Education Revolution

What to do about the gender gap (which impacts the college gender gap and the global economy)? How do for-profit schools stack up? And how schools could save big bucks.

Girls outpace boys on Illinois tests, and what to do about it. Tribune:

"Research has shown that girls have a much better working memory than boys, so they do much better when they have to read a passage and then answer questions about what they read," said Ken Wallace, assistant superintendent at Maine High School District 207 and a board member of The Boys Project, a national group that works to raise the academic performance of boys. In an effort to boost boys' success across the spectrum, some Illinois schools have created single-sex classrooms. Others, such as Gen. George Patton Elementary School in Riverdale, which has some of the largest gender testing gaps in the state, are hiring more male teachers. The school, mainly low-income, has gender gaps that reach as high as 55 percentage points in 3rd-grade reading.

The Boys Project site here.

Data on for-profit school performance in Philadelphia detailed. They were given the worst performing schools. WSJ:

When for-profit management of public schools was first proposed in Philadelphia six years ago, many in that city were extremely skeptical, if not aggressively hostile. So the Philadelphia School Reform Commission, the entity responsible for the innovation, gave only the 30 lowest performing schools to for-profit companies, while another 16 were given to nonprofit organizations, including two of the city's major universities (Temple and the University of Pennsylvania). Others were reorganized by the school district itself.

In effect, a competition was run among the three types of management -- for-profit, nonprofit, and government-run. Four years into the race, here are the results: Students at schools managed by for-profit firms were roughly six months ahead in math than would be expected had the schools remained in the hands of the school district. In reading, students in schools managed by for-profit firms were two months further along than they would have been if the schools had been under district control, though that difference was not large enough to give us statistical certainty. Meanwhile the nonprofits -- and the school district's own reorganized schools -- did no better than expected.

And a huge money-saving idea, worth looking into--online textbooks (save your kids' backs too.) At the very least, dollars could be deployed elsewhere. USA Today:

Since March, Dixon Deutsch and his students have been quietly experimenting with a little website that could one day rock the foundation of how schools do business.

A K-2 teacher at Achievement First Bushwick Elementary Charter School in Brooklyn, N.Y., Deutsch, 28, has been using Free-Reading.net, a reading instruction program that allows him to download, copy and share lessons with colleagues.

And I would think data on what is working effectively would be more forthcoming.

An education revolution, a little bit at a time.

Previous posts: The Education Solution, Unforeseen School Choices