Our special series exploring San Diego Unified School District's financial crisis, "Schools on the Brink," is now complete. We partnered with NBC 7 San Diego to take a look at what's at stake, how we got here and what options the district can take going forward.
We also hosted a forum on Thursday discussing possible solutions and featured readers' ideas on how they'd fix schools; make sure to check them out on our special section.
Here are the five videos:
A new study establishes something that we pretty much knew—or at least should have known–by now: school culture matters. And it seems to matter more than class size, spending, and other structural factors.
The paper by Roland G. Fryer and Will Dobbie out of Harvard examined 35 charter schools in New York City. The duo looked at three different flavors of charter schools: those that provide wrap-around services, a model focused on teacher selection and retention, and the so-called ‘No Excuses’ brand of school.
“We find that traditionally collected input measures — class size, per pupil expenditure, the fraction of teachers with no certification, and the fraction of
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in a recent speech to students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that in his ideal world, he’d get rid of half of his city’s teachers and double the salaries of those remaining. This statement, together with a weak economy and teacher layoffs, has led to renewed interest in the question of class size — and whether larger classes inevitably mean that students learn less than they otherwise would.
CNN’s Christine Romans, host of the weekly “Your Bottom Line” show, interviewed Justin Snider of The Hechinger Report about class size in a segment that aired on December 10th. Opposite Snider was Leonie
Merry Christmas Sears and CME (the corporations that runs the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Board of Trade). Today Santa is coming to visit you.
Naughty. Not nice.
The Illinois House Revenue and Finance Committee will meet at 10 a.m. to consider SB397 which will give tax
A letter to the Seattle Public School Board
1. Seattle should not choose a school superintendent by default — again.
2. There are financial and political risks to foregoing a search
3. The state auditor has already cited the school board for failing to exercise oversight. The superintendent search is no time to shirk responsibilities again.
4. Susan Enfield has not been thoroughly vetted by
by Frederick M. Hess • Dec 12, 2011 at 9:01 am
Cross-posted from Education Week
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The Cato Institute's Neal McCluskey has energetically denounced the slimmed-down federal role that Linda Darling-Hammond and I sketched last week, offering a not-unreasonable litany of complaints about federal overreach. (It's amusing that Neal thinks I'm endorsing big government, given that most in education regard me as unduly harsh when it come to federal efforts, but that's a topic for another day.) What's relevant here is that Neal's response also illustrates the problems that bedevil those who want to get Washington "out" of education. The biggest is that even Tea Party sympathizers have shown precious little willingness to get serious about putting an end to federal ed spending.
Conservatives cheerfully promise to "turn off the lights" at the U.S. Department of Education, but even the
In a ruling that could have multi-billion dollar consequences for Colorado's budget, a Denver judge ruled the state's school funding system is not "thorough and uniform" as mandated by the state constitution.
The state's school funding system "is not rationally related to the mandate to establish and maintain a thorough and uniform system of free public schools," District Judge Sheila Rappaport said in her 183-page ruling in which she called the system "unconscionable."
"It is also apparent that increased funding will be required," Rappaport said in her ruling, saying lawmakers would be given
A coalition of 18 community organizations has launched a nearly $1 million Internet-based project that translates state rankings of public schools into simple letter grades.
"Every parent can relate to grades A through F," said Colorado Succeeds president Tim Taylor, a member of the Colorado School Grades coalition. "We're not changing inputs, just translating in a way that is clear."
The website — in English and Spanish — went live today to coincide with the start of choice
Hardly a week goes by when some newspaper or television network doesn’t feature where the U.S. ranks among the nations participating in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). This test, administered to 15-year olds every three years, serves as a benchmark for “how we’re doing” in terms of education outcomes relative to our international competitors.
Because the results get so much attention, millions of Americans are aware that our students’ average scores rank relatively low on all three tests (though, when you account for error margins, U.S. scores are actually roughly average). Such awareness has stirred up remarkable urgency to improve our education system – we aretold this is a “Sputnik moment,” and that the very future of our nation’s economy is at risk.
Yet, for all the attention we pay to our rankings on standardized tests, how many Americans are aware that, in
Durham, N.C.
NO one seriously disputes the fact that students from disadvantaged households perform less well in school, on average, than their peers from more advantaged backgrounds. But rather than confront this fact of life head-on, our policy makers mistakenly continue to reason that, since they cannot change the backgrounds of students, they should focus on things they can control.
No Child Left Behind, President George W. Bush’s signature education law, did this by setting unrealistically high — and ultimately self-defeating — expectations for all schools. President Obama’s policies have concentrated on trying to make schools
When reading Kevin Carey’s article on Diane Ravitch in The New Republic (“The Dissenter,” November 23, 2011), two thoughts jostled in my mind: first, that any response would give the piece more credit than it deserved; second, that his misleading summary of her scholarship required a rebuttal. The latter thought ultimately won. Given our reactive political climate, in which cursory statements often pass for truth, someone should point out the errors and distortions in Carey’s statements.
Carey attempts in his piece to discredit Ravitch’s work and credibility—and thereby to undermine her opposition to the reforms that he champions (such as charter schools). He does this with personal attacks, sundry quotations of education professors, and what masquerades as an overview of her life’s work. The references to her personal life do not
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