Improving test scores will lead to school massacres, according to a Washington Post column by Margaret McKenna, president of Lesley University, on the anniversary of Columbine.
Education Gadfly annihilates the argument, citing Dave Cullen’s reporting in Slate on the FBI’s diagnosis of the Columbine killers: Eric Harris was a psychopath who hated […]
Archive for May, 2008
How can a state prove veteran teachers are “highly qualified” to teach their subjects? California’s system, which got an F rating from the National Council for Teacher Quality, is dubious, writes Lance Izumi of the Pacific Resarch Institute. He describes the state’s High, Objective, Uniform State Standard of Evaluation (HOUSSE) which requires 100 […]
A 2001 interpretation of California law prohibits volunteers from clearing stream beds, or doing any other unpaid work on a public project, writes Daniel Weintraub in the Sacramento Bee. Everyone is supposed to get the “prevailing” union wage, whether they want it or not.
The issue first surfaced in Redding, where some college students got […]
Welcome Eduwonk to the wonderful world of edublogging. The new site, sponsored by the Progressive Policy Institute’s 21st Century Schools Project, is off to a good start. It rips NY Timesman Michael Winerip’s latest attack on No Child Left Behind.
Under NCLB different states have different accountability plans, different standards, and different rules. […]
A professor recommends Valen Johnson’s Grade Inflation: A Crisis in College Education. A Duke statistician, Johnson makes the case that students give good evaluations to instructors from whom they expect good grades. “Since these days student evaluations make or break a young faculty member’s chances for tenure, the end result of the ‘consumerism’ […]
Hatemonger’s Quarterly has a winner in its Horrible College-Student Poetry contest. Plus some horrible runner-ups. The winning author of “believing the me i’m told” is Michael E. Lopez. Could it be this guy?
One of the runner-up poems reminds me of the favorite genre of Highland Park High students in the late ’60s: […]
Project Appollonia is looking for English-language books for K-6 children in Costa Rica. The mailing address is:
Project Apollonia C/O
David Scott Anderson
Grupo Utopia International
1601 NW 97th Avenue
SJO 23432
Miami, FL 33172-2053
Graduation exams don’t increase the drop-out rate, according to a study by Jay Greene of the Manhattan Institute. The study also shows that neither reducing class size not increasing funding leads to higher graduation rates. In a New York Sun column on New York’s Regents exams, Greene writes:
First, many of the students who don’t […]
Parents are putting unborn children on the waiting list for a spot at the Academy for Academic Excellence, a K-12 charter school in Apple Valley, California.
These days, many classes combine students with wildly varying levels of achievement and English fluency; several may have disabilities that affect their learning. Teachers are supposed to reach everyone. If they don’t, the kids who didn’t learn will be passed on anyhow.
Social promotion is caused by an out-of-date allegiance to grouping […]
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