Education Next articles from January 2006

Education Next archives from January 2006

High-school headache: an institution that works neither for the "talented tenth" nor those at greatest risk.(Editorial)
January 1, 2006... The American high school no longer works, Bill Gates tells us, not for the best or the brightest, nor for those at risk of falling off the education ladder. Gates is right. Take the latest results from the National Assessment of...

No lawsuit left behind: Chief Justice Roberts, the schoolmaster?
January 1, 2006... From the perspective of newspaper headlines, judicial activity on the education front was uncharacteristically unspectacular last year. Unlike blockbuster cases in the recent past, ranging from publicly funded vouchers (Zelman v....

Checking NYC's facts.(correspondence)
January 1, 2006... We take the essence of Eric Hanushek's article ("Pseudo Science and a Sound Basic Education," check the facts, Fall 2005) to be that existing means for appraising "adequate" school financing levels are, at best, inexact, and when in the hands...

North Carolina charters.(correspondence)
January 1, 2006... Renowned pollster George Gallup once referred to data gathering this way: "Not everything that can be counted counts; and not everything that counts can be counted." This comment is apropos to any discussion of charter school research,...

Bloomberg's revolution.(correspondence)
January 1, 2006... Sol Stern's "An Education Revolution That Never Was" (forum, Fall 2005) is neither forthright about education in New York City nor informed about education generally, as his use of sources and data makes evident. He quotes a teacher...

Private schools for the poor.(correspondence)
January 1, 2006... James Tooley ("Underground Education," features, Fall 2005) reports widespread existence of private schools in five poor countries--India, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and (to a lesser extent) China--and addresses two common "myths" about such...

The American high school: can it be saved?(forum)
January 1, 2006... The American high school, once an austere brick building serving a few hundred children, mostly white boys, who studied reading, writing, and arithmetic, has grown into a sprawling mall complex for thousands of boys and girls, of various ethnic...

Surviving a midlife crisis: advanced placement turns fifty.(feature)
January 1, 2006... In 1956, 1,220 college-bound juniors and seniors in 104 American high schools took the first Advanced Placement (AP) exams conducted by the Educational Testing Service for the College Board. Only 11 subject areas were offered at the time:...

The Adolescent Society: James Coleman's still-prescient insights.(feature)
January 1, 2006... The high-school problem is nothing new. In one of his early writings, excerpted in the following pages, James S. Coleman, the brilliant sociologist who later wrote the famous report on the equality of opportunity for education (the "Coleman...

A foundation goes to school: Bill and Melinda Gates shift from computers in libraries to reform in high schools.(feature)
January 1, 2006... The biggest philanthropy in the world sits in an unmarked building next to an industrial dry dock. It does little to attract attention, but everyone knows it's there. And even though its official address is a post office box, everyone involved...

"Acting white": the social price paid by the best and brightest minority students.(research)(Cover Story)
January 1, 2006... "Go into any inner-city neighborhood, and folks will tell you that government alone can't teach kids to learn. They know that parents have to parent, that children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television...

World wide wonder? Measuring the (non-)impact of Internet subsidies to public schools.(research)
January 1, 2006... Like the television revolution, which brought electronic boxes into schools in the 1960s and was supposed to turn classroom teaching on its head, computers were rolled into schools in the 1990s and connected to the worldwide web with the...

Friendly competition: does the presence of charters spur public schools to improve?(research)
January 1, 2006... Most research on charter schools, and the most intense public debate over their desirability, has focused on the impact of these new schools on the students who attend them. But charter proponents also hope that the threat of students' leaving...

If the World Is Flat: why does American education go in circles?(Book Review)
January 1, 2006... The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. By Thomas L. Friedman. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005, $27,50; 488 pages. Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat could have been the most influential prod to education...

Sex, drugs--and more sex and drugs: the new Adolescent Society.(Book Review)
January 1, 2006... I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe. Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2004, $28.95; 688 pages. Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld. Random House, 2005, $21.95; 406 pages. Many years ago, it was generally acknowledged that sociology had...

Color me purple: but don't mention race!(Book Review)
January 1, 2006... Colormute: Race Talk Dilemmas in an American School By Mica Pollock. Princeton University Press, 2004, $39.95; 268 pages. Mica Pollock taught in a California high school for a year in the mid-1990s, then spent another two years in...

Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?(Brief Article)(Book Review)
January 1, 2006... Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind? Michael Eric Dyson. (Basic Books). As part of a diatribe against a beloved, thoughtful television personality, the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at the...

Crash Course: Imagining a Better Future for Public Education.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
January 1, 2006... Crash Course: Imagining a Better Future for Public Education. Christopher Whittle. (Riverhead Books). [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Chris Whittle launched Edison Schools in 1991, having already prospered with "Channel One," which introduced a...

Learning on the Job: When Business Takes on Public Schools.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
January 1, 2006... Learning on the Job: When Business Takes on Public Schools. Steven F. Wilson. (Harvard University Press). In this lucid and engaging analysis of six for-profit education-management organizations, including industry heavyweight Edison and...

Choice and Competition in American Schools.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
January 1, 2006... Choice and Competition in American Schools. Edited by Paul E. Peterson. (Rowman and Littlefield). [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] To celebrate Education Next's fifth anniversary, the editors have gathered 23 of the journal's greatest hits and...

Supertest: How the International Baccalaureate Can Strengthen Our Schools.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
January 1, 2006... Supertest: How the International Baccalaureate Can Strengthen Our Schools. Jay Mathews and Ian Hill. (Open Court). The author tells twinned stories, that of the birth and growth of the International Baccalaureate (IB) program around the...

With the Best of Intentions: How Philanthropy Is Reshaping K-12 Education.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
January 1, 2006... With the Best of Intentions: How Philanthropy Is Reshaping K-12 Education. Edited by Frederick M. Hess. (Harvard Education Press). This volume of insightful papers, first presented at an American Enterprise Institute conference last April,...

Foundations matter: a Detroit boy works to fix the public schools.(school life)
January 1, 2006... I grew up in Detroit, lived in an apartment with my immigrant parents, and walked to Thirkell Elementary, six blocks away. It was a time, the 1940s, when our industrial midwestern city was known as the nation's "Arsenal of Democracy" and had a...