News Archives – June 2008
June 19, 2008 – New York Times – “2 School Entrepreneurs Lead the Way on Change”
Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America, and her husband Richard Barth, CEO of the Knowledge Is Power Program, are a power couple in the world of education, seeking to reshape the United States’ educational landscape by creating new schools, training better principals and getting more smart young teachers into needy classrooms.
June 18, 2008 – The Washington Post – “States eye uniform graduation rate reporting”
U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings in April proposed new rules requiring states to assign students a unique ID number to track the individual from ninth grade through graduation, or until that student drops out. Currently, graduation rates vary across the states, making state-by-state comparisons difficult. Secretary Spellings' proposal aims to make that process easier and more accurate within the next five years.
June 18, 2008 – New York Times – “Report Sees Cost in Some Academic Gains”
A new study by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a research organization in Washington, argues that the nation’s focus on helping students who are furthest behind may have produced a Robin Hood effect, yielding steady academic gains for low-achieving students in recent years at the expense of top students. Susan Traiman, director of education policy at the Business Roundtable, a group that represents business executives, said the challenge was to improve the ability of schools to educate students across a range of levels. She said, “We’re producing progress at the bottom, and we need to maintain that, but we need to ratchet up the performance of students at every achievement level if we’re going to be competitive.”
