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My month as Slate's resident Schoolhouse Rocker comes to an end today, and so with this post I hang up my blogger's keyboard. (Not entirely, actually; for the last few weeks I've been maintaining a bare-bones book blog for news about Whatever It Takes, and I'll keep that one going indefinitely.)
I'm grateful to my editors at Slate for giving me ...
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After my post on cheating went up on Monday, a few readers wrote to remind me of a classic work of cheating economics, ''Rotten Apples: An Investigation of the Prevalence and Predictors of Teacher Cheating,'' by Harvard economist Brian A. Jacob and Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt, which was prominently featured in Freakonomics, the best-selling ...
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I've long been impressed by the accomplishments of Achievement First, the charter-school network that grew out of Amistad Academy, a middle school founded in 1999 in New Haven, Conn., by Doug McCurry, an educator, and Dacia Toll, then a recent graduate of Yale Law School.
Amistad has always served a low-income, high-minority population—a ...
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The new union-friendly charter school in the Bronx I wrote about last week is not the only big project that Green Dot Public Schools has taken on this fall. The other is the attempted transformation of Locke High School in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. The school, which currently has about 2,500 students, has long been notorious as ...
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One potential problem with basing teacher compensation in part on test scores is that it gives teachers an incentive not just to ''teach to the test,'' but to game the test completely. Because of strict accountability measures imposed in Texas in the 1990s by then-Gov. George W. Bush and Rod Paige, the Houston school superintendent, test scores ...
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Speaking of KIPP:
In Whatever It Takes, in one of the chapters on the Promise Academy middle school, I describe the impact of the KIPP schools in the Bronx and Harlem on the Promise Academy’s leaders and staff. This was during the first few years of the Harlem Children Zone’s middle school, which were a struggle, and those KIPP ...
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In Wednesday's post, I mentioned a new study of the KIPP middle schools in the San Francisco Bay Area. I still haven't read the whole study (it's 140 pages), but I've read a good chunk, along with a report from the San Francisco Chronicle and one from the San Francisco Examiner. The study shows mixed results, and they're mixed in an intriguing ...
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In my post last Friday on the Harlem Children's Zone (the subject of my new book), I referred briefly to the difficulties that the organization's charter middle school, the Promise Academy, faced while I was reporting in Harlem. On Sunday, I received an e-mail from a reader, a teacher named Derek, who had just finished the book and asked if he ...
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The divide between the teachers unions and the charter-school crowd often seems unbridgeable. At an education-reform forum in Denver last month, on the eve of the Democratic Convention, Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark and a member of the pro-charter Education Equality Project, spoke out against the unions, noting how ''vicious'' they can be:
Ten ...
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The reason I think the Harlem Children's Zone is so important—the reason I wrote a whole book about the program—is that I think it's the closest thing we have to a model for the kind of collaboration I was referring to yesterday.What Geoffrey Canada has constructed in Harlem is a comprehensive set of integrated programs that currently serve 8,000 ...