Education Next articles from March 2004

Education Next archives from March 2004

Tough love: the value of high grading standards.(From The Editors)
March 22, 2004... In my high school, rumor had it that Richard Brockhaus was the toughest grader in the state. Others disagreed. They insisted it was the whole country. When as a senior I finally braved his Advanced Placement calculus course, Dr. B did...

Cheating teachers.(Correspondence)
March 22, 2004... It is shameful that a small minority of teachers feel the need to help their students cheat on tests ("To Catch a Cheat," Research, Winter 2004). The issue says something larger about our society that is very hard to fathom and is simply...

The inclusion mandate.(Correspondence)
March 22, 2004... While the situation described by Ann Christy Dybvik ("Autism and the Inclusion Mandate," Feature, Winter 2004) can and does occur, it is not the norm in special education. In reality, there are many excellent special-education programs around...

How to decentralize.(Correspondence)
March 22, 2004... The problems of governance structure and budgeting described by Jon Fullerton and William Ouchi ("Mounting Debt" and "Academic Freedom," Forum, Winter 2004) are not unique to education. The same problems of overcentralization plague the...

Finding good leaders.(Correspondence)
March 22, 2004... I had always planned to semi-retire into education after I had saved enough in my business career to supplement a teacher's pay. Now that I am moving from the business world to education, I read Frederick Hess's article on educational...

Civic education.(Correspondence)
March 22, 2004... In "Tug of War" (Research, Fall 2003), James B. Murphy argues that "the attempt to inculcate civic values in our schools is at best ineffective and often undermines the intrinsic moral purpose of schooling." Murphy's first argument relies...

Not getting it.(Correspondence)
March 22, 2004... I was pleased to see Lynne V. Cheney's review of Kieran Egan's Getting It Wrong from the Beginning: Our Progressivist Inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget ("Progressively Worse," Fall 2003). Egan is one of the few...

Civic Education: can public schools teach good citizenship?(Forum)
March 22, 2004... DECLINING VOTER PARTICIPATION AMONG the young. Persistently low scores on national civics and history assessments. High-school graduates who can't find Iraq on a globe. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] These are just some of the symptoms of...

Exploring the costs of accountability: claims that the No Child Left Behind Act represents an "unfunded mandate" wilt under close scrutiny.(Feature)
March 22, 2004... How much will the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) cost? Critics argue that NCLB's requirement that states bring all students up to academic proficiency by the year 2014 represents a massive unfunded mandate. William J. Mathis, for...

A Board's eye view: the town's public schools were among the worst. Yet no one seemed to care.(Feature)
March 22, 2004... During the last weeks of my brief tenure as a member of the local public school board, I took to carrying around a copy of the Declaration of Independence. I felt a need to commune with ancestors who had suffered a "long train of abuses"--and...

The sun sets on the West: today's social studies experts preach an anti-western ideology.(Feature)
March 22, 2004... The 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon led to a revival of patriotic feelings across the nation. Yet the mood was quite different among prominent experts within the social studies field. In the pages of Social...

A building need: charter schools in search of good homes.(Feature)
March 22, 2004... THE 1,100 STUDENTS AT E. A. OLLE MIDDLE School in suburban Houston enjoy a relatively new facility, built in 1988 and renovated since, with grounds that include an athletic field and even an amateur radio station. Just a few miles away, their...

The race connection: are teachers more effective with students who share their ethnicity?(Research)
March 22, 2004... In the mid-1960s, an acquaintance of mine was a young, timid teacher beginning her career in a virtually all-black high school on the South Side of Chicago. Even to this day, she recalls two events from that period. On one occasion, she saw a...

The gentleman's "A": new evidence that tough-grading teachers elicit better student performance.(Research)
March 22, 2004... WITH REPORTS THAT SOME OF THE NATION'S FINEST UNIVERSITIES have been handing out A's like lollipops at Halloween, the lowering of standards in higher education has become a hot topic. But grading standards in primary and secondary education...

The open classroom: schools without walls became all the rage during the early 1970s. Were they just another fad?(Whatever Happened to ...?)
March 22, 2004... LIKE AUTOMOTIVE MODELS, WOMEN'S hemlines, and children's toys, pedagogical fads come and go, causing an immediate stir but rarely influencing teaching practice in any significant way. The notion that every innovation dreamed up by reformers...

Voucher research controversy: new looks at the New York City evaluation.(Check the Facts)
March 22, 2004... "Principal Stratification Approach to Broken Randomized Experiments: A Case Study of School Choice Vouchers in New York City," "Comment," and "Rejoinder" By John Barnard, Constantine E. Frangakis, Jennifer L. Hill, and Donald B. Rubin;...

Teachers unions: the good, the bad, and the ugly.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... The Worm in the Apple: How the Teacher Unions Are Destroying American Education by Peter Brimelow HarperCollins, 2003, $24.95; 320 pages. Peter Brimelow aims high. In The Worm in the Apple, he seeks to emulate The History of...

Uncivil war: a bloodless account of a bitter battle.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... California Dreaming: Reforming Mathematics Education by Suzanne M. Wilson Yale University Press, 2003, $29.95; 320 pages. California's "math wars," the struggle over what is sometimes called the "new New Math," illustrate all the...

Just the Facts: a guide for school researchers.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... School Figures: The Data Behind the Debate by Hanna Skandera and Richard Sousa Hoover Institution, 2003, $15; 342 pp. The education field sometimes seems flooded with numbers, but all too often they're numbing, obscure, of...

Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care.(Book Alert)
March 22, 2004... Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care, by John H. McWhorter (Gotham Books). "We must have the attitude that every child in America, regardless of where they're raised or how they're born,...

Judging School Discipline: The Crisis of Moral Authority.(Book Alert)
March 22, 2004... Judging School Discipline: The Crisis of Moral Authority, by Richard Arum (Harvard Press). Fifteen years ago, Gerald Grant's influential The World We Created at Hamilton High illustrated how efforts to expand the rights of students had...

School of Dreams: Making the Grade at a Top American High School.(Book Alert)
March 22, 2004... School of Dreams: Making the Grade at a Top American High School, by Edward Humes (Harcourt). What makes Whitney High School so special? Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Edward Humes immersed himself in the life of this renowned magnet school...

No Child Left Behind? The Politics and Practices of School Accountability.(Book Alert)
March 22, 2004... No Child Left Behind? The Politics and Practices of School Accountability, edited by Paul E. Peterson and Martin R. West (Brookings). The extensive accountability requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) have provoked much...

A kibbutz education: the collective farm was a powerful educational tool.(Education Matters to Me)
March 22, 2004... Working the earth purifies the soul" was one of the many mottos at Ben Shemen, the boarding school I attended as a teenager living in what was then British Palestine. The educational experience at Ben Shemen was grounded in the soil; students...