The Ambiguous Embrace: Government and Faith-Based Schools and Social Agencies by Charles L. Glenn Princeton University Press, 2000, $37.50; 304 pages. Schools, Vouchers, and the American Public by Terry M. Moe Brookings...

Putting parents first: A cause worth fighting for. (Education Matters to Me).(Brief Article)
December 22, 2001... Growing up in a middle-class family in Erie, Pennsylvania, my brother, sister, and I didn't have much in the way of luxuries. But we never lacked for love and support. Our parents did everything they could to make sure we would have more...