How important are school gadgets?
Some educators wonder how much high-tech tools raise achievement.
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How homicides affect test scores - study
School reformers who say that poverty and family circumstance are only excuses for poor student performance might do well to look at a new study which found African-American children in Chicago scoring a lot lower on reading and vocabulary tests within a week of a homicide in their neighborhood--even if they did not directly witness the violence.
The principal who created a wellspring of innovation
Despite the school’s disadvantages, Jackson has produced one of the highest levels of Advanced Placement test participation in the country — top 2 percent. Thirty-seven percent of Wakefield seniors have passing scores on those tests, more than twice the national average. Wakefield has reached its federal achievement targets, unusual for a school with so many impoverished students, but also made itself a national model for imaginative instruction, outdoing even the most affluent public schools.
Rhee shakes up six schools
As expected, Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee brought the "reconstitution" hammer down on six low-performing schools Monday: Ballou High School, Garfield, Stanton and Davis elementary, Hamilton Center and Luke C. Moore Academy. It means that the approximately 150 teachers at those schools must reapply for their jobs if they want to remain.
One of the six, Stanton, will be operated beginning this summer by a Philadelphia-based charter school organization, Scholar Academies.
No Child Left Behind gives Rhee options to address problems at schools that have consistently failed to make what the law describes as "adequate yearly progress" on standardized test scores. Overall, about 90 of DC.'s 123 schools are under some form of federal notice to improve.
The six schools cited Monday, with a combined enrollment of about 2,200, have undergone multiple waves of federally mandated
The six schools cited Monday, with a combined enrollment of about 2,200, have undergone multiple waves of federally mandated
Senior Bertrand Ngampa gives a presentation on an interactive whiteboard at W.T. Woodson High in Fairfax County. (Dayna Smith/Post)
