October 2, 2008

The Red Tape Report: An Exploratory Study of the Regulatory Interference Faced by School Leaders in Five States

by Matthew Carr, Nathan Gray, Marc Holley

In public education today, individual schools are accountable—under the federal No Child Left Behind Act as well as myriad state and local policy regimens—for their students’ achievement and other vital outcomes. Increasingly, school leaders find their own job tenure and compensation tied to those outcomes as well. But do they possess the authority they need to lead their schools to heightened performance? Numerous surveys (conducted by Public Agenda, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, and others) suggest that many school leaders feel they do not. Thus an important public policy question arises: what factors help or hinder school leaders in exercising their authority—and in which areas?

September 15, 2008

Accelerating Student Learning in Ohio: Five Policy Recommendations for Strengthening Public Education in the Buckeye State

As Gov. Ted Strickland concludes his 12-city "Conversation on Education" tour to gather ideas for reforming public education in Ohio, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute has put forth a report of five recommendations designed to keep improvements in the Buckeye State's public schools on track toward three critical goals: 1) maximizing the talents of every child; 2) producing graduates as good as any in the world; and 3) closing the persistent academic gaps that continue between rich and poor, and black and white and brown.

August 25, 2008

Education Olympics 2008: The Games in Review

by Amy Ballard, Stafford Palmieri, Amber Winkler, Ph.D.

This report has a simple aim: to present results from international assessments so readers can judge for themselves how American students stack up globally. It's intended to be a standalone supplement to our "Education Olympics" web event held between August 8th and August 22nd, 2008 (see edolympics.net). It shows how the U.S. has performed internationally in education in recent years, and it provides a glimpse of how education looks in several top-performing nations.

August 15, 2008

Sweating the Small Stuff: Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism

by David Whitman

The most exciting innovation in education policy in the last decade is the emergence of highly effective schools in our nation’s inner cities, schools where disadvantaged teens make enormous gains in academic achievement. In this book, David Whitman takes readers inside six of these secondary schools and reveals the secret to their success: they are paternalistic.

June 18, 2008

High-Achieving Students in the Era of No Child Left Behind

by Ann Duffett, Steve Farkas, Tom Loveless

This publication reports the results of the first two (of five) studies of a multifaceted research investigation of the state of high-achieving students in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) era. Part I examines achievement trends for high-achieving students since the early 1990s; Part II reports on teachers' own views of how schools are serving high-achieving pupils in the NCLB era.