If you thought the reading wars were over, think again. Igniting the latent feud between the advocates of whole language and phonics is President Bush’s federal program, Reading First.
Five can be a difficult birthday. Just ask the architects of President Bush's landmark federal law, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which turned five this past Monday, January 8th.
The New Year is upon us, prompting a look at the year ahead. For education reformers, this year will bring a mix of the old and the new, as lawmakers bridge the gap between the lingering stalemates of 2006 and the policy innovations of 2007.
As 2006 draws to a close, education reformers are already looking ahead to the coming year. What ideas will ignite debate in 2007? One perennially combustible issue – education funding – is sure to get even hotter. Leading the pack of financial reforms is the concept of weighted student funding.
Five years have passed since 9/11 – a fateful day that changed the course of history. This past Monday night, President Bush commemorated 9/11’s anniversary with an address to the nation, calling our war against terror the “decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century, and the calling of our generation.”
SAT scores for 2006 were released this week, sounding off yet more alarms about high school performance. Nationally, SAT scores dropped by an average of 7 points – the sharpest decline in 31 years.
Charter schools are the foster children of the public school “family.” Who will own them? As innovative, public schools, they certainly can’t claim kinship with the state’s private schools. And unlike their traditional public school siblings, they have no bureaucratic sugar daddy to safeguard their financial well-being.
Parents need to make a concerted effort to rescue factual U.S. history from the make-believe history taught today by revisionists.
RALEIGH — Two recent nationwide studies have examined curriculum and teaching practices in K-12 English and math, and find that even the best states often come up short. The companion studies, “The State of State Math Standards” and “The State of State English Standards,” were both sponsored by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. North Carolina’s B in English placed it on the “honor roll” of only 20 states that earned an A or a B in that subject. The state’s C in math is well above the national average of D, but a “big decline” compared to 2000. NC scores were higher than the national scores in both subjects.
