Education Next articles from January 2009

Education Next archives from January 2009

The home-schooling special: today's choicest choice.(from the editors)
January 1, 2009... For those who think about school choice, vouchers and charter schools are canonical. But going by the numbers, home schooling is the choicest item on the choice menu. A few thousand students use vouchers, and a million or more students attend...

Better pay for new teachers.(correspondence)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2009... Just as we in Denver successfully completed 10 months of tough negotiations with our teachers union, the issue of Education Next with Jacob Vigdor's article ("Scrap the Sacrosanct Salary Schedule," features, Fall 2008) dropped into my mailbox....

California home schooling.(correspondence)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2009... We read with great interest your legal beat article on the California home-schooling case ("Home Schoolers Strike Back," Fall 2008). After the article was published, the California Court of Appeal for the Second Appellate District reversed its...

Student incentives work.(correspondence)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2009... I celebrate Professor Kirabo Jackson's article ("Cash for Test Scores," research, Fall 2008). It corroborates and extends my evaluation of the Advanced Placement Incentive Program carried out for the O'Donnell Foundation, which pioneered the...

The value of discipline.(correspondence)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2009... I commend David Whitman for his article ("An Appeal to Authority," features, Fall 2008) calling attention to an intriguing, comparatively new genre of public schools that are registering impressive academic gains with inner-city, mostly...

Classrooms for the Future.(correspondence)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2009... In painting all initiatives that include mass distribution of computers in schools with the same broad brush stroke, Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn ("How Do We Trans form Our Schools?" features, Summer 2008) risk dismissing the kind of...

Language barriers: Arizonans battle federal court order to spend more.(the legal beat)
January 1, 2009... Once past the long, agonizing upheaval of school desegregation, the states and their education departments by and large have bent to the federal will. But what happens when they don't? What if instead they see a federal judicial order as a...

Home schooling goes mainstream.(feature)(Report)
January 1, 2009... "I never really told anybody about my music at school, only my really close friends," Cheyenne Kimball told People Magazine in 2006. "Then [school officials] actually aired the show around the whole entire school, and that caused a lot of...

The big U-turn.(feature)(educational reform)(Essay)
January 1, 2009... In the 1990s Continental Airlines was struggling, even more than its troubled U.S. airline peers. As the company's then-president Greg Brenneman explained in a 1998 article in the Harvard Business Review (HBR), "Continental ranked tenth out of...

Same old same old: new union leadership does not change a thing.(feature)(Essay)
January 1, 2009... In July, the two major teachers unions entered a rare planetary conjunction, with both the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) choosing new presidents at their national conventions barely a week...

Juggling act: the politics of science in education research.(feature)(Essay)
January 1, 2009... Two education bills from George W. Bush's first term are long overdue for reauthorization. One, of course, is the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), passed in late 2001. The other is the Education Sciences Reform Act (ESRA), which in November...

Virtual schools: will education technology change the nature of learning?(forum)(Discussion)
January 1, 2009... Can new education technologies short-circuit change-resistant politics and remake our schools? Or are well-intended advocates once again overhyping the ability of electrons and processors to solve thorny problems of teaching and learning? In...

Higher private school share boosts test scores.(School choice INTERNATIONAL)(Essay)
January 1, 2009... Proponents of vouchers and other measures that expand access to private schooling often claim that competition from privately operated schools will spur student achievement--and, perhaps, lower costs--in public schools. Critics of such...

who gains, who loses? the fiscal impact of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program.(research)(Report)
January 1, 2009... Do school vouchers save the taxpayer money, or do they add to taxpayer burdens? Which groups of taxpayers are most affected, and do they gain or lose? What is the financial impact on public school districts? Usually, these questions are debated...

What happens when states have genuine alternative certification? we get more minority teachers and test scores rise.(check the facts)(Report)
January 1, 2009... Forty-seven states have adopted a pathway to teaching, alternative to the standard state certification otherwise required. Is this new pathway genuine or merely symbolic? Does it open the classroom door to teachers of minority background? Does...

Purposeful Youth: Is it asking too much?(Book review)
January 1, 2009... The Path to Purpose: Helping Our Children Find Their Calling in Life. By William Damon Free Press, 2008, $25.00; 217 pages. As reviewed by Nathan Glazer William Damon, a distinguished psychologist and the director of the...

Reality Check: Murray's simple truths not so simple.(Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality)(Book review)
January 1, 2009... Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality By Charles Murray Crown Forum, 2008, $24.95; 224 pages. As reviewed by Peter Wehner Charles Murray is one of the most influential public...

So Much Reform, So Little Change: The Persistence of Failure in Urban Schools.(Brief article)(Book review)
January 1, 2009... So Much Reform, So Little Change: The Persistence of Failure in Urban Schools. Charles M. Payne (Harvard Education Press). Payne, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, here sets out to explain "the sociology of failure" of urban...

Raising the Grade: How High School Reform Can Save Our Youth and Our Nation.(Brief article)(Book review)
January 1, 2009... Raising the Grade: How High School Reform Can Save Our Youth and Our Nation. Bob Wise (Jossey-Bass). The price for having former public officials advocating for school reform is that we must every so often be subjected to a book like this...

Managing School Districts for High Performance: Cases in Public Education Leadership.(Brief article)(Book review)
January 1, 2009... Managing School Districts for High Performance: Cases in Public Education Leadership. Stacey Childress, Richard F. Elmore, Allen S. Grossman, and Susan Moore Johnson, eds. (Harvard Education Press). The idea that educators can learn from the...

The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don't Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need--and What We Can Do About It.(Brief article)(Book review)
January 1, 2009... The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don't Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need--and What We Can Do About It. Tony Wagner (Basic Books). The Harvard Ed School's Tony Wagner has written a thoughtful half-right...

School Choice International: Exploring Public-Private Partnerships.(Book review)
January 1, 2009... Rajashri Chakrabarti and Paul E. Peterson, eds. (MIT Press). As the subtitle of this book suggests, the papers in this scholarly volume are less about the act of choosing a school than about the ways the private sector has worked in partner...

Team colors: film explores racial divide in 1930s America.(The Great Debaters )(Movie review)
January 1, 2009... As reviewed by David Steiner The Great Debaters Viewed May 2008 In the 1930s, an all-black debate team from a small East Texas college defeated the all-white debate team of the University of Southern California (USC) in front of at...

Linky love, snark attacks, and fierce debates about teacher quality? A peek inside the education blogosphere.(what next)(Essay)
January 1, 2009... If I mentioned Thomas Friedman and George Will, surely you would know that they are among the nation's most influential newspaper columnists. But what about Markos Moulitsas and Michelle Malkin? If these names don't ring a bell, you haven't...

Intellectual combat: my journey in competitive forensics.(school life)(Essay)
January 1, 2009... In the fall of 1990, I somewhat reluctantly joined my high school debate team. My first debate focused on whether the United States should increase manned space exploration. I was completely lost; it seemed 1 had forgotten how to speak....