Education Next

Jay Greene wrote a new blog post: Blaming Special Ed — Again   2 months ago · View When times get tough, school systems and their enabling reporters blame special education.   Regular readers of JPGB and Education Next have seen this argument debunked before, but I feel compelled to do it again in response to a sloppy and lazy article in the Wall Street Journal . The WSJ piece by Barbara Martinez is entitled “Private-School Tuitions [...]

Jay Greene wrote a new blog post: National Standards Nonsense is Still Nonsense   3 months ago · View Mike Petrilli has finally tried to address the problems we’ve raised regarding national standards .  Despite Mike’s best efforts, I’m afraid that national standards and assessments still sound like a really bad idea. I raised doubts about the rigor and soundness of the proposed national standards, citing the fact that many credible experts have denounced them as lousy. [...]

Jay Greene wrote a new blog post: National Standards Nonsense Redux   3 months ago · View The revised set of proposed national standards were released last week .  I don’t know what else to write about this without sounding like a  broken record.  The bottom line is that this is a really dangerous movement that is receiving support from some people who should know better. As we’ve already pointed out at JPGB, there is [...]

Jay Greene wrote a new blog post: Look in the Mirror   4 months, 4 weeks ago · View Making the Grade: The Economic Evolution of American School Districts by William A. Fischel University of Chicago Press, 2009, $55; 304 pages. How did American schools come to be structured as they are, with age-graded schools in relatively autonomous school districts and school calendars that begin in August and end in June? Look in the mirror, suggests [...]

Jay Greene wrote a new blog post: Reformer’s Disease   4 months, 4 weeks ago · View I think I’ve discovered a new medical disorder that I call Reformer’s Disease.  Good and smart people involved in education reform can easily be stricken with this disorder in which they visualize a desirable reform policy and then imagine that they can simply impose that policy on our education system and that it will come out [...]

Jay Greene wrote a new blog post: National Standards Nonsense   6 months 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 [...]

Jay Greene wrote a new blog post: The Case for Special Education Vouchers   10 months ago · View An interview with Jay Greene about vouchers for disabled kids is available here. The big battles over school vouchers in American education have focused on programs serving low-income children who live in urban areas . Milwaukee’s program, begun in 1990, is the biggest and oldest in the country, and the District of Columbia effort, funded by the federal government, has [...]

Jay Greene wrote a new blog post: The Odd Couple   3 years ago · View Checked: Charles Murray, “Intelligence in the Classroom,” Wall Street Journal , January 16, 2007; Richard Rothstein, Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic, and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap (Economic Policy Institute, 2004) Checked by Jay P. Greene Welfare critic and American Enterprise Institute fellow Charles Murray and former union organizer and New York Times columnist Richard Rothstein don’t usually have much [...]

Jay Greene wrote a new blog post: Debunking a Special Education Myth   3 years, 6 months ago · View Can spiraling special education costs explain why educational achievement remained stagnant over the past three decades while real education spending more than doubled? Policy makers, education researchers, and school district officials often make this claim. Special education students—goes the argument—are draining resources away from regular education students. In 1975, the federal government enacted the Education of [...]