American Students Are Not Failing
It has recently become a humdrum narrative: Our schools are failing, we must reinvent the schools, we must fire the principals and the teachers and start over, we must race to the top, we must have vouchers and charters, we must turn public education over to the business people who tanked the economy in 2008, we must….do something, anything.
Fortunately there are sane people in the world, even in the United States. One of them is University of Texas physicist Michael Marder. Professor Marder has produced on his own a series of studies of U.S. performance and demonstrated that academic performance is a function of poverty. Here is his latest: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSf63qdI4xg&feature=youtu.be
Professor Marder is not one of those notorious education professors who make excuses for poor performance. He is at the top of his game. This is his bio:
Michael Marder is a member of the Center for Nonlinear Dynamics, internationally known for its experiments on chaos and pattern formation, and for the last four years ranked #1 in the nation by US News and World Report.
Fortunately there are sane people in the world, even in the United States. One of them is University of Texas physicist Michael Marder. Professor Marder has produced on his own a series of studies of U.S. performance and demonstrated that academic performance is a function of poverty. Here is his latest: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSf63qdI4xg&feature=youtu.be
Professor Marder is not one of those notorious education professors who make excuses for poor performance. He is at the top of his game. This is his bio:
Michael Marder is a member of the Center for Nonlinear Dynamics, internationally known for its experiments on chaos and pattern formation, and for the last four years ranked #1 in the nation by US News and World Report.
American Students Are Not Failing
It has recently become a humdrum narrative: Our schools are failing, we must reinvent the schools, we must fire the principals and the teachers and start over, we must race to the top, we must have vouchers and charters, we must turn public education over to the business people who tanked the economy in 2008, [...]
Test, Test, Test, Test: Another Day in Bridgeport
Paul Vallas has taken over as superintendent in Bridgeport, Connecticut, while running a consulting business on the side (he just won a $1 million contract to help fix the Illinois schools). He is concerned that students and teachers slack off after they take the state tests in March, so he has just imposed yet another [...]
We Are Number One!
A new report by UNICEF finds that the United States ranks second among the nation’s advanced nations in child poverty, with 23.1% of our children living in poverty. We are second to Romania, where the rate is 25.5%. Read the summary here. Forgive me, but I think we are really number one. Romania is a [...]
Does This Historical Analogy Make Sense?
I read an article last fall that compared our current education reform movement with Stalinist education policy. There is a part of me that is reluctant to go along with any sort of alarmism, not the alarmism of today’s Henny-Pennies (“the sky is falling, we are failing, failing, failing”), nor the Henny-Pennies of other eras. [...]
Long Arm of Federal Control Reaches Districts
In what must be the most startling development of the past month, year, and perhaps decade, the U.S. Department of Education is now launching a Race to the Top competition for districts. It has nearly $400 million to award, but as we have seen in the state-level competition, the amount of money was sufficient to [...]
Did Arne Learn Anything in New Haven?
When Secretary of Education Arne Duncan visited New Haven’s first turnaround school, he asked what was needed to encourage more teachers to leave high-performing schools for low-performing schools. Everyone who responded to his question talked about the importance of preparing teachers better for the challenges of teaching students in urban schools. They spoke of a [...]
Louisiana Voucher Plan Draws Criticism
Louisiana legislators grilled Commissioner of Education John White about the state’s decision to approve the largest number of voucher students (315) for a small religious school that lacked facilities or teachers. Many questions were raised about the state’s failure to do any site visits to ascertain the readiness of the school to accept new students. [...]
Singapore Wants Creativity, not Cramming
Since “A Nation at Risk” in 1983, American policymakers (the ones who make decisions but never worked in a school) have looked with envy towards the Asian nations that get high test scores. It became a commonplace to complain that American students didn’t work hard enough and there had to be more “accountability” tied to [...]
Musical Chairs at DC Think Tanks
This may seem to be inside baseball for most of my regular readers, but it is nonetheless worth noting. The DC think tanks exercise undue influence on the national media, because they are located in our nation’s capitol, and the media assumes it is worth paying attention to people who spend full time thinking. Unfortunately, [...]
Vermont Stands Up for Its Children
Vermont decided not to apply for a waiver from NCLB. Not because it loves NCLB. No one does. But because Vermont education officials had their own ideas about how to help their schools. And they discovered that Arne Duncan’s offer to give them “flexibility” was phony. He did not want to hear Vermont’s ideas. Contrary [...]
Why the Gates Compact?
As I was researching the story about the closing of Allan elementary school in Austin, which will be replaced in the fall by an IDEA charter school, I came across this story about the Gates compact. What is the Gates compact? Austin was the 16th district to apply for $100,000 from the Gates Foundation to [...]
When a School Dies
This is what it looks like when a school dies.Read here. The Austin school board–at the urging of the district superintendent Meria Carstarphen–decided to hand over Allan elementary school to a charter chain called IDEA. She said that IDEA had the formula to raise the academic achievement of the children in that school. The new [...]