More NCLB Fizzle, New NCTQ Report…And, More Scopes!

A helpful reader sent a link to this NPR item about a school in Chicago. Interesting story…

In Virginia, the anti-No Child Left Behind revolt fizzles. Across the country — for a variety of reasons — this is a story of a dog that didn’t bark, some enterprising reporter will write that up sooner or later…Virginia’s SOL program is excellent yet NCLB critics in Virginia would have more credibility if they’d at least acknowledge and highlight the approximately 20 point gaps between black and white students in reading and math and the smaller, though still significant gaps between white and Hispanic students. Though positive in many ways, one thing that Virginia’s SOLs did not do is explicitly hold schools accountable for gap closing.

Also re NCLB, This Week in Education writes up a new NCLB memo from the NEA that’s floating around. The nut? About 10,000 schools in school improvement because of No Child. Sounds high until you consider that there were about 8,000 under the previous 1994 version of the law (though a Department of Ed analysis in the late 1990s found that only half got any assistance at all, fewer still meaningful help). Neither the memo nor This Week points the historical context out. The difference now, of course, is that being in school improvement actually means something.

Very provocative piece on ideology in higher education from The Chronicle of Higher Ed.

The National Council on Teacher Quality has released a handy primer (pdf) about policies that can help or hinder efforts to improve teaching.

More Scopes!

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