The kindness project for schools

[...]... work of improving their underperforming schools Schools focused their resources on improving academic achievement Alerted to the problems in their schools, communities rallied to the aid of lowperforming schools Thousands of Floridians volunteered their time to tutor struggling students Improving academic performance—and thus the school’s grade—became a focus New York City became the second jurisdiction... 2013 The case for parental choice for children with disabilities is especially powerful District lobbyists have claimed for decades that state funding for special needs children does not cover their costs Taking them at their word regarding their need to shift funds out of general education and into special education, these individuals have no basis for complaint if a special needs child leaves with their... was not reflected in the rankings.5 Table 2 shows the year-by-year scores for charter schools in each state Maine came in strong with new legislation in 2012, which they improved in 2013, resulting in the second-highest ranked law in the nation Hawaii delivers the biggest point gain in the ranking with a huge improvement to their legislation in 2013 Notice also that new kids on the block—Maine and Washington—now... included the story of Greg Forster betting The Washington Post columnist Jay Mathews dinner over whether state lawmakers would pass seven or more new or expanded private choice programs Forster nearly tripled up on the minimum requirement in 2011 and easily passed the hurdle again in another blockbuster year for private school choice in 2012 The Report Card proposes to use this wager as the unofficial standard... seen whether other charter operators will bother to go through the expense and trouble of applying for a charter in Nashville, thus possibly creating a divergence between the apparent and the de facto quality of the Tennessee charter school law Passive resistance to state policy only rarely proves so obvious Analysts may praise the quality of state academic standards in a state, but out in the schools, ... been making average international achievement In other words, the world is not standing still waiting for the United States to get its K-12 act together There are countries that spend less, score higher and have made faster academic progress than America The forthcoming pages, therefore, show which states have made progress from 2003 to 2013 and also the extent of that progress 24 Report Card on American... love: Florida’s schools began a steady process of improvement, both on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test and on NAEP (a source of external validation for the state exam) The practice of grading schools had many critics in 1999, and some remain today, despite Florida’s strong improvement Far from withering under the glare of public shame, Floridians rolled up their sleeves and began the hard work... Program for children with speech and language impairments Lawmakers in Utah’s southern neighbor substantially improved the Arizona Empowerment Scholarship Account program The changes to the program will make participation easier for both special needs and other eligible children Indiana lawmakers, meanwhile, expanded eligibility for their voucher program to include all children with disabilities.4 The. .. over the years, despite raising standards multiple times Arizona, on the other hand, began with a majority of schools earning “A” and “B” from the outset Over time, the variation in these school grading details may increase our knowledge of how best to fashion a system in order to nudge a faster improvement rate for public schools MASSIVE OPEN ONLINE COURSES CONTINUED TO RAPIDLY EXPAND IN 2013 Stanford... itself for the children’s plight These detractors continually ignore the fact that today’s students often have parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and others who themselves attended public schools The assignment of our public school system in helping to break this cycle of poverty involves the imparting of academic knowledge and skills that are vital to the future success of children The past failure . thank the following for making this Report Card on American Education possible: First, we thank the Allegheny Foundation and the Gleason Family Foundation for their generous sup- port for the creation. coauthor of the Report Card on American Education: Ranking State K-12 Performance, Progress and Reform for ALEC, and currently serves on the ALEC Execu- tive Committee to the Task Force on Education. voucher the programs that are best for their kids. Indiana and other states have made great progress in our efforts to give our children the best educational options available to them. Much