Here is some recent coverage of education issues on washingtonpost.com.
http://washingtonpost.com/education. Click through after each excerpt to read the entire piece and post comments.
The Post also has a Facebook presence dedicated to its education coverage.
http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?topic=15...26.587067717..1
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To get federal funds, schools must apply stronger measures to struggling schools
If a public school struggles year after year, is the solution to shut it down? Fire everyone and start over? Hand the reins to a contractor? Or help teachers and principals raise their game?
As the federal government offers school systems an unprecedented $3.5 billion to revive schools, a huge increase for a reform program launched with $125 million in 2007, policymakers increasingly are prescribing stronger medicine for the lowest performers.
In years past, educators generally opted for the least invasive remedies. Most shied from state takeovers, shutdowns, conversion to a charter school and the like.
Instead, they favored measures such as teaming a principal with a "turnaround specialist," who would offer coaching and encouragement. The 2002 federal No Child Left Behind law, enacted under President George W. Bush, allowed the less-aggressive approaches.
Now the Obama administration is pushing a harder line for the weakest schools. School systems that want a share of the federal aid have four options:
-- Turnaround: replacing a school principal and at least half the staff;
-- Restart: converting a school to an autonomous charter school or hiring an education management organization to run it;
-- Shutdown: closing a school and dispersing its students; or,
-- Transformation: replacing a principal, improving teacher effectiveness and taking other steps for comprehensive reform.
Systems with nine or more of the weakest schools may use the transformation option in no more than half of them. That proviso significantly tightens the Bush-era accountability policy.
Will it work?
"In general, we don't have much evidence on what it takes to create an alternative to a failed school," said Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst, a Brookings Institution analyst who oversaw education research in the Bush administration. "There's not a lot of case studies that you can point to. It's not that [Obama officials] are ignoring evidence. It's just that there isn't much evidence to go on." ...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...9122701521.html
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Why Duncan's record in Chicago is a problem
It’s an all too familiar story.
Someone gets appointed to a big job because he supposedly got great results at his old job.
It doesn’t take too long for people to realize that the supposedly great results weren’t so great--but the boss has taken the new organization on the same route anyway.
This is the story of Rod Paige as education secretary under then president George Bush early in this decade, and now, according to a Washington Post story today by my colleague Nick Anderson, of Arne Duncan as education secretary under President Obama.
Paige, a former superintendent of Houston’s schools who earned his doctorate in physical education, came under tough criticism for his record in that Texas school district when it became known that the progress made in keeping kids in school appeared to be a statistical trick of under-reporting by high schools.
Now we have Duncan, who the president knew for years in Chicago and hailed as having made enormous progress during his seven years as Chicago school chief, starting in 2001.
Anderson tells us that Duncan tried a lot of approaches to turn around the city’s struggling schools. He got rid of staff, brought on people who are supposed to be experts in turning around schools and shut down those schools thought to be impossible to fix.
There were more efforts, too, but you get the idea. He tried a lot of things.
Some may have helped in some places, but nowhere was there a great turnaround like the one he now demands from other cities.
When, for example, Obama appointed Duncan in December 2008, he said standardized test scores had risen in Chicago’s elementary schools by 29 percentage points during Duncan’s seven years as superintendent.
Well, not so much, it turned out.
According to one research group that issued a report this year, the real improvement was only about 8 percentage points.
And while Obama said that Duncan had improved Chicago’s dropout rate during each of his seven years as Chicago schools boss, which appears to be true, he didn’t mention that 70 percent of 11th graders still fail to meet state standards. Oh, and about half of Chicago’s kids who attend non-selective-enrollment high schools still drop out.
Another research group found that Duncan’s closure of low-performing schools did little good for students, Anderson reported. ...
My point? Progress is hard. Progress is uneven. Progress takes different approaches.
No one person has the answer for everybody. ...
This is why so many people are upset at Duncan -- especially those who had hoped Obama would change the educational dynamic of Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” era, with its emphasis on high-stakes standardized tests and charter schools.
They had hoped Duncan would take the country away from NCLB. Instead, he seems to be ratcheting it up, based on a record in Chicago that is hardly shining.
So here we go again. Most unfortunately.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sh...in-chicago.html
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Education Secretary Arne Duncan's legacy as Chicago schools chief questioned
CHICAGO -- Soon after Arne Duncan left his job as schools chief here to become one of the most powerful U.S. education secretaries ever, his former students sat for federal achievement tests. This month, the mathematics report card was delivered: Chicago trailed several cities in performance and progress made over six years.
Miami, Houston and New York had higher scores than Chicago on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Boston, San Diego and Atlanta had bigger gains. Even fourth-graders in the much-maligned D.C. schools improved nearly twice as much since 2003.
The federal readout is just one measure of Duncan's record as chief executive of the nation's third-largest system. Others show advances on various fronts. But the new math scores signal that Chicago is nowhere near the head of the pack in urban school improvement, even though Duncan often cites the successes of his tenure as he crusades to fix public education.
"Chicago is not the story of an education miracle," said Chester E. Finn Jr. of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education think tank in Washington. "It is, however, the story of a large urban system that has made some gains and has made some promising structural changes." ...
For more than seven years, starting in 2001, Duncan tried to rejuvenate his city's struggling schools: jettisoning staff, hiring turnaround specialists, shutting down those deemed beyond hope. He pushed a back-to-basics curriculum, spawned dozens of charter schools and experimented with performance pay. ...
'Focused on outcomes'
Yet questions have arisen this year about the magnitude of Duncan's accomplishments. The Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, which represents business, professional, education and cultural leaders, concluded in June that gains on state test scores were inflated when Illinois relaxed passing standards and that too many students still drop out of high school or graduate unprepared for college. The Consortium on Chicago School Research, a nonpartisan group at the University of Chicago, reported in October that Duncan's closure of low-performing schools often shuffled students into comparable schools, yielding little or no academic benefit. ...
In 2003, President George W. Bush's education secretary, Rod Paige, faced similar, perhaps stronger, criticism when his much-highlighted record as leader of Houston's schools in the 1990s came under scrutiny. Questions were raised that year about the reliability of Houston's reported dropout rates. ...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...ST2009122901085
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The truth about Arne Duncan and the Chicago schools
My colleague Nick Anderson, the Post's national education reporter, has done a wonderfully balanced and nuanced job of answering a question I am often asked: If Arne Duncan is such a hotshot education secretary, then why are the Chicago schools he once led so bad? ...
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/class-str..._duncan_an.html