Education Next articles from June 2008

Education Next archives from June 2008

Race to the top: business model a guide to replicating quality schools.(from the editors)
June 22, 2008... With 57 schools serving more than 14,000 students and plans to open dozens more, KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) is the darling of the school reform world. Ten years ago, KIPP was a pair of high-performing schools in poor neighborhoods in...

Mayor Bloomberg's report card.(correspondence)
June 22, 2008... In their efforts to do what is best for children in the New York City Public Schools, Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein ("New York City's Education Battles," features, Spring 2008) have been willing to take on powerful entrenched interests....

Education and Economic Growth.(correspondence)(Brief article)
June 22, 2008... Promoting quality education for economic growth has become a priority in more nations than ever before. The belief in the power of education is strong in policy circles. But the question remains, does education contribute to economic growth,...

The Vallas Effect.(correspondence)(Paul Vallas)(Brief article)
June 22, 2008... I salute Dale Mezzacappa for her astute portrait of the frenetic Paul Vallas ("The Vallas Effect," features, Spring 2008). In Philadelphia, Vallas had some key successes improving learning. He standardized the curriculum, helping the large...

The third way.(correspondence)
June 22, 2008... Andy Smarick ("Wave of the Future," features, Winter 2008) divides charter proponents into those who see charter schools as a separate education system and those who see chartering as a tool to improve districts. At NewSchools Venture Fund, we...

Design challenge.(correspondence)
June 22, 2008... Newstead, Saxton, and Colby ("Going for the Gold," features, Spring 2008) hold that turning a new design for schooling or learning into reality requires resource allocations, as well as systems and processes that support the design's intent;...

Revisiting Utah.(correspondence)
June 22, 2008... Parents for Choice in Education (PCE) has worked for the past seven years to refine and tailor a school choice program that would serve Utah's families and address the concerns of Utah political leaders ("Voting Down Vouchers," features, Spring...

Court Jousters: plaintiffs exploit weaknesses in NCLB.(the legal beat)(No Child Left Behind Act of 2001)
June 22, 2008... Though an extremely controversial law, much contested in legislative, administrative, and even electoral venues for the past several years, No Child Left Behind (NLCB) has not generated a large volume of litigation. Given the well-known...

How do we transform our schools? use technologies that compete against nothing.(feature)
June 22, 2008... Teachers, administrators, researchers, reformers, government leaders, parents, and others have long extolled the benefits that computer-based learning could have in schools: Educational video games, often referred to as "edutainment" or...

No country for strong men: California unions tame the terminator.(feature)
June 22, 2008... When in 2006 California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger asked a panel of education experts to recommend an overhaul of the state's troubled public schools, observers hoped the celebrity chief executive was about to bring his unique brand of...

Brand-Name Charters: the franchise model applied to schools.(feature)
June 22, 2008... If you had been a 10-year-old on the streets of San Lorenzo, California, in the summer of 2003, you would have had a hard time avoiding Jason Singer and Cathy Cowan. Singer, now 37, had enlisted Cowan, a teacher, to help him recruit 5th-grade...

Is the price right: probing Americans' knowledge of school spending.(feature)
June 22, 2008... In the contentious world of education politics, the need to spend more on public schools stands out as a rare point of agreement. Our recent national survey of American adults ("What Americans Think about Their Schools," features, Fall 2007)...

Accountability Left Behind: U.S. Court of Appeals sides with NEA, would free districts from NCLB requirements.(feature)(National Education Association, No Child Left Behind Act of 2001)
June 22, 2008... In January, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit reversed the dismissal of an "unfunded-mandates" challenge to the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) brought by the National Education Association (NEA), several of its...

The Reading First controversy: promises and perils of federal leadership.(feature)
June 22, 2008... "Reading First is the most effective federal program in history." So reads the opening line of a report that Alabama superintendent of education Joseph Morton sent to his congressional delegation last June, in which he recounts how the...

New York City Charter Schools: how well are they teaching their students?(research)
June 22, 2008... The 60 charter schools operating in New York City have provided a unique opportunity for the New York City Charter Schools Evaluation Project, of which we are a part, to con-duct a randomized field trial of the impact of charter schools on...

Scaling Up In Chile: networks of schools facilitate higher student in achievement.(research)(Report)
June 22, 2008... On international tests, Chilean students in 2006 outperformed those of all other Latin American countries in reading and were second only to Uruguay in math (see Figure 1). But although Chile's educational performance appears to outstrip that...

Few states set world-class-standards: in fact, most render the notion of proficiency meaningless.(check the facts)
June 22, 2008... As the debate over the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) makes its murky way through the political swamp, one thing has become crystal clear: Though NCLB requires that virtually all children become proficient by the year 2014,...

Peerless, Indeed: Educator's diagnosis on the mark, 65 years later.(Peerless Educator: The Life and Work of Isaac Leon Kandel)(Book review)
June 22, 2008... Isaac Kandel was an eminent professor of education at Teachers College, Columbia University, during its heyday in the 1920s and 1930s. In the 1940s, when an American commission, made up mainly of university presidents, was asked to reconstitute...

Preschool Politics: States' efforts to reach the very young.
June 22, 2008... The Sandbox Investment: The Preschool Movement and Kids-First Politics. By David L. Kirp Harvard University Press, $26.95; 333 pages. A holiday-themed campaign ad for Hillary Clinton showed the candidate affixing to boxes wrapped...

Lessons Learned: What International Assessments Tell Us about Math Achievement.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 22, 2008... Tom Loveless, editor (Brookings Institution Press). While math scores are bandied about in the modern era, how much do we really know about what they mean or what they can teach about practice and policy? In this dense but thought-provoking...

Generation Digital: Politics, Commerce, and Childhood in the Age of the Internet.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 22, 2008... Kathryn C. Montgomery (MIT Press). Montgomery, a professor of communications at American University and founder of the Center for Media Education, examines how the new media landscape is changing the nature of childhood. Ranging from issues...

Toward Excellence with Equity: An Emerging Vision for Closing the Achievement Gap.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 22, 2008... Ronald F. Ferguson (Harvard Education Press). Kennedy School economist Ron Ferguson has assembled here eight of his better papers, written over the past dozen years, that deal with the achievement gap and how to tackle it; he has updated...

Turning Around Failing Schools: Leadership Lessons from the Organizational Sciences.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 22, 2008... Joseph F.Murphy and Coby V.Meyers (Corwin Press). The best thing about this book is its title; unfortunately, its pages fail to fulfill the promise of its cover. Rather than offering actionable insights for education leaders drawn from the...

Not as Good as You Think: Why the Middle Class Needs School Choice.(Brief article)(Book review)
June 22, 2008... Lance T. Izumi, Vicki E. Murray, and Rachel S. Chaney (Pacific Research Institute). This California-centric volume contends that many middle-class families live under the illusion that their kids' schools are swell and that it's only poor...

REPN TRI to the FULLEST!!!: teens write creatively in cyberspace but not in the classroom.(cultured)
June 22, 2008... American teens are locked in a strange communications loop. For them, language comes in two flavors. Here's one: "whats new? glad I put u on my top and im not on urs. its cool though. whats been new? REPN TRI to the FULLEST!!!" ...

Opinion leaders or laggards?: newspaper editorialists support charter schools, split on NCLB.(what next)(No Child Left Behind Act of 2001)
June 22, 2008... Two reforms have dominated the education policy debates of the past decade: school choice as epitomized by charter schools, and testing and accountability as symbolized by No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Nine months ago we reported on public...

Up or down the Staircase?: mentors help interns figure it out.(school life)
June 22, 2008... I walked into my first education job midyear as an English teacher of 9th graders who had driven my predecessor and two substitutes onto other career paths. The students were ready for me, but I was not prepared for them. By the end of the...