For those who don’t fully understand the issue of inflated graduation rate reports by state governments, here is a video produced by the Bluegrass Institute that details how Kentucky overstates its graduation rates by as much as 12 percent. If accurate school data were horses…
Five decades ago, the states below the Mason-Dixon line spurred the first modern major efforts to reform American public education. Concerned about low educational attainment, especially among its rural and poor black and white students, governors such as governors such as Lamar Alexander (a future U.S. Senator) and future presidents Bill Clinton and George W. [...]
As Research Consultant for the Schott Foundation for Public Education, Michael Holzman has helped shed light on the impact of low teacher quality and systemic academic failure on the educational and economic prospects of young black men. Through his research, Holzman and Schott have done plenty to show in numbers the depths of the nation’s [...]
As U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan has taken on one of the nation’s most-pressing challenges: Improving the quality of public education — especially for the poorest students. And so far, through the Race to the Top effort and the proposed revamp of the No Child Left Behind Act, he has (imperfectly) forced many Americans [...]
What is happening today in the dropout nation — or what has been happening while your editor has been on the road: Amid last week’s woeful responses to the reading test results from the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress, Education Sector’s Chad Alderman offers a different perspective. He notes that if you break down [...]
Check out the Dropout Nation Twitter feed for instant news and updates on the reform of American public education. Here are some select tweets from March 15th: CS Monitor lists what could change w/#NoChikd/#ESEA reauth. http://bit.ly/9xOhCH #edreform #edpolicy # Gregory Kane: Forget firing teachers; instead, give kids #SchoolVouchers http://bit.ly/9q84dR #TQ #edreform #CentralFalls # Today’s maxim: [...]
Editor of Dropout Nation and Co-Author of "A Byte At the Apple: Rethhinking Education Data in the Post-NCLB Era". Conttributor to The American Spectator and Labor Watch. Author of "Left Behind: A Star Editorial Board series" and longtime editorialist on education and economic affairs.
With old-school civil rights groups complaining about President Barack Obama’s embrace of the school reform movement — and its commitment to improving the quality of education for all children — listen to this Dropout Nation Podcast from February on why their approach to educational equity doesn’t work. The only way educational equity will actually be […]
On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I offer some important steps towards recruiting and developing more high-quality teachers. Eliminating tenure, eliminating seniority-based benefits and embracing the use of student performance data — along with moves such as the dismissal of 241 poor-performing teachers last week by D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Miche […]
As part of a further discussion about the importance of Beltway school reformers to embrace the grassroots, here is a rewind of a February Dropout Nation Podcast on the subject. Inside-the-Beltway policymaking, important as it is, will mean nothing for improving the educational destinies of children if school reformers don’t reach out to urban groups […]