Will cheating scandals change the focus on high-stakes testing?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has another explosive story out this week about possible cheating on standardized tests. This time, the newspaper looked at suspicious circumstances in nearly 70,000 schools across the country and found “red flags” in about 200 districts, an analysis that “suggests a broad betrayal of schoolchildren across the nation,” the newspaper said. The [...]
Little teacher support for some Obama school-reform strategies
Teachers are skeptical about several of the major reform ideas the Obama administration and education activists are pushing to turn around the nation’s struggling schools, a new survey commissioned by Scholastic and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has found. (Disclosure: the Gates Foundation is among the many funders of The Hechinger Report.) Fewer than a [...]
As India expands higher education, questions remain about quality and competition
Will India’s higher-education system catch up to those of world leaders, and should its economic rivals be concerned? American RadioWorks aired a podcast today that addresses these and other questions about India’s education ambitions. I discussed India’s higher education building boom with host Stephen Smith, and how the country’s open universities fit into plans to expand access [...]
Affirmative action on the docket again: Justice Kennedy’s past opinions hint at outcome
Affirmative action in college admissions is on the Supreme Court docket again this year after a white student named Abigail Fisher challenged a University of Texas program meant to promote diversity on UT campuses. Affirmative-action proponents, including many university leaders, are concerned that if the University of Texas loses, efforts to increase diversity in U.S. [...]
Is the era of teaching to the test nearing an end?
One more state received a waiver from the federal No Child Left Behind Act requirements this week, and the debate about what the waivers will mean for education policy continues. New Mexico, which was left waiting for a verdict on its application after an announcement that 10 other states had been granted waivers last week, [...]
Obama’s new teacher plan: Not so new?
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan made his case yesterday for the $5 billion that he and President Barack Obama want Congress to put toward a new grant competition to overhaul the teaching profession. The program would follow the mold of the administration’s $4.35-billion Race to the Top competition in form and, it seems to a [...]
An American problem: Is changing culture enough to stop youth violence?
Halfway into The Interrupters, a documentary airing Tuesday night on PBS’s Frontline, Caprysha Anderson, an 18-year-old teenager from inner-city Chicago, rides a carousel for the first time. The seemingly mundane event is transformative for Caprysha and for the audience’s understanding of the depths of her violent upbringing. She has just gotten out of jail. Her [...]
Ten states let off the No Child Left Behind hook
U.S. President Barack Obama announced today that he is letting 10 states off the hook for meeting requirements in the federal No Child Left Behind Act. The law, passed in 2001 with bipartisan support under President George W. Bush, called for all students to reach proficiency in English and math by 2014, a goal that [...]
Are school choice and integration the secret ingredients to lowering crime?
Young African-American men at risk of committing crimes were much less likely to do so when they attended higher-performing schools outside their neighborhoods, according to a study published today in Education Next. The study, by David Deming, a professor of education and economics at Harvard, looked at students in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, the North Carolina school district where [...]
New evidence that small schools work?
You might have forgotten about the small schools movement amid all the recent hubbub about overhauling teacher evaluations. But a study released on January 25th reminds us that only a few years ago, reducing the number of total students in a school was seen as a key weapon in the arsenal of urban school reform, [...]
