The 2012 election cycle is off and running, with big implications for America’s schools. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) awaits reauthorization. The Obama administration is implementing new regulations targeted at for-profit colleges. Standoffs between the GOP-controlled House and the Obama administration have yielded budget brinksmanship, while domestic spending has been squeezed by massive deficits. President Obama, following in the footsteps of the Bush administration, has aggressively championed federal education initiatives like Race to the Top and the Investing in Innovation fund. Meanwhile, the Republican primaries have been marked by candidates’ rejection of an active federal role in education, as several have pledged to “turn out the lights” at the U.S. Department of Education.

In a discussion hosted by Ed Next editor Frederick Hess, the panelists included:

PETER CUNNINGHAM, U.S. Department of Education
KATHERINE HALEY, Office of Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio)
ALYSON KLEIN, Education Week
JOE WILLIAMS, Democrats for Education Reform
DAVID WINSTON, The Winston Group

More information about the event is available on the AEI website.

In the Spring 2012 issue of Ed Next, June June Kronholz looks at two school districts working with Khan Academy to boost math achievement.

In the video, leaders from Rocketship and School of One discuss the advantages of digital learning while sharing their concerns about California laws and union regulations that have limited the role of online learning.

More about the book is available here.

HT: Joanne Jacobs

On Thursday, Jan. 5 from 8:30-10:00 am we’ll be watching a live webcast of the Fordham Institute’s forum on accountability, starring Eric Hanushek, Charles Barone, Sandy Kress, and Mark Schneider. The event is described as follows:

Ten years ago, George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act, the law that has dominated U.S. education—and the education policy debate—for the entire decade. While lawmakers are struggling to update that measure, experts across the political spectrum are struggling to make sense of its impact and legacy. Did NCLB, and the consequential accountability movement it embodied, succeed? And with near-stagnant national test scores of late, is there reason to think that this approach to school reform is exhausted? If not “consequential accountability,” what could take the U.S. to the next level of student achievement?

More information about the event and the panelists can be found on the Fordham Institute website.

Terry Moe was interviewed by Mike Petrilli for the Education Next book club podcast here.

Research by Hanushek which appeared in Ed Next in 2008 found strong relationships between achievement on accountability-based tests and economic growth. (See: “Education and Economic Growth,” Education Next, Spring 2008)

In this video, Eric Hanushek of the Hoover Institution discusses the shortcomings of the NRC report with Terry Moe, also of the Hoover Institution.

The Winter 2012 issue of Education Next includes a full critique of the NRC report by Eric Hanushek, “Grinding the Antitesting Ax: More bias than evidence behind NRC panel’s conclusions”

As Hanushek explains, the NRC report neglected the scientific evidence when it concluded that NCLB and high school exit exams were not good policies.  By the NRC’s own evidence, test-based accountability is very valuable, and investing in these programs has a rate of return that dwarfs that of virtually all governmental programs.

Research by Hanushek which appeared in Ed Next in 2008 found strong relationships between achievement on accountability-based tests and economic growth. (See: “Education and Economic Growth,” Education Next, Spring 2008)

Kipp shares her experience teaching 11th and 12th grade English online while she resides with her family in rural Colorado. Though not physically in a classroom, Kipp has been able to successfully engage students through live class sessions, emails, instant messaging, and texting. Kipp used to teach in a traditional classroom setting but says that despite some of the unique challenges teaching virtually presents, she finds the online teaching experience more rewarding and in many instances more effective.

Today (Thursday), tune in to a live webcast of an all-day conference on education governance sponsored by The Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the Center for American Progress.

School reforms abound today, yet even the boldest and most imaginative among them have produced—at best—marginal gains in student achievement. What America needs in the twenty-first century is a far more profound version of education reform. Instead of shoveling yet more policies, programs, and practices into our current system, we must deepen our understanding of the obstacles to reform that are posed by existing structures, governance arrangements, and power relationships. Yet few education reformers—or public officials—have been willing to delve into this touchy territory.

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the Center for American Progress have teamed up to tackle these tough issues and ask how our mostly nineteenth-century system of K-12 governance might be modernized and made more receptive to the innumerable changes that have occurred—and need to occur—in the education realm.

More information is available here.

This video highlights some of the strategies being pursued by the Partnership, which include identifying students for Gifted and Talented Education (GATE), parent engagement, professional development for teachers and principals, school accountability, use of new education technologies, protecting schools from the disruption of disproportionate teacher layoffs, and fostering inviting learning environments.

More information is available at http://www.partnershipla.org

The Georgia’s governor, state charter school commissioners, and parents all react to the May 16th decision.

Visit Education Next’s Charter School and Vouchers Archive to read more opinion, research, and news pieces on charter schools.

More videos in this series by NewSchools can be found here.

Are America’s highest achieving students being left behind?

A trio of recent studies and articles raises troubling questions about America’s “Achievement-Gap Mania.” Are we leaving our highest performing students behind in the quest to raise the test scores of students at the bottom? If so, what will this mean for our future international competitiveness?

Learn about the recent studies–Fordham’s Do High Flyers Maintain their Altitude? and the George W. Bush Institute’s Global Report Card—as well as Frederick M. Hess’s new National Affairs essay, “Our Achievement-Gap Mania.” And join a conversation about whether our focus on raising the bottom is blinding us to trouble at the top.

Panelists:

• Ulrich Boser, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress
• John Cronin, Director of the Kingsbury Center for Research on Academic Growth at the Northwest Evaluation Association
• Frederick M. Hess, Resident Scholar and Director of Education Policy Studies at American Enterprise Institute
• Josh McGee, Vice President for Public Accountability Initiatives at the Laura and John Arnold Foundation

Moderator:

• Chester E. Finn, Jr., President, Thomas B. Fordham Institute

Find more information on student achievement and the global report card here.

More information is available on the conference’s main page, here.

The study on which the Global Report Card is based, “When the Best is Mediocre: Developed countries far outperform our most affluent suburbs,” by Jay Greene and Josh McGee, will appear in the Winter 2012 issue of Ed Next and is now available online.

The rankings of 13,636 U.S. school districts can be found in the Global Report Card, available on the website of the George W. Bush Institute, where readers can see how students in each school district compare to students in 25 other nations.

A detailed explanation of the methods used to conduct the analysis is available here.

The Education Next article on this report, “Are U.S. Students Ready to Compete?” can be found here. A PDF of the full report, “Globally Challenged,” can be found here.

Paul Peterson is editor-in-chief of Education Next, and Eric Hanushek serves on the editorial board.  Both are  senior fellows at the Hoover Institution and members of its Koret Task Force on K-12 Education

Panelists
Frederick M. Hess, Director, Education Policy Studies, American Enterprise Institute
Randi Weingarten, President, American Federation of Teachers

Moderator
Michael J. Petrilli, Executive Vice President, Thomas B. Fordham Institute

This event will be webcast. There is no need to register for the webcast – simply visit www.edexcellence.net at 10 a.m. on August 23 and watch the proceedings live.

Panelists:

Ted Mitchell, president and CEO of the NewSchools Venture Fund.

Fiona O’Carroll, executive vice president of the New Ventures/Innovation Group at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Panel moderated by Gary Huggins.

While physical education has been drastically cut back across the country — in response to budget concerns and test score pressures — Naperville Central High School, in the Chicago suburbs, has embraced a culture of fitness: PE is a daily, graded requirement. And for one group of struggling students, there’s an innovative program to schedule PE right before their most challenging classes. In the six years since that program started, students who signed up for PE directly before English read on average a half year ahead of those who didn’t, and students who took PE before math showed dramatic improvement in their standardized tests.

In 2010, an Ed Next video featured another innovative physical education program for high school students, the 25th Hour P.E. Class at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia. The program uses heart rate monitors to hold students accountable for how long and how hard they work out.

Veronica Nolan is executive director of the Urban Alliance, an organization which helps young people from under-resourced areas in the District of Columbia prepare for successful careers through internship and mentoring opportunities in professional settings.

Stephanie Saroki is co-founder of Seton Education Partners, a non-profit working to help struggling urban Catholic schools find alternatives to school closure.

Veronica and Stephanie describe their experiences as Teach for America corps members, explain what inspired them to lead entrepreneurial education organizations after teaching, and consider what it is about TFA that has made its alumni so successful as change agents in education.

This video accompanies a new study that attempts to determine which organizations are most effective in spawning leaders of entrepreneurial ventures in education. That study, “Creating a Corps of Change Agents: What explains the success of Teach for America?” by Monica Higgins, Jennie Weiner, Wendy Robison, and Frederick Hess, will appear in the Spring 2011 issue of Education Next, and is now available online.

HT: Gotham Schools

HT: Jay P Greene’s blog

For more on spelling bees, and other academic competitions, please see “Competition Makes a Comeback” by June Kronholz in the Summer 2010 issue of Education Next.

More information about the event is available here.

For more on this topic, see “Teachers Swap Recipes,” in the Summer 2011 issue of Education Next.

HT: This Week in Education

A new Ed Next article by Peter Meyer “Assessing New York’s Commissioner of Education,” looks at how New York won and what’s next for David Steiner, who announced that he will be stepping down this summer.

For a full discussion of his David Steiner’s tenure, see Peter Meyer’s interview with him.

Graham Down reviewed the book here.

Panelists included:

Jeanne Allen, President, The Center for Education Reform
Justin Cohen, President, School Turnaround Group, Mass Insight Education
Elaine Weiss, National Coordinator, Broader Bolder Approach to Education
David Stuit, Partner, Basis Policy Research, and author, Are Bad Schools Immortal?

Mike Petrilli moderated the discussion.

More information about the event, which took place on March 2, 2011, is available here.

California’s new “parent trigger” law allows parents at a failing school to vote to turn the school into a charter, to replace the staff, or to force other changes. But when McKinley parents pulled the trigger, the public school system fought back.

Patrick Wolf’s testimony from the hearing is available here.

HT: Jay P. Greene’s Blog

From Reason.tv:

Before hurricane Katrina ravaged the city in 2005, New Orleans had one of the worst performing public school districts in the nation… Today, New Orleans has the most market-based school system in the US. 60% of New Orleans students currently attend charter schools, test scores are up, and talented and passionate educators from around the country are flocking to New Orleans to be a part of the education revolution. It’s too early to tell if the New Orleans experiment in school choice will succeed over the long term, but for the first time in decades people are optimistic about the future of New Orleans schools.

An article appearing in the Spring 2011 issue of Ed Next, “New Schools in New Orleans,” by Jed Horne, looks at what’s next for the schools of New Orleans.

For background on the story, please see “Hope After Katrina,” by Kathryn Newmark and Veronique de Rugy, and “In the Wake of the Storm,” by Michael B. Henderson.

Ed Next recently published an evaluation of the impact of a merit pay plan in New York City that awarded bonuses to all teachers in schools that met performance targets. Please see “Does Whole-School Performance Pay Improve Student Learning?” by Sarena Goodman and Lesley Turner, which appears in the Spring 2011 issue of Ed Next.

Chester E. Finn, Jr. argues that the war has not yet been won, that there have been advances but a lot of pushback, and a lot of heavy lifting still to be done. Mike Petrilli argues that the war of ideas has been won, that fringe reform ideas have gone mainstream, but that reformers may be pushing the ideas in a direction that may not be productive. Should reformers be more worried about the education establishment or about their own allies?

In the Spring 2011 issue of Education Next, the editors of the magazine debate this topic at greater length in “Taking Stock of a Decade of Reform.”

A promotional video produced by the school appears here.

Matt’s research on the subject may be found here.