Education Next articles from September 2008

Education Next archives from September 2008

The next president had many school choices; Will he provide similar opportunities for others?(Editorial)
September 22, 2008... Not since Abraham Lincoln have we had a president with as unusual an early education as the one experienced by the man who will take office on January 20, 2009. John McCain and Barack Obama each had considerably more formal schooling than...

Disrupting class.(correspondence)(Letter to the editor)
September 22, 2008... Clay Christensen and Michael Horn's essay ("How Do We Transform Our Schools?" features, Summer 2008) has a plaintive quality to it. Their argument about disruptive innovation is compelling in a for-profit setting, not so in elementary and...

The Governator.(correspondence)(Letter to the editor)
September 22, 2008... Daniel Weintraub's chronicle of the tortured path of education politics under Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger ("No Country for Strong Men," features, Summer 2008) hints at the frustration surrounding the death of the Year of Education Reform in...

Reading first.(correspondence)(Letter to the editor)
September 22, 2008... Shep Barbash has done a masterful job of explaining the goals of the Reading First program and its journey through periods of legislative gymnastics, controversy, and success in selected states ("Looking Beyond the Reading First Controversy,"...

Wrong numbers.(correspondence)(Letter to the editor)
September 22, 2008... William Howell and Martin West have written an interesting article about Americans' utter ignorance concerning the amounts their tax dollars contribute to public education costs ("Is the Price Right?" features, Summer 2008). While homeowners...

A matter of time.(correspondence)(Letter to the editor)
September 22, 2008... We read with great interest the article by Caroline Hoxby and Sonali Murarka, which reports promising results from their randomized-control study of New York City charter school students ("New York City Charter Schools," research, Summer 2008)....

Charters as a diverse sector.(correspondence)(Letter to the editor)
September 22, 2008... Charter schools are too often treated as a monolithic reform and too rarely treated as a diverse sector. When we think of charter schools as a reform, we tend to either praise or criticize, depending on the particular snapshot of charter...

Home schoolers strike back; California case centers on parents' rights.(the legal beat)
September 22, 2008... To their surprise, California's home-schooling parents found out in February that they were scofflaws. A state appellate court ruled in In re Rachel L. that state law requires all children to be taught be certified teachers. Thus, nearly...

The 2008 education next--PEPG survey of public opinion; Americans think less of their schools than of their police departments and post offices.(feature)(Survey)
September 22, 2008... Americans clearly have had their fill of a sluggish economy and an unpopular war. Their frustration now may also extend to public education. In this, the second annual national survey of U.S. adults conducted under the auspices of Education...

The early education of our next president; Not much in public schools.(feature)
September 22, 2008... One of them, Barack Obama, was awakened at four in the morning in Jakarta to study from a correspondence course; the other, John McCain, attended grade school in old airplane hangars. Both went on to elite private high schools. ...

Scrap the sacrosanct salary schedule; How about more pay for new teachers, less for older ones?(feature)(Viewpoint essay)
September 22, 2008... On what basis should we distribute rewards to salespeople? It seems like a silly question, doesn't it? First, "we," meaning the public at large, don't usually get to decide such matters. Second, there are obvious systems of rewards for...

Out jail and into jobs; Maya Angelou Public Charter School offers hope and an education to kids in trouble.(feature)
September 22, 2008... "Tell the judge I want a program," pleaded Eddie. "Tell him I don't need to be locked up." Eddie was my client, 16 years old, charged with breaking into a house and stealing a TV and VCR. A Formica table separated us in a dingy room in the Oak...

An appeal to authority; The New Paternalism in urban schools.(feature)
September 22, 2008... By the time youngsters reach high school in the United States, the achievement gap is immense. The average black 12th grader has the reading and writing skills of a typical white 8th grader and the math skills of a typical white 7th grader. The...

Preschool puzzle; As state after state expands pre-K schooling, questions remain.(forum)
September 22, 2008... Last year, more than 30 states increased public funding for pre-K education. Advocates Pre-K Now and its congressional allies are pushing for new federal spending and regulations. Some analysts project enormous long-term benefits to...

Cash for test scores; The impact of the research Texas Advanced Placement incentive program.(research)
September 22, 2008... Cash incentives for high school students to perform better in school are growing in popularity, but we understand very little about them. Does paying students for better Advanced Placement (AP) test scores encourage enrollment in AP classes?...

Something's Better Than Nothing; Why technology in education doesn't need to be very good.
September 22, 2008... Disrupting Class: Why Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns By Clayton M. Christensen, with Michael B. Horn and Curtis W. Johnson McGraw-Hill, 2008, $32,95; 288 pages. Clayton Christensen is a professor at the...

Where Did NCLB Come From? The true story of the federal role in education.(Book review)
September 22, 2008... See Government Grow: Education Politics from Johnson to Reagan By Gareth Davies University Press of Kansas, 2007, $39.95; 387 pages. Gareth Davies, a historian at Oxford University, brings care and precision to his study of the...

Homeschool: An American History. Milton Gaither (Palgrave Macmillan).(Brief article)(Book review)
September 22, 2008... Homeschool: An American History. Milton Gaither (Palgrave Macmillan). This engaging scholarly work offers a sweeping history of education conducted in the home from the colonial period through the present. It charts the evolution of...

Augmented Learning: Research and Design of Mobile Educational Games. Eric Klopfer (MIT Press).(Brief article)(Book review)
September 22, 2008... Augmented Learning: Research and Design of Mobile Educational Games. Eric Klopfer (MIT Press). Writing about education technology tends to dwell on long-term visions or tout the merits of expensive hardware investments (one laptop per...

Relentless Pursuit: A Year in the Trenches with Teach for America. Donna Foote (Alfred A. Knopf).(Book review)
September 22, 2008... Relentless Pursuit: A Year in the Trenches with Teach for America. Donna Foote (Alfred A. Knopf). Since 1990, Teach For America (TFA) has placed 17,000 teachers in more than 1,000 high-need schools, and the organization has ambitious plans...

Race, Schools, & Hope: African Americans and School Choice after Brown. Lisa M. Stulberg (Teachers College Press).(Brief article)(Book review)
September 22, 2008... Race, Schools, & Hope: African Americans and School Choice after Brown. Lisa M. Stulberg (Teachers College Press). Plodding through this book can be a maddening exercise, what with its paeans to progressive icons (Cornel West! Howard Zinn!),...

Envelope Frenzy: One Year, Five Promising Students, and the Pursuit of the Ivy League Prize. Joie Jager-Hyman (Harper).(Fat Envelope Frenzy: One Year, Five Promising Students, and the Pursuit of the Ivy League Prize)(Brief article)(Book review)
September 22, 2008... Envelope Frenzy: One Year, Five Promising Students, and the Pursuit of the Ivy League Prize. Joie Jager-Hyman (Harper). "After hearing the news from MIT, Nabil... called both Princeton and MIT to negotiate for more time... . Princeton,...

Arrested development; Online training is the norm in other professions. Why not in K-12 education?(what next)
September 22, 2008... Everyone knows that the Internet is changing the way the world works, plays, and connects. Yet its most powerful applications only seem obvious after some entrepreneur has brought them to life. Of course the web is a great way to distribute...

What do college students know? By this professor's calculations, math skills have plummeted.(school life)
September 22, 2008... Professors are constantly asked if their students are better or worse today than in the past. I conducted an experiment to try to answer that question for one group of students. For my fall 2006 course, Calculus I for the Biological and...