Soon after taking office in 2007, Washington, D.C., Mayor Adrian Fenty took over the D.C. Public School System. In short order, he appointed Michelle Rhee as Chancellor of the underperforming, unsafe, and neglected school district. Rhee was viewed from the beginning as a force capable of improving a school system …
It’s not exactly news that the federal No Child Left Behind program has encouraged the states to define proficiency downward in order to avoid triggering various federal sanctions. But judging from Education Next’s recent grading of state proficiency standards, the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program is no fix. Here’s …
Results from the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading assessment have just been released and are, well, uninspiring. Reading achievement, despite significant increases in spending over the past few decades and increasing federal policy intervention in the past decade, has remained flat. The lackluster results indicate that the …