My granddaughter attends the Denver Language School, a charter school in the Denver Public Schools (DPS), where she is enrolled in the Mandarin immersion program. When I asked my son about this choice, he said that if China could someday…
Category Archives: English Learners
Typin’ and Cryin’: Goodbye NCLB AYP
January 17, 2012 – 7:00 am
The first round of eleven NCLB waiver applicants will soon learn whether their submissions are good enough to earn the Department of Education’s (ED) stamp of approval. When that happens, we will lose something very important to our education system…
ED Abandons ‘Same Cell’ Battle
November 30, 2011 – 3:01 pm
No, this is not about biology. This is about another quiet retreat in the Obama administration’s ESEA waiver package — a retreat that shows how much ground civil rights groups have lost in the education debate since the Republican takeover…
Another Brick in the Wall
November 7, 2011 – 3:35 pm
All over the world there are signs of unrest and discontent among people who feel they have no way to make a better life for themselves and their families. They look through the cracks of an ever-higher wall to those…
Spin and Waive
September 22, 2011 – 11:16 pm
As an experiment in insta-punditry, let’s make some quick predictions about the President’s Friday announcement on NCLB waivers. We know what to expect because Thursday, two “senior administration officials” held a background briefing with reporters to preview the speech. From…
Restructuring, Reform and Reality
September 20, 2011 – 2:08 pm
In a recent eduwonk post regarding NCLB’s complex and controversial school restructuring options, Andrew Rotherham wrote, “When it comes to tackling these problems, we have a serious failure of creativity, imagination, and, of course, political will. That’s not this law’s…
This Will Be 5 Percent of Your Grade…
September 15, 2011 – 10:01 am
If you were an 8th-grade teacher and you told your class that a 20-page term paper would be 5 percent of their grade, what kind of results would you expect? Being rational time-allocators, most of your students would probably turn…