Education
The Reaction Against Ritalin During the 1990s, the U.S experienced an enormous increase in the prescribing of Ritalin and other psychotropic drugs to treat U.S. schoolchildren, primarily boys, diagnosed with attention deficit disorders.
Left Behind What? Framing an Appropriate Conservative Response to “No Child Left Behind” When I was extended the generous invitation to speak with you this evening, I was asked to discuss the “No Child Left Behind” education plan passed by Congress in December and signed into law earlier this month. I felt the best place to start was to ask the simple question, “Left Behind What?” What is this thing, this entity, that we as a society deem so valuable that we would not want anyone to be left out of it? Opportunity?
How School Choice Benefits The Urban Poor One-fourth of all American children entering the ninth grade fail to graduate from high school.1 That is bad enough, but a staggering 50% of all minority kids who enter ninth grade do not graduate.2 As Colorado education philanthropist Steve Schuck has observed, “[these] are appalling statistics.”
English Learners Not Left Behind With New Plan The education plan announced in November by House and Senate Conferees includes bold and unprecedented reforms of federal bilingual education programs. In fact, the nation’s more than 3.5 million English learners (three-quarters of whom are Spanish-speaking) stand to be among the biggest winners when President Bush signs the “No Child Left Behind” education plan into law, as he is expected to do in coming weeks.
Finding Keys to Teacher Quality Little noticed in the "No Child Left Behind" education reform bill that President Bush will sign into law early in 2002 is a shift toward greater autonomy for localities in how they use federal funds for attracting knowledgeable teachers into the classrooms.
Unlocking Options for Parents After 35 years of largely subsidizing failure, the federal government finally may require measurable academic results for the billions spent on public education. That’s the historic importance of an agreement by House-Senate Education Conferees that all states must test all children in grades 3-8 according to state-developed standards in core subjects. But the most significant reforms may prove to be the advances for parental choice and bilingual reform in the fine print of the massive bill that President George W. Bush sought as his top domestic priority.
Indispensable Tests: How a Value-Added Approach to School Testing Could Identify and Bolster Exceptional Teaching Most parents want the comparative information that tests supply about students, schools, and school districts. Tests also serve as a hedge against grade inflation, and help ensure that education standards are more than mere suggestions.
The Rise of Home Schooling Among African-Americans Significant growth in black families’ participation in home schooling is beginning to show up on the radar screens of researchers. The National Center for Education Statistics computed African-Americans as 9.9 percent of the 850,000 children the federal agency figured were being home-schooled nationally in 1999. Veteran home-schooling researcher Brian Ray figures blacks are currently about 5 percent of the 1.6 million to 2 million home-schooled children but he agrees that black home schooling is growing rapidly.
Lessons Learned from California’s Bilingual Reform Experience In 1998, the people of California marked a dramatic change of course for the state's English language learners, and passed Proposition 227. Arizonans followed their lead in 2000 with a similar initiative passed by a nearly two-to-one margin. The people of both states effectively voted to end bilingual education as it is known and taught across America, and to replace it with a one-year program of English immersion.
Candidates Disregard School Issue Plenty of evidence exists that Virginians are skeptical of the status quo that a government monopoly perpetuates in K-12 schooling and are open to fresh ideas about educating children...