Spring 2006 / Vol. 6, No. 2
Getting Ahead by Staying Behind
An evaluation of Florida’s program to end social promotion
A Trip to the Rose Garden
I was 22 and straight out of my Teach For America training when I met Wendall. It was 1996, and he was an 11-year-old 6th grader in my very first class. He immediately caught my eye because he had a proclivity for being “off task.” I thought he might be suffering from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity [...]
The Joy of Gaming
Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter By Steven Johnson Riverhead Books, 2005, $23.95; 238 pages. As reviewed by Nathan Glazer Everything Bad Is Good for You. Is this title a joke? The subtitle suggests it could be. And the book’s epigraph is from the movie Sleeper, [...]
Muggles, Broomsticks, Quidditch, and Owls That Deliver Mail
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince By J. K. Rowling Scholastic Press, 2005, $29.99; 652 pages. As reviewed by Diane Ravitch Not long after the release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the sixth Harry Potter book, worldwide sales for the series topped 270 million copies. Not only has the Harry Potter series broken [...]
Tales from the Inside
Another Planet: A Year in the Life of a Suburban High School By Elinor Burkett HarperCollins, 2001, $12.95; 352 pages. Brief Intervals of Horrible Sanity: One Season in a Progressive School By Elizabeth Gold Tarcher/Penguin, 2003, $15.95; 336 pages. Class Dismissed: A Year in the Life of an American High School, a Glimpse into the [...]
A Setback in Dover
Last rites for Intelligent Design
Of Teacher Shortages and Quality
Good teaching—the kind that can routinely raise student achievement—is the most valuable of all education resources. When a teacher inspires, children learn, even when the building is antiquated, the Internet is missing, and classes are bigger than usual. So teacher quality matters. A lot. Yet the standard measure of quality today, the teaching credential or [...]
Savage Exaggerations
Checked: The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. Crown Publishers, 2005 Ordinary Resurrections: Children in the Years of Hope. Crown Publishers, 2000 Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools. Crown Publishers, 1991 Free Schools. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1972 Death at an Early Age. Penguin Group, 1967 Checked by Marcus A. Winters Jonathan Kozol [...]
Great Expectations
The Impact of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards
Breaking the Mold
It was the kind of defiant act that most school principals probably have contemplated wistfully at one time or another. Disgusted by what he and his staff considered to be poorly written, poorly stapled, and generally disorganized mandatory citywide exams sent to Fritsche Middle School by the Milwaukee Public Schools central office in the fall [...]
Is There a “Qualified Teacher” Shortage?
WASHINGTON—As American schools reopen, a 15-year effort to “professionalize” the job of teacher is running up against a strong counterforce—the urgent need to fill classroom vacancies. — Christian Science Monitor, August 26, 2002 The headlines in those early years of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) were consistently alarming. “As Standards Rise, Too Few Teachers,” was [...]
Déjà Vu All Over Again
Schools will operate in the future as they do now
Dramatic Growth is Possible
Until Thomas Friedman recently discovered otherwise, we believed the world was round. We also thought that phone calls had to travel through Ma Bell wires, and that your operator would be in Des Moines, not in New Delhi. Remember when we had just three daily television news programs, one with father Walter, and all at [...]
Our Schools in the Year 2030
How will they be different?
When Principals Rate Teachers
The best—and the worst—stand out
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