Last week President Obama announced plans to require all states to certify that their standards were “college- and career-ready” in order to obtain their portion of $14.5 billion in federal education funds. This is the single largest pot of education money in the federal budget–it’s previously been called Title I of the Elementary and Secondary [...]
All Posts Tagged: 'No Child Left Behind'
Engaging Elephants in Education Reform
I recently read Switch: How to change things when change is hard, a soon-to-be released book by brothers Chip and Dan Heath. Switch is in many ways a typical org/psych book filled with real-world metaphors to explain why change is so hard, and inspirational stories to show that the author’s theory of change can work [...]
Comparable Difficulties
New York City is full of high profile, compelling education controversies. Mayoral control! Rubber room! Budget cuts! Swine flu! So it won’t be surprising if little attention is paid to the recent announcement that a plan to phase in the use of actual teacher salaries in the city’s Fair Student Funding budgeting system has been [...]
The Other Lake Wobegon
There are a lot of cute references to No Child Left Behind as some sort of Lake Wobegon law, because of its provision that all children must be “proficient” by 2014. The reference is to Garrison Keillor’s famous book by the same name, where all the children from the town of Lake Wobegon are above [...]
Late Choices
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan today released a letter to chief state school officers regarding regulations passed back in October. In what is no April Fool’s joke, his letter rolls back a regulation that could have helped provide parents of children enrolled in unsuccessful schools the option of choosing a better one.
No Child Left Behind [...]
Tennessee Growth Models: A Response from Dr. William Sanders
Ed. Note: Last week, Education Sector published a report titled “Are We There Yet? What Policymakers Can Learn About Tennessee’s Growth Model.” The report examines Tennessee’s model for using measures and projections of annual student learning growth as a means of determining whether schools are making “Adequate Yearly Progress” under the No Child Left Behind [...]
Giving the Game Away
The No Child Left Behind Act is often criticized as creating “perverse incentives” or “unintended consequences” whereby seemingly virtuous policies inadvertently cause more harm than good by incenting bad behavior. It’s a convenient man-bites-policy-dog way to frame a news story, and it allows people to preface denunciations of the law with some variant of “Of [...]
Viva Las Vegas
I did a radio interview with KNPR today (the “N” actually stands for “Nevada” and was issued a long time ago, well before they knew what a great call sign that would turn out to be) focused on the Clark County (Las Vegas) school district’s latest results under NCLB. Here’s the beginning of the story [...]
Exaggeration
The Post story on the Reading First study begins: “Students enrolled in a $6 billion federal reading program that is at the heart of the No Child Behind law…”
Wait. It’s only a $6 billion program if you add up the total funding over six years (I think, I’m writing this on a plane). That’s a [...]
A New Playbook
The Rockefeller Institute of Government is a respected in-house think tank of the New York State University system that specializes in state/federal collaborations in public policy. When a federalism free-for-all broke out in the wake of the federal No Child Left Behind Act’s requirement that states set academic standards and hold their schools accountable for [...]
Spellings Stands Firm
I went to the National Press Club today to listen to a speech from the Secretary of Education. I was at a similar event a while back–has to have been more than a year ago–and she seemed more confident this time around. Given enough questions and enough time, you can tell if someone’s just a [...]
Democracts and NCLB
Sam Dillon’s Times front-pager on NCLB-bashing among Democratic presidential candidates came out a few days before I hit the road to spend Christmas with the fam, but apparently I’m not the only one who didn’t get to it until after the New Year. As Eduwonk notes, the buried lede in that piece was the major [...]
Kevin Carey Discusses the “Pangloss Index”
Kevin Carey, Education Sector Policy Director, discusses his “Pangloss Index,” which he uses to describe states’ failure to accurately rank their progress under NCLB.
The publication discussed in this podcast was made possible by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York. The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author.
Leaving Birmingham Behind
People have their differences of opinion about No Child Left Behind, but even the law’s supporters would concede that it sets extremely ambitious goals for improvement. NCLB requires states to establish a series of escalating performance targets for schools and districts, rising from wherever they were when the law was enacted in 2002 to 100 [...]
Lowering Student Loan Default Rates: What One Consortium of Historically Black Institutions Did to Succeed 
College and Career-Ready: Using Outcomes Data to Hold High Schools Accountable for Student Success
03/05/10 | Andrew Rotherham's reaction to New York as a Race to the Top finalist is mentioned on National Journal.
03/04/10 | Andrew Rotherham defends the U.S. Senate's filibuster rule in a column for the New York Daily News.
03/04/10 | Kevin Carey is quoted on college tuition increases in a CNN article.
03/02/10 | Chad Aldeman's False Fronts report generated a news article in Inside Higher Ed.
03/02/10 | Kevin Carey guestblogs about college accreditation on Higher Ed Watch.
03/02/10 | Chad Aldeman's False Fronts report generated a news article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.