- New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s at it again, stumping in Brooklyn churches on behalf of a tax break aimed at kids attending private schools. The initiative would extend middle class families credits of up to $500 for each child enrolled in private schools, including parochial schools; donors to nonprofits funding scholarships to such institutions would also receive some relief. Unfortunately, it’s a great policy in search of a credible advocate: Cuomo’s recent tumble in the polls has been directly tied to his education policies, especially his insistence on chaining teacher evaluations and tenure even more closely to standardized tests. That’s really not a great idea (though it’s probably not as bad as interfering with your own ethics commission). The proposal now has Cardinal Timothy Dolan praying for it, which should help its prospects. But the governor’s approval ratings could need something even stronger than divine intervention.
- So do the students of the Normandy Schools Collaborative, a Missouri district that demonstrates perfectly why some parents feel they have to desperately scrimp to help their children escape from public schools. A heartbreaking article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch details one diligent student’s lost year at a high school awash in dysfunction: unqualified teachers addressing sleeping students, stagnant academic growth, and a disciplinary crisis that makes learning virtually impossible. The state attempted a bold takeover last year in an effort to turn the ship around, replacing half the staff and doing away with the elected school board, but the number of students applying to transfer out of the district actually climbed by 50 percent. As Fordham’s most recent research study proved, school closures are usually a superior alternative to doomed turnaround efforts. The battle of Normandy demands a change in strategy.
- Of course, Missouri is hardly the only place where students are stranded in a wasteland of malign neglect. In Washington, D.C., former high school math teacher Caleb Rossiter has turned his tales of classroom terror into a disturbing book, Ain’t Nobody Learnin’ Nothin’. After being faced with the staggering unpreparedness of the seniors in his pre-calculus class, Rossiter decided to interrogate the teachers who had passed them up the academic ladder. The exchanges with those educators, along with his other observations on failing schools, paint a picture of grade inflation in the District that will be hard to shake.
- But all is not doom and gloom in the world of public education. A new study conducted in ninety-one English schools has uncovered a surefire way to boost learning and improve performance on standardized tests. The benefits accrue disproportionately to poorly performing and special education students, and reformers don’t even need to adopt any painful curricular changes. All they have to do is ban cell phones, a method that researchers claim will effectively lengthen the school year by five days. It’s admittedly not an intuitive step: We know that teens’ love of video games can actually make them better students, and all that texting in class is a marvelous way of building social capital. But keeping them focused on the lesson at hand could yield even greater benefits. Who would have guessed?
Topics:
