Education Next

Paul wrote a new blog post: Charter High Schools   1 day, 3 hours ago · View If American schools are in disastrous straits, the high school is ground zero. The late Theodore Sizer, former dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, was among the first to explain how high school teachers and students were tacitly conspiring to compromise a vibrant education for boring classroom acquiescence. On the latest tests of achievement, [...]

admin wrote a new blog post: Spring 2010 Correspondence   1 day, 4 hours ago · View School Budgets In “ The Phony Funding Crisis ” (features, Winter 2010), James Guthrie and Arthur Peng examine the apparent phenomenon in which schools, while claiming continual underfunding and budget cuts, continue to open their doors and educate students. As logical as their argument sounds, we believe it comes from the 30,000 foot level and differs from what [...]

Jay Greene wrote a new blog post: National Standards Nonsense   2 days, 1 hour ago · View The national standards train-wreck is pulling into the station, again.  This time it is a completely voluntary set of national standards in the same way that complying with a 21-year-old drinking age is completely voluntary for states to receive federal highway money.  States had to commit to a rushed and largely secretive national standard setting [...]

Paul wrote a new blog post: Saving Schools and Virtual Schooling   2 days, 3 hours ago · View Education Next’s Paul E. Peterson talks about his new book, Saving Schools , and about the advantages of virtual schooling, with Nathan Glazer. “ A Courageous Look at the American High School ,” an excerpt from Saving Schools: From Horace Mann to Virtual Learning by Paul E. Peterson, is also available on the Education Next [...]

Paul wrote a new blog post: A Courageous Look at the American High School   2 days, 3 hours ago · View In Saving Schools: From Horace Mann to Virtual Learning, scheduled for release by Harvard University Press this spring, Paul E. Peterson tells how five individuals—Horace Mann, John Dewey, Martin Luther King Jr., Al Shanker, and William Bennett—shaped American education in ways they never expected. Peterson chronicles how education became ever more centralized and bureaucratized, creating the [...]

Joshua Dunn wrote a new blog post: Is Arne Duncan’s new civil rights crusade unconstitutional?   3 days, 3 hours ago · View On Monday, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced that his department will expand its efforts in civil rights enforcement.  Its civil rights division will monitor racial disparities in enrollment in college prep classes, school discipline, and teacher assignment. Like everything this sounds fantastic in the abstract.  Who after all publicly declares that they oppose protecting civil [...]

Paul wrote a new blog post: We Need Fewer Teachers, Not More   4 days, 3 hours ago · View In Sunday’s NYT, Elizabeth Green explains beautifully the challenges of classroom teaching , revealing both the critical importance of teaching talent and the extraordinary challenges of producing it. Bored students are ignoring assiduous efforts by hard-working but not particularly knowledgeable or pedagogically sophisticated instructors. Schools of education are driving off in the wrong direction, she tells us, [...]

Education Next wrote a new blog post: New Book Review: Hanushek Reviews Ouchi on Total Student Load   4 days, 4 hours ago · View Bill Ouchi is a management professor who studies school districts. His latest book provides an in-depth look at six school districts with high-profile leaders (including Rod Paige, Arne Duncan, Joel Klein, and Arlene Ackerman) who are all pursuing decentralization of decisionmaking and funding, a school reform strategy lauded by Ouchi in a previous book. These six stories [...]

Eric Hanushek wrote a new blog post: Total Student Load   4 days, 4 hours ago · View The Secret of TSL: 
The revolutionary discovery that raises school performance By William G. Ouchi Simon and Schuster, 2009, $26; 336 pages. When I first saw the title, never having heard of TSL, I thought this might be a late-night infomercial about a new diet supplement designed to make all students attentive. Not far into the [...]

Chester E. Finn wrote a new blog post: Book Alert: The Death and Life of the Great American School System   4 days, 23 hours ago · View Diane Ravitch’s important new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, will surely stir controversy, exactly as she intends. For it embodies and expresses–with her characteristic confidence, style and verve–a fundamental change in her views about where U.S. K–12 education should be heading. Simply stated, she believes it should recapture the strengths of [...]

Education Next wrote a new blog post: Behind the Headline: Congress shouldn’t betray D.C. scholarship program   5 days ago · View On Top of the News Congress shouldn’t betray D.C. scholarship program 03/08/10 | The Washington Post Behind the Headline How Vouchers Came to D.C. Fall 2004 | Education Next A bipartisan coalition led by Sen. Joe Lieberman is calling on the Senate to restore the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. An article by Spencer Hsu that appeared in Ed [...]