The issue before the justices involves whether public employees may press federal lawsuits when an adverse job action is based on subjective or malicious reasons targeted only at them.
The Forum for Education and Democracy report calls for moving away from k-12 tests and sanctions and, instead, do what other countries with high student achievement do.
Legislation authorizing a new alternative- teacher-certification process that supporters say could take less time and less money than the current path is on its way to Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt, a Republican who has supported the idea in the past.
It is disappointing that Education Week did not use this opportunity to include an article on the negative impact the No Child Left Behind Act has had on gifted education.
To the Editor: Your In Perspective article “Working Smarter by Working Together”(April 2, 2008), on the professional learning community at Adlai E. Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Ill., was a compelling description of how educators can organize themselves to learn from each other. Adult learning, however, should only be an interim goal. Professional learning communities will become just one more transitory innovation unless they narrowly focus their efforts on improving teacher performance and raising student achievement.
“The qualities of an effective mathematics teacher,” according to your front-page summary of findings from the National Mathematics Advisory Panel’s recent report, are “frustratingly elusive.”
They were hoping to more closely align teacher-tenure decisions with student test scores, but the mayor of New York City and other proponents of that idea got the opposite: a two-year ban.
• A chart accompanying a story in the April 9, 2008, issue of Education Week about a union-run institute focused on helping local teachers’ unions find ways to bring reform to themselves and their school districts should have said that Mark Simon served as the president of the Montgomery County Education Association in Maryland for two six-year terms between 1985 and 2003.
Larger expenditures on regular classroom instruction do lead to better performance, with higher teacher compensation showing the single largest effect, a study finds.
Students involved in service-learning programs report being more interested in their coursework and better motivated to do well in school, a report says.
As state leaders reassess the knowledge and skills needed to succeed in a competitive economy, they are weighing plans to gauge how their schools measure up against those of Singapore, South Korea, and Japan, as well as Finland and other European nations—all perennial leaders on international assessments.
Kathleen Kennedy Manzo & Sean Cavanagh, April 22, 2008
Today, a mounting database of results from international studies has made it possible for researchers to start exploring the relationship between education and economic growth in much more systematic ways than in 1983.
The push to ensure that all students, not just the academically gifted, take introductory algebra and do so earlier has gained widespread acceptance in U.S. schools over the quarter-century since A Nation at Risk advocated strengthening graduation requirements in math.
The persistent lack of significant improvement since publication of A Nation at Risk is owing to the unwavering persistence of the very ideas that caused the decline in the first place—the repudiation of a definite academic curriculum in the early grades, argues E.D. Hirsch Jr.
India's education landscape reveals that its image as a rising force in science and math fields is driven mostly by changes in the private school sector.
China’s education system has undergone significant changes over the past quarter-century, some brought into classrooms directly by government policy, others swept along by the rising tide of free-market reforms.
The education system has long been viewed as a model because of its strong performance on international-comparison tests, but among its citizens, schooling in the nation is seen as inadequate.
The European Union has its share of education successes with Finland outperforming the world on international exams and several other European countries scoring above the international average.
Kathleen Kennedy Manzo & Sean Cavanagh, April 22, 2008
One can debate whether a straight line can be traced from the release of A Nation at Risk in 1983 and the signing of the federal No Child Left Behind Act in 2002, argues Howard Gardner.
It remains unclear how long Texas state officials will be responsible for the schooling of the 416 children removed from a polygamist group's compound.
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