Education Next articles from September 2002

Education Next archives from September 2002

Credible cassandras: this time, perhaps, the sky really is falling. (From the Editors).(Brief Article)
September 22, 2002... High-school graduation rates are slipping? Can this be? Or is Chicken Little at it again? After rising for more than 100 years, reports Duncan Chaplin in our lead feature, graduation rates started to slip during the 1970s. By the turn of...

Correspondence.
September 22, 2002... Missing evidence? At New American Schools, it has always been our practice to cooperate with--even to initiate--in-depth review that leads to improvement. That's why it's baffling to us why Jeffrey Mirel ("Unrequited Promise;' Research,...

The seeds of growth: the United States became the world's economic superpower over the course of the 20th century. But can today's education system be counted on to fertilize growth in the future? (Forum).
September 22, 2002... The early 1990s saw the height of the east Asian miracle. The economies of Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, and other countries of the region were expanding at rates that dwarfed those of the United States and the mostly European...

Barren land. (Forum).
September 22, 2002... During the past four decades, poor countries worldwide have experienced a massive expansion of education. But the global mandarins who thought education would lead to surging economies have been sorely disappointed. Education is a powerful...

Tassels on the cheap: treating the GED as a high-school diploma masks a declining graduation rate. (Feature).
September 22, 2002... For more than a century the department of education has collected data on the number of high-school diplomas awarded each year. A statistic called the" degree ratio" can readily be calculated by combining these data with population figures from...

Educational Jujitsu: how school finance lawyers learned to turn standards and accountability into dollars. (Feature).
September 22, 2002... In their continuing efforts to extract more school spending from state legislatures through the courts, advocacy groups recently acquired a powerful new weapon: the standards movement. Their success provides yet another example of the law of...

The virtues of randomness: for years, researchers have used randomized field trials to evaluate the effectiveness of medical procedures. (Feature).
September 22, 2002... Educators are finally starting to catch on The principle that social interventions ought to be evaluated has a long pedigree. Eager readers of the Muquadimah know that Ibn Khaldun considered competing explanations for the success of Arab...

Ruly crew: lessons from the Clinton administration's attempts to cajole the states into complying with federal mandates for standards-based reform. (Feature).
September 22, 2002... The no child left behing act, signed by President Bush in January 2002, builds squarely on the framework of standards-based reform established in Goals 2000 and the 1994 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)....

The accreditation game: accreditation is supposed to ensure quality teacher training. But with little agreement over what and how to teach, accreditation threatens to become an exercise in ideology. (Feature).
September 22, 2002... THE NATIONAL COUNcil for Accreditation of Teacher Education (known broadly as NCATE, pronounced "en kate") was launched in 1954 by a coalition of professional organizations from across the education community. Previously, teacher-training...

Learning English: strange as it may seem, new evidence shows it's better to know two languages but be taught math in English. (Research).
September 22, 2002... BILINGUAL EDUCATION IS ONE OF the most intensely contested features of the contemporary education landscape. Initially legislated as a pedagogical tool to address lagging Hispanic performance, its early proponents argued that students with...

Quantity over quality; ever-declining class sizes and teachers' dwindling pay have a common explanation: the increasing price of skilled labor. (Research).
September 22, 2002... IN A RECENT PUBLIC AGENDA SURVEY, PARENTS OF PUBLIC HIGH-SCHOOL students supported the idea that reducing class sizes was a better way to improve schools than raising salaries for teachers. More stunning, however, was the survey's finding that...

Responsible polling: Phi Delta Kappa and the Gallup Poll respond to claims that their poll artificially depresses the public's support for school vouchers. (Check the Facts).(Statistical Data Included)
September 22, 2002... The issue that Terry Moe raises in his article "Cooking the Questions" in the Spring 2002 issue of Education Next concerns Phi Delta Kappa's interpretations of findings from the 2001 Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll of the public's attitudes toward...

Dodging the questions: Phi Delta Kappa and Gallup were given the opportunity to defend their poll. Why didn't they do so? (Check the Facts).(Statistical Data Included)
September 22, 2002... Somehow I expected more. When I challenged Phi Delta Kappa (PDK) and Gallup's claim that they had discovered a "significant decline" in voucher support, I figured they would respond with detailed justifications of their procedures and findings....

Choice words: are private schools truly more effective? (Book Review).(The Education Gap: Vouchers and Urban Schools; Catholic Schools: Private and Social Effects)
September 22, 2002... Catholic Schools: Private and Social Effects Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000, $100; 160 pages By William Sander The Education Gap: Vouchers and Urban Schools Brookings Institution, 2002, $28.95; 275 pages By William G....

The Education Gap: vouchers and urban schools. (Book Review).
September 22, 2002... By William G. Howell and Paul E. Peterson, with Patrick J. Wolf and David E. Campbell The "gap" that serves as The Education Gap's leitmotif is a catchall for educational inequalities among demographically distinct groups--racial, ethnic,...

Women's work: mothers sustain the home-schooling movement. (Book Review).
September 22, 2002... Kingdom of Children: Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling Movement Princeton University Press, 2001, $24.95; 238 pages. by Mitchell L. Stevens Deciding to home school your children is a huge commitment, but in many ways it...

Full court press: why I am fighting for school choice. (Education Matters to Me).(Brief Article)
September 22, 2002... In the late 1950s and early 1960s, if you were a black basketball player in Milwaukee and thought you "had game," there were two playgrounds to establish your credentials: Franklin Square and Lapham Park, I spent many hours on both courts. ...