Last year, Kansas City Superintendent John Covington made headlines when he stabilized the hemorrhaging Kansas City School District (which had lost 75 percent of its students in the past four decades) by shutting half of the district’s schools, selling the central office building, and axing close to a quarter of...
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Since the PISA-results bomb dropped last December, myriad reports have been released, op-eds written, and dinner conversations had comparing the American education system to high-achieving OECD nations. Some of them have been pretty smart. Others have been reasonably vapid, if well-intentioned. And almost all seem compelled to hail Finland. If...
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I talked for a bit last night with a DCPS teacher about IMPACT. While he expressed some concern about the system, he also said he was proof of it's effectiveness. See, he's a third-year elementary teacher at a struggling school in Northeast. He had twenty kids on...
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Here’s one for you:
Rosa Parks : Civil Rights Movement :: _________ : Current Education Reform Movement
[caption id="" align="alignright" width="203" caption="Photo by ElvertBarnes"][/caption]
It’s a trick question (er, analogy). We don’t have one. We don’t have a sweet little old lady, smartly chosen by the movement to be our rallying point....
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Over the past decade, Detroit’s population has declined by 25 percent. Since its heyday in 1950, the city has contracted by about 40 percent. (It now sits at about 700,000, making it the 18th most populous city in the country.) Coupled with this exodus is a gang of usual social...
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2011 may already be a banner year for education reform (in part thanks to the foundation laid in 2010). Policymakers and education activists in many states (and in D.C.) have just cause to smile—and to soak in the victories that have been won. But don’t assume that these victories will...
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Stop me when this sounds unfamiliar: You flip through the pages of the latest Economist (or parse through the articles online), looking for interesting material, chuckling to yourself over the risible article titles and amusing photo captions. Then you settle on a number of pieces to read—the majority of which...
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Review: The Nation’s Report Card: History 2010
Gadfly’s voice is hoarse from proclamations that history education is being tossed aside in the NCLB-fueled fervor over reading and math. But this week brings no relief for his vocal cords. Instead, it brought release of the 2010 Nation’s Report Card for U.S. history,...
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First came the recruitment of State Superintendent Deborah Gist; next came winning $75 million in Race to the Top (RTTT) funds. Rhode Island has been on a whirlwind track toward education reform over the past couple years. And—as one with boatloads of Ocean State pride (who doesn’t love coffee milk,...
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In this week’s Atlantic, Gagan Biyani, cofounder of Udemy (a web start-up that provides a platform for anyone in the world to build their own online course with video, virtual-classroom sessions, etc.), said:
The price of college is going to fall, and the Internet is going to cause that fall. The...
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