Free Republic

THERE is no shortage of bad news for the White House these days. The Washington press corps is on death watch outside the house of Karl Rove, George Bush's chief adviser, and the car bombs continue to explode across Iraq. Yet last Thursday also saw some rare good news. It is buried in a pretty obscure place, in a report published by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. But it has some big implications—not only for Mr Bush's much-maligned claim that he is a different sort of conservative, but also for the future health of American society. The National Assessment...

This week a new empirical study claiming to show that public schools do a better job than private schools has made a big media splash. But the study is deeply misleading. The authors make claims their statistical method can’t possibly justify. And if you guessed that the study got off the ground with help from the educational status quo, you’d be right. If there’s one thing education research has shown, it’s that private schools do a better job than public schools. The consensus in favor of this among empirical studies is as strong as on anything in education-policy research. Indeed,...

Our competitive American nature makes it difficult to be out of first place in the world for long. But that’s where we have been in education and we’re doing something about it legislatively. One of the hallmarks of the new national “No Child Left Behind” legislation, written to improve education, is the measurement of student academic achievement. To fulfill this new mandate every State developed rigorous achievement standards and enlisted professional testing companies to prepare subject matter test questions. These tests purport to measure current status and learning growth that validates the States’ standards. Every student at specific grade levels...

Not since the golden age of "Looney Tunes" has bad news been met with such hand-rubbing glee. This week, the American Federation of Teachers informed the media that students in some charter schools across the country were actually underperforming their peers in regular public schools. In a "gotcha" moment, the group announced it had culled the results from numbers "buried" in data released by the U.S. Education Department — numbers that had gone largely unnoticed. [snip] The [NAEP] data in question this week tested a sample of students in seven states. But there are now some 3,000 charter schools educating...

Reg Weaver, President of the National Education Association, took to the podium in Boston this week to say that John Kerry was his man. And why not? Nearly one in 10 of the delegates to this week's Democratic convention belongs to a teachers union. ... The little scheduling snafu notwithstanding, if you're a teachers union leader, what's not to like in a candidate who has called for "fully funding education, no questions asked?" ... When we cross-referenced spending increases with the National Assessment of Educational Progress reading scores, we found virtually no link between spending and performance. ... Surely it's...

"No school left behind by a few absentees" was the recent headline of a news story that told of how President Bush's "No Child Left Behind" education bill is being "tweaked" because of its requirement that all students must eventually pass federally mandated tests when, in fact, nearly 300 middle and high schools in New Jersey fell short. In the third "adjustment" to the law since the start of this year, Rod Paige, US Secretary of Education, announced in March that schools would be allowed to "average their participation rates" over three years. This takes into account that some students...

Education should be about children, not partisan politics. Yet, sadly, there has been a lot of political posturing on this issue lately. It may be inevitable during an election year. I admit that last week I, too, ratcheted up the debate with a very poor word choice to describe the leadership of the nation's largest teachers union. I chose my words carelessly, and I am truly sorry for the hurt and confusion they caused. I especially want to be clear on one point. As ill-considered as my words were, my disappointment was directed only -- and I mean only --...

A patchwork of state standards is failing to produce high school graduates who are prepared either for college or for work, three education policy organizations say in a new report. The solution, they say, is to adopt rigorous national standards that will turn the high school diploma into a "common national currency." "For too many graduates, the American high school diploma signifies only a broken promise," the groups, which favor standardized testing to improve education, say. Working through what they call the American Diploma Project, the organizations — Achieve Inc., the Education Trust and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation —...

This article pertains to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg (NC) public schools, but it is applicable to many other public school systems. A great deal of attention is being given to "the gap," but less to overall achievement. I wonder why... A coalition of activists gathered at the Marshall Park statue of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Thursday and urged Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools to close longstanding test-score gaps between minority and white students. The recent release of CMS's first-ever results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often known as the nation's report card, highlighted that gap: White students were three to five times...

<p>The racial achievement gap in education is the major civil rights issue of our time. But the old solutions won't make the grade.</p> <p>THE STUDENT BODY of Cedarbrook Middle School in a Philadelphia suburb is one-third black, two-thirds white. The town has a very low poverty rate, good schools, and a long-established black middle class. But in an eighth-grade advanced algebra class that a reporter visited in June 2001, there was not a single black student. The class in which the teacher was explaining that the 2 in number 21 stands for 20, though, was 100 percent black. A few black students were taking accelerated English, but no whites were sitting in the English class that was learning to identify verbs.</p>

The High Rate Of High School Graduate Failure (July 9, 2003)Who Really Failed: Students Or The System? by Phyllis Schlafly All over the country, students, their parents and teachers are in an uproar about the tens of thousands who flunked the test designated as the requirement for high school graduation. Threats of withholding diplomas have brought out accusations, recriminations, and even angry mobs. States have devised various ways to deal with this crisis. Award the diplomas anyway, stonewall the complainers, keep the students in school an extra year, postpone the deadline to 2004 or even 2006, lower the standards, lower...

Broadman & Holman, the publisher of my latest novel, "The Jericho Sanction," sent me out on the road this week to promote the book. It occurred to me as I was skimming news stories about America’s youngsters returning to school that if high school students were our "target audience," a sufficient number of them would not be able to read the words on the pages. Nor would their teachers. A great disservice is being done to the young people of this country when it comes to preparing them intellectually for the challenges that lie ahead. When I was a student...

In rare moments when Congress isn't preoccupied with the war, taxes or prescription drugs, Congress is worrying that American students don't know any American history. Congress is right to worry because this is true, but it doesn't follow that the federal government is capable of remedying the problem. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the Nation's Report Card, reported that less than half of high school seniors demonstrate even a basic grasp of history. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, in a report called "Losing America's Memory: Historical Illiteracy in the 21st Century," charged that 55 colleges...

Teaching History: Fact Or Fiction? by Phyllis Schlafly Posted Aug 1, 2003 In rare moments when Congress isn’t preoccupied with the war, taxes or prescription drugs, Congress is worrying that American students don’t know any American history. Congress is right to worry because this is true, but it doesn’t follow that the federal government is capable of remedying the problem. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the Nation’s Report Card, reported that less than half of high school seniors demonstrate even a basic grasp of history. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, in a report called Losing...

Accountability, choice pay off By Greg Forster and Marcus A. Winters The U.S. Department of Education recently released the latest round of reading scores from its national testing program. The results show impressive gains in Florida. This gives us some important confirmation that students in Florida are seeing real improvement under the education reforms of the past few years. ...Florida ranks fifth in improvement in fourth-grade reading out of 37 states for which scores are available both in 2002 and in 1998, the last time the reading test was given. Florida's improvement in eighth-grade reading scores was even more impressive,...

The NAEP (National Assesment of Educational Progress) 2002 Reading results were released yesterday. Department of Defense Schools are very good indeed, and seem to almost eliminate the racial gaps in reading, particularly the Hispanic one. It should also make it clear that members of the armed forces seem to be either peculiarly intelligent, or they breed intelligent children. California does very badly, BTW, and Texas does quite well, particularly for Hispanics. % over basic DOD schools 8th grade - Black - 80 Hispanic - 85 White - 92 US 8th grade Black - 54 Hispanic - 56 White - 83...