This Week In Education Thompson: Bubble Families

This Week In Education

Thompson: Bubble Families

New York City has abandoned a pilot project to pay parents for things like going to the dentist ($100) or holding down a full-time job ($150 per month). Children were rewarded for attending school regularly ($25 to $50 per month) or passing a high school Regents exam ($600). The reason? It didn't work for most families. Only "high school students who met basic proficiency standards before high school tended to increase their attendance, receive more class credits and perform better on standardized tests; more families went to the dentist for

Standards: NCLB Author Slams Ravitch, LDH

Here's a pretty heated email Sandy Kress sent out this morning about the East Palo Alto charter school whose charter school was denied an extension, and standards recanter Diane Ravitch:

"Linda Darling Hammond and Diane Ravitch have built their careers recently beating up on standards based reform, Teach for America, charter schools, choice, and NCLB, among other initiatives that reformers have put in place over the last 15 years. They've distorted data to attempt to show that these reforms do not work, even when objective data show otherwise.

"Now the results are in on THEIR approach. I won't attempt to explain or manipulate the data. Look for yourself. Linda Darling Hammond had all the money in the world and the Stanford faculty, all the advantages and more than the typical charter school would have. Look at the chart of student results from her school and similarly situated schools