Lizette Alvarez writes:

Imagine an educational system where children do not start school until they are 7, where spending is a paltry $5,000 a year per student, where there are no gifted programs and class sizes often approach 30. A prescription for failure, no doubt, in the eyes of many experts, but in this case a description of Finnish schools, which were recently ranked the world’s best.

Finland’s Schools: Yahoo | Google | Teoma | Alltheweb

A teacher recently gave her students the assignment of balancing the federal budget using this simulation. Some of the results are instructive. From Marginal Revolution…

Isthmus, Madison’s Weekly, has a somewhat interesting forum running on the School Board Elections.

Ron Brownstein summarizes John Kerry’s positions on education reform, then and now, including a discussion of the No Child Left Behind Act.

Alan Borsuk writes about the demise of Milwaukee Public Schools 8-T program, an initiative “aimed at dealing with a problem that perplexes urban school districts across the United States: what to do with the large number of eighth-graders who are not really ready for high school”.

Extensive research indicates that neither holding students back a grade nor promoting them unprepared fosters achievement,” the North Central Regional Educational Laboratory said in a report summarizing the issue.
So what do you do with such students?
In 1997, the Milwaukee School Board voted to require students to meet a set of proficiency standards before they graduate from middle school in an effort to deal with a “social promotion” problem that made ninth grade, in the words of one MPS administrator, “a parking lot” for hundreds of kids who were doing poorly.

The technology legend and his wife Betty Moore donated $250,000 to the school’s foundation, charter-school supporters announced Saturday during a casino-night fundraiser held at the Fremont Hills Country Club.
Gordon Moore, who is famous for predicting that a computer chip’s power would double every two years, stated in the charter-school foundation’s press release that “Betty and I feel very strongly that competition in educational opportunities results in innovation and significant improvements for all participants.” From Tim Oren

The Washington Post Magazine Features a series of articles on integration.

• Barbara Rose Johns is remembered not only as a soldier of civil rights, but also as a role model for her family.
• Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring shows what happens when everyone in the school is a minority.
• In the early 20th century, African American students learned the hard way that seperate was nowhere near equal.
• In 1954, Josie Davenport, Paul Bergeron and their McKinley High School classmates were on the unnerving front line of integration.
• The landmark decision in Brown v. Board is an appropriate moment to consider the implications of low expectations when it comes to African American and Hispanic students.

Sarah Carr writes:

Many researchers see the root causes of this gap in the early years. There is a growing conviction that even good schools cannot do enough for students who start far behind.
“If we send kids to kindergarten with this big gap, we can be pretty sure that as things stand, the gap is not only going to remain, but will get bigger,” said Deborah Stipek, the dean of Stanford University’s School of Education.
Increasingly, educators are focusing on preschool programs as a critical step in making up the deficit, and they are developing – or being pushed to develop – programs that are more overtly academic than ever. Nationally, some programs are cutting nap time; others have instituted more formal assessments. Literacy blocks – the jargon for early language and reading programs – are becoming as common as wood blocks.