White voters vs. minority schoolchildren
White voters don’t like paying for the education of minority schoolchildren, or so we learn from a New York Times article this week that looked at places in New York where school budgets were voted down this year. The article’s author, Sam Roberts, found that in places where the majority of voters were white and the majority of schoolchildren […]
A New Jersey miracle? Perhaps.
Should education reporters be flocking to New Jersey to write about its graduation “miracle”? A report by the Schott Foundation for Public Education released this week showcases New Jersey, and Newark in particular, as a rare bright spot in a dismal picture of graduation rates for black males in America, and the report’s authors attribute New […]
Spending $10 billion to save jobs, sooner or later
The $26 billion bill signed by President Barack Obama earlier this week is intended to preserve jobs, and $10 billion of it is earmarked for saving teachers’ jobs — but how soon it will do so remains unclear. We wrote about the passage of this bill in an earlier post, and since then local education reporters around the […]
Disproportionate share of turnaround money headed to high schools
In his education speech in Texas on August 9th, President Barack Obama told the nation, “We know what works. It’s just we’re not doing it.” The speech came as the U.S. Department of Education hands out $3.5 billion in turnaround grants to failing schools around the country, an outsized proportion of which will go to […]
$10 billion teacher jobs bill passes, but the controversy isn’t over
President Obama has won his summer-long battle for a bill that will funnel to states $10 billion to save teachers’ jobs. The House of Representatives returned early from its summer recess yesterday to pass the measure, which totals $26 billion and also includes money for other public workers, and President Obama signed it almost immediately. The […]
Charters and turnarounds do well in “Investing in Innovation” (i3) competition
A couple of themes run through some of the 49 successful “Investing in Innovation” (i3) grant applications announced yesterday by the U.S. Department of Education: Expanding charter schools and scaling up school-turnaround strategies. The grant competition – which isn’t over, as applicants must still go through a couple of steps before they get the money – is meant […]
Reviving desegregation from the dead
I’ve attended a couple of conferences on school desegregation in the past two years, where I’ve encountered the same small group of civil rights activists and sociologists worrying about the demise of desegregation policies around the country and the resurgence of racially segregated schools. So it’s interesting to see Education Next, a journal edited by […]
Firing the wrong teachers?
Michelle Rhee, chancellor of the Washington D.C. public schools, made a splash last week when she fired 241 teachers in her efforts to overhaul a system where just eight percent of eighth-graders perform at grade level in math, but nearly all teachers are rated as excellent. But what if Rhee fired the wrong teachers? That’s a scenario […]
Throwing out the Baby College with the bathwater?
It hasn’t been a good month for the Obama administration’s education agenda. First, the House of Representatives introduced a bill that would bite off some $8 billion from the president’s favorite reforms — the Race to the Top competition, the Teacher Incentive Fund, and the expansion of charter schools. Now, Obama’s Promise Neighborhoods Initiative, which would […]
Finding the right incentives to improve public education
A New York Times story today reports what many have already assumed: New York students’ remarkable test score gains over the past few years were due in large part to the fact that the tests were getting easier, not that the students were necessarily learning more. The story is a reminder of one of the […]
