Radio station WAMU in Washington, DC, today aired the final installment of journalist Dan Charles’s impressive four-part series on a year in the life of an urban school trying to leave its dismal history behind. Listen here.
All Posts Tagged: 'Urban Schools'
Worth Repeating
Matt Yglesias makes a point that can’t be made often enough (we make it here at least once a year): when you compare urban school districts on a common measure (the NAEP) and break the numbers out by socioeconomic status, some are much better than others. Which, to my mind, suggests that it’s reasonable to [...]
Free Advice
Eduwonkette writes:
In this month’s issue of Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, a new study by UT-Austin professor Julian Vasquez-Heilig and Linda Darling-Hammond, “Accountability Texas-Style: The Progress and Learning of Urban Minority Students in a High-Stakes Testing Context,” revisits the Houston miracle by analyzing years of student-level test score and graduation data (1995-2002). There’s no version [...]
Still More on the Progessive Solution
This back-and-forth between James Forman and Leo Casey, picking up on the conversation Sara and I started last week on the lack of progressive solutions to dysfunctional urban school systems, includes some worthwhile posts on both sides. Leo’s distinctions between corruption, patronage, and incompetence are legit, and he’s right to disparage silver-bullet free market solutions–although [...]
Culture Club
Over at EdWize, Peter Goodman complains that “the pathology of poverty” makes it difficult to motivate and educate kids like those on The Wire: “Poverty, the culture of the streets is not shed at the classroom door!! As teachers we can’t make the streets safer or construct better housing or more stable family life … [...]
The Wire Week Nine: The Beginning of the End
After a couple of very good but not great weeks, The Wire launches into the final third of the season with a vengeance.
First, I hope the foolishness with sticking students in 90-minute test prep classes, but then turning up the heat in order to keep them docile in said classes, apparently without considering that the [...]
Disappointment abounds
When I read the headline of this New York Times article (Leaving the City for the Schools, and Regretting It), I was excited – perhaps there was finally an article extolling some of the virtues of urban public schools. Yes, these schools have plenty of troubles and there are schools in NYC that any [...]
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
03/11/10 | Kevin Carey is quoted on the rising costs of education in The Economist.
03/10/10 | Chad Aldeman's False Fronts paper is quoted on Accuracy in Academia.
03/09/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on Federal Family Education Loan defaults on The Huffington Post.
03/09/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on loan origination on the Firedog Lake blog.
03/07/10 | Kevin Carey calls for a Race to the Top in higher education in a column in The Chronicle of Higher Education.