PIONNERING WORK ON SCHOOL MANAGEMENT COMMITTEES IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS

PIONNERING WORK ON SCHOOL MANAGEMENT COMMITTEES IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS: "PIONNERING WORK ON SCHOOL MANAGEMENT COMMITTEES IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS PDF | Print | E-mail

In 2003, CAPP got a grant from the Commonwealth Education Fund (CEF) through AAN to implement a project titled œStrengthening Civil Society Participation in Education for All in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) with the aim of promoting community participation in education, through the establishment of SCHOOL MANAGEMENT COMMITTEES (SMCs) in the FCT.

As at the time the project began in 2003\2004, there was no policy on establishing SMCs but CAPP in collaboration with the then FCT Primary Education Board (PEB) got an approval to establish SMCs. Later the United Children Education Fund (UNICEF) in collaboration with FCT Universal Basic Education Board trained some selected teachers on establishing the School Based Management Committees (SBMC) with a guideline from UNICEF."

IIEP : Higher education systems

IIEP : Higher education systems: "Universities are potent agents for social change, and higher education plays a critical role in development:

* Universities are essential institutions in modern knowledge-based economies and societies.
* They train the personnel that operate the key institutions of society.
* They generate knowledge and translate it into new applications and products.
* They preserve cultural heritage and variety."

access_information/other thematic issues/global priorities

access_information/other thematic issues/global priorities: "Transparency International supports the international efforts to have the right of access to information recognised and respected. The exercise of this right enables citizens to keep their governments and public bodies accountable. This can hinder corrupt practices that benefit from opaque or obscure regimes. Access to information is essential for citizen empowerment. Citizens entrust their governments with power through elections, and with resources through the payment of taxes. Those who are entrusted with this power bear a responsibility not only to serve, but also to inform citizens and encourage the public to participate in their decisions and actions. - It is citizens, after all, who should ultimately be the source of power, as they bear the consequences of its abuse."

Global Policy Innovations Program

Global Policy Innovations Program: "We develop and broadcast innovative ideas through:

Daily publishing – GPI publishes the critically acclaimed online magazine Policy Innovations, a companion blog, podcasts, video, and workshop summaries and analysis.

Regular convening – GPI convenes three levels of meetings: tactical meetings with partners on best practices in civil society; operational dialogues between businesses and NGOs on applied ethics; strategic workshops with scholars, ethicists, and practitioners on shaping the language and terms of the international debate on globalization.

Occasional research – GPI conducts occasional research projects on ethical issues in the global economy. Devin Stewart is currently conducting an interview-based survey with Carnegie Endowment scholar Josh Kurlantzick on the future of Asian economic integration and its effect on labor and environmental standards.

SUPPORT
Launched in April 2004 with the support of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Global Policy Innovations is based at the Carnegie Council in New York City."

Bringing Art Back to Life - USF News - University Communications & Marketing

Bringing Art Back to Life - USF News - University Communications & Marketing:
Bringing Art Back to Life

Moses House, USF Partner to Revitalize the Arts and Sulphur Springs

By Daylina Miller

TAMPA, Fla. (April 6, 2010) Mann-Wagnon Cultural Park in Sulphur Springs looked like any other family picnic last Saturday. The grill was smoking as hotdogs and hamburgers sizzled under its heavy lid. Kids from knee-high to teenagers ran around and socialized.

To an outsider, they looked like a hodgepodge family of all races and creeds, hugging and smiling and greeting each other as brother and sister. They would see a family - brought together by a man passionate about art, his heritage and creating a positive future for children on a small sliver of property along the Hillsborough River in Sulphur Springs.

They call it Moses House.

Taft Richardson, a renowned bone sculptor, passed away last spring but his legacy lives on through the nonprofit organization that he and his brother, Harold Richardson, helped build in the 1980s. Moses House has a longstanding tradition of blending art, culture and heritage in an environment designed to keep kids off the street and out of trouble. Having lost one property where their art classes were located, the Richardsons kept the program alive at Sulphur Springs Elementary.

Until now. Art lives again at Moses House.

The equipment has not been moved in quite yet and the green floors are still tacky with paint, but Moses House volunteers are quickly approaching the end of the renovations at a new site at Mann-Wagnon Park. By May, they hope to have classes in full-swing again.

USF’s Office of Community Engagement has been a partner in the project, helping organize and support efforts and using the art center as an opportunity for university to students to learn about social issues in this vulnerable Tampa neighborhood. USF hopes to base some service learning courses at Moses House.

“When you do art projects, you can’t just pack up at the end of the class and leave,” said Susan Greenbaum, USF’s Director of the Office of Community Engagement. “This is a great site. The city was going to tear down these buildings.”

Moses House has been rejuvenated by volunteers from both inside the community and as far away as Brooksville. The nonprofit organization has cultivated many community partnerships in addition to USF to aid them in their mission of using the arts to improve the quality of life for children in the neighborhood, which has high rates of poverty and juvenile delinquency.

Moses House supporters see its programming as a way to help children enhance their education, while helping them resist the negative effects of poverty, prejudice and discrimination.

Moses House also has become a means for the neighborhood to look inward and appreciate what makes it unique and strong.

“It’s art,” Greenbaum said about Moses House. “It’s culture. It’s a quest for understanding.”

The relationship between USF and Moses House has developed during the past three years, said Greenbaum, an anthropologist. Several USF students and faculty members have played a role in revitalizing Moses House, including Greenbaum who has worked with public housing residents relocated to Sulphur Springs from other areas of Tampa.

Antoinette Jackson, an assistant USF anthropology professor, has developed cultural heritage projects in Sulphur Springs and nearby Seminole Heights. Moses House’s Executive Director, Lance Arney, is a USF doctoral candidate whose dissertation research is on challenges facing youth in Sulphur Springs. And USF doctoral student Mabel Sabogal created Moses House’s website and now serves as its assistant director.

“My role has been to help reorganize the organization, develop new programming, and to get more volunteers and staff involved,” Arney said.

One of these new programs involved bringing “street music” into the mix so that teenagers in Sulphur Springs can write and produce their own rap songs. A local DJ, Carlos Corcho, known professionally as “DJ Chang Bang” helps to coordinate the program.

Recording equipment will soon be brought into the new building and workshops will be held once a week on-site.

“I feel music is the best vehicle to really bring people together, to open their minds to new things,” Corcho said. “It’s a good thing to do for the community to get the kids off the street.”

Other workshops include the bone sculpture class inspired by Taft’s own bone sculptures, which allows children to use their imagination to create works of art out of animal bones.

“These kids are talented and we are here to develop that,” Harold said. “But the majority of them don’t know what to do about it. We show them how to connect the mind and the hand. This is what we try to instill in the kids. Whatever you can see in your mind, you can make with your hand and make me see that.”

There are still many challenges for the Sulphur Spring community to face. Greenbaum estimates that one in five homes in the neighborhood is in foreclosure. But Moses House is one small step ahead for a community that is a considered a few steps behind in comparison to other neighborhoods in Tampa.

“This is our small effort to support the things we think will produce lasting results,” Greenbaum said. “This is the kind of organization that can make a difference in a place like Sulphur Springs.”

The University of South Florida is one of the nation's top 63 public research universities and one of only 25 public research universities nationwide with very high research activity that is designated as community engaged by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. USF was awarded $380.4 million in research contracts and grants in FY 2008/2009. The university offers 232 degree programs at the undergraduate, graduate, specialist and doctoral levels, including the doctor of medicine. The USF System has a $1.8 billion annual budget, an annual economic impact of $3.2 billion, and serves more than 47,000 students on institutions/campuses in Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota-Manatee and Lakeland. USF is a member of the Big East Athletic Conference.

Last Child Movement - Notes from the Field

Last Child Movement - Notes from the Field:

The Children and Nature Movement: Notes from the Field

How a Movement Is Forming and How You Can Get Involved

A back-to-nature movement to reconnect children with the outdoors is burgeoning nationwide.

—USA Today, November 2006

Not long after the first publication of Last Child in the Woods in 2005, I found myself wandering down a path toward the Milwaukee River, where it runs through urban Riverside Park in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. At first glance, nothing seemed unusual about the young people I encountered. A group of inner-city high school students, they dressed in standard hip-hop fashion. I expected to see in their eyes the cynicism so fashionable now in urban, suburban, and even rural communities, the jaded look of what D. H. Lawrence long ago called the "know-it-all state of mind." But not today.

As they cast their fishing lines from the muddy bank, they laughed with pleasure, delighted by the lazy brown river and the landscape of the surrounding park. Ducking a few backcasts, I walked through the woods to the two-story Urban Ecology Center, made of lumber and other material recycled from abandoned buildings.

When this park was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the founder of American landscape architecture, and established in the late nineteenth century, it was a tree-lined valley with a waterfall, a hill for sledding, and places for skating and swimming, fishing and boating. But in the 1970s, topography was flattened to create sports fields. Pollution made the river unfit for human contact, park maintenance declined, families fled, violent crime and drug dealing moved in. Riverside Park became associated with blight, not beauty. Then, in the 1990s, a remarkable chain of events occurred. A dam on the river was removed, and natural water flow flushed out contaminants. A retired biophysicist started a small outdoor-education program which evolved into the nonprofit Urban Ecology Center, annually hosting more than eighteen thousand student visits from twenty-three area schools.

The center’s director, Ken Leinbach, a former science teacher, gave me a tour. We climbed to the top of a wooden tower, overlooking the park. "No serious violent crime has occurred in the park in the past five years," he told me. "We see environmental education as a great tool for urban revitalization." The center welcomes kids and their families from the surrounding neighborhoods so they can begin to associate the woods with joy and exploration, as memories of danger fade.

In Riverside Park, nature was not the problem; it was the solution.

For decades environmental educators, conservationists, naturalists, and others have worked, often heroically, to bring more children to nature, usually with inadequate support from policy-makers. Now a number of convergent trends—including intensified awareness of the relationship between human well-being, the ability to learn, and environmental health; concern about child obesity; and media attention to nature-deficit disorder—are bringing the concerns of these veteran advocates before a broader audience. While some may argue that the word "movement" is hyperbole, we do seem to have reached a tipping point. Now comes the greatest challenge: deep, lasting, cultural change.

In 2006 a handful of like-minded people formed the nonprofit Children & Nature Network, for which I now serve as chairman, to track and encourage this movement. By the time you read this, much more will have occurred, but as of spring 2008, in the United States, Canada, and abroad, we see progress among state and national legislatures, conservation groups, schools and businesses, government agencies and civic organizations.

At this writing, we have identified more than forty regional campaigns, sometimes called Leave No Child Inside, that have formed or are being assembled—in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Chicago, the San Francisco Bay Area, Connecticut, Florida, Colorado, Texas, British Columbia, and elsewhere. For the most part, these campaigns, each with distinctive regional characteristics, have emerged independently, with support from civil society and the business community, from political and religious leaders, liberal and conservative. (For more information about how to create a regional campaign, see below or see the Children & Nature Network web site.)

Leadership has emerged in nearly every sector. In September 2006, the National Conservation Training Center and the Conservation Fund hosted the National Dialogue on Children and Nature in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. The conference drew more than 350 leaders from around the country, from education, health care, the outdoor recreation industry, residential development, urban planning, conservation, and the academic world. Witnessing a precipitous drop in public use of many national and state parks, the leadership of the National Park Service and the National Association of State Park Directors signed a joint Children and Nature Plan of Action. In 2007, the U.S. Forest Service launched More Kids in the Woods, funding local efforts to bring children outdoors. That same year, the new U.S. secretary of the interior, Dirk Kempthorne, challenged Interior’s three hundred top managers to determine what their departments could do to turn around the nature-deficit trend. At least ten governors—Democrats and Republicans—have launched statewide conferences or campaigns, including Connecticut’s pioneering program to encourage families to visit the underused state parks. Replicable in every state, the effort was the first formal program to call itself No Child Left Inside.

On the policy-making front, bills are being passed. In March 2007, the New Mexico state legislature approved the Outdoor Classrooms Initiative, an effort to increase outdoor education in the state. Then on April 21, John Muir’s birthday, Washington governor Christine Gregoire signed into law the Leave No Child Inside initiative, legislation that allocates $1.5 million a year to outdoor programs working with underserved children. In California, similar legislation has been introduced to fund long-term outdoor education and recreation programs serving at-risk youth. And at the national level, the No Child Left Inside Act, introduced in the House and Senate, is designed to bring environmental education back to the classroom and, indirectly, to get more young people outside. More legislation is on the way.

The disconnect between children and nature is also gaining greater attention in other countries, among them the Netherlands, where the Dutch government sponsored the translation of Last Child in the Woods, and conservation and environmental education leaders—in cooperation with the Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality—have launched a petition to ask parliament to support major efforts to reduce the nature deficit in their country.

In the United States, nonprofit conservation leaders, witnessing the graying of their membership and recognizing the importance of creating a young constituency for the future, have increased their commitment. In 2007, the Sierra Club’s Building Bridges to the Outdoors project took more than eleven thousand young people, many from inner-city neighborhoods, into the natural world. Other conservation groups have moved quickly too. The National Wildlife Federation rolled out the Green Hour, intended to persuade parents to encourage their children to spend one hour a day in nature. John Flicker, president of the National Audubon Society, is campaigning for the creation of a family-focused nature center in every congressional district in the nation. Some nature conservancy organizations are going beyond their traditional definition of conservation. The Trust for Public Land is placing increased emphasis on engaging children with nature, to ensure that natural areas preserved today will continue to be protected by future generations. The Conservation Fund, another organization that has focused primarily on purchasing and protecting land, has also taken action. In 2007, the Fund’s president, Larry Selzer, created the National Forum on Children and Nature, enlisting governors, mayors, cabinet secretaries, corporate CEOs, and non-government organizations as participants. The goal: raise twenty million dollars to fund existing programs and seed new ones.

Such organizations are recognizing that the human child in nature may well be the most important indicator species of future sustainability.

To some extent, the movement is fueled by organizational or economic self-interest. But something deeper is going on here. In 2006, ecoAmerica, a conservation marketing group, commissioned SRI Consulting Business Intelligence to conduct a comprehensive survey of Americans’ environmental values related to everything from health, animals, global warming, taxes, and more. EcoAmerica president Robert Perkowitz reports, "It was very enlightening for us to discover that the biggest shared concern about nature is really kids’ alienation from it." Forecasting more than seventy major global developments, the World Future Society now ranks nature-deficit disorder as number five.

With its nearly universal appeal, this issue seems to hint at a more atavistic motivation. This appeal may well have something to do with what Harvard professor Edward O. Wilson calls the biophilia hypothesis, which, as described in Last Child in the Woods, suggests that human beings are innately attracted to nature. Biologically, we are all still hunters and gatherers, and there is something in us we do not fully understand that needs immersion in nature. We do know that when people talk about the disconnect between children and nature—if they are old enough to remember a time when outdoor play was the norm—they almost always tell stories about their own childhoods: this tree house or fort, that special woods or ditch or creek or meadow. They recall those "places of initiation," in the words of naturalist Robert Michael Pyle, where they may have first sensed with awe and wonder the largeness of the world, seen and unseen.

When people share these stories, their cultural, political, and religious walls come tumbling down. And when that happens, unlikely allies converge and ideas can pour forth, leading to ever more insightful approaches to entrenched social problems. Real estate developers are taking notice of a potential new market. For example, some of California’s largest developers were gathered in Carmel by Clint Eastwood to discuss how they might design, build, and market future communities that connect children to nature. Among the ideas proposed by these and other developers: leave some land and native habitat in place (that’s a good start); employ green design principles; incorporate nature trails and natural waterways; throw out or reduce the conventional covenants and restrictions that discourage or prohibit natural play and rewrite the rules to encourage it; allow kids to build forts and tree houses or plant gardens; and create small, on-site nature centers. In such a discussion, it’s a short conceptual leap from excusing more sprawl by giving it a green patina to redeveloping portions of decaying urban and suburban neighborhoods into eco-communities where nature would be an essential strand in the fabric of daily life. The fact that developers, builders, and real estate marketers—at least the ones I met with—would approach this challenge with such apparently heartfelt enthusiasm was revealing. They were visualizing a new and different future.

In similar ways, the children and nature movement is proving to be one of the best ways to challenge other entrenched concepts—for example, the current test-centric definition of education reform. A different vision is embodied in the nature-themed schools sprouting up nationwide, such as the Schlitz Audubon Nature Center Preschool, where, as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported in April 2006, "a 3-year-old can identify a cedar tree and a maple—even if she can’t tell you what color pants she’s wearing. And a 4-year-old can tell the difference between squirrel and rabbit tracks—even if he can’t yet read any of the writing on a map. Young children learn through the sounds, scents, and seasons of the outdoors." Taking cues from the preschool’s success in engaging children, an increasing number of nature centers plan to add preschool programs not only to meet the demand for early childhood education but also to "create outdoor enthusiasts at a young age," as the Journal Sentinel reported.

The children and nature movement is fueled by this fundamental idea: the child in nature is an endangered species, and the health of children and the health of the Earth are inseparable.

Howard Frumkin, director of the National Center for Environmental Health at Centers for Disease Control, recently described the clear benefits of nature experiences to healthy child development, and to adult well-being. "In the same way that protecting water and protecting air are strategies for promoting public health, protecting natural landscapes can be seen as a powerful form of preventive medicine," he said. He believes that future research about the positive health effects of nature should be conducted in collaboration with architects, urban planners, park designers, and landscape architects. "Perhaps we will advise patients to take a few days in the country, to spend time gardening," he wrote in a 2001 American Journal of Preventive Medicine article, "or [we will] build hospitals in scenic locations, or plant gardens in rehabilitation centers. Perhaps the . . . organizations that pay for health care will come to fund such interventions, especially if they prove to rival pharmaceuticals in cost and efficacy." Today, Frumkin adds, "Of course, there is still much we need to learn, such as what kinds of nature contact are most beneficial to health, how much contact is needed and how to measure that, and what groups of people benefit most. But we know enough to act." In every arena, from conservation and health to urban design and education, the movement will have no shortage of tools and no shortage of potential far-reaching benefits. Under the right conditions, cultural and political change can occur rapidly. The recycling and antismoking campaigns revealed how social and political pressure can transform society in a single generation. The children and nature movement has perhaps even greater potential because it touches something even deeper within us, biologically and spiritually. An array of leaders from different religious backgrounds have stepped forward to support the reconciliation of children and nature. Such leaders understand that all spiritual life begins with a sense of wonder, and that one of the first windows to wonder is the natural world.

Beyond all of this, the most important development has been the growing number of individual parents and other family members who have decided to do what it takes to bring nature into their lives, and keep it there. The real measure of our success will not be in the number of programs created or bills passed, but in the breadth of cultural change that will make such decisions second nature—in every family, every school, and every neighborhood. We do not know if this young movement will outlast the decade. But those who pursue it—and the pioneers who were working for change decades ago—are responding not only to nature, but to a hunger for hope. Martin Luther King Jr. taught us that the success of any social movement depends on its ability to depict a world where people will want to go. Thinking about children’s need for nature helps us begin to paint a picture of that world—which must be done, because the price of not painting that picture is too high.

In January 2005, I attended a meeting of the Quivira Coalition, a New Mexico organization that brings together ranchers and environmentalists to find common ground. (The coalition is currently working on a plan to promote ranches as new schoolyards.) When my turn came to speak, I told the audience how, when I was a boy, I felt such an intense sense of ownership of the woods near my home that I pulled out scores of developers’ survey stakes in a vain attempt to keep the earthmovers at bay. After the speech, a rancher stood up. He was wearing scuffed boots. His aged jeans had never seen acid wash, only dirt and rock. His face was sunburned and creased. His drooping moustache was white, and he wore thick eyeglasses with heavy plastic frames, stained with sweat. "You know that story you told about pulling up stakes?" he said. "I did that when I was a boy too."

The crowd laughed. I laughed.

And then the man began to cry. Despite his embarrassment, he continued to speak, describing the source of his sudden grief—that he might belong to one of the last generations of Americans to feel that sense of ownership of land and nature.

The power of this movement lies in that sense, that special place in our hearts, those woods where the bulldozers cannot reach. Developers and environmentalists, corporate CEOs and college professors, rock stars and ranchers, may agree on little else, but they agree on this: no one among us wants to be a member of the last generation to pass on to our children the joy of playing outside in nature.

—Richard Louv, March 2008

Biosphere Foundation

In 2009, Biosphere Foundation (BF) initiated three marine conservation projects in Indonesia, a country with more than 17,000 islands and uncharted marine biodiversity.

The first is a long-term program to protect endangered sea turtles in the Anambas Islands. The second is a project located within the Bali Barat National Park to monitor and encourage a long-term conservation program at Menjangan Island’s coral reef. The third, is a program onboard Mir, a sailing vessel that will be based in Southeast Asia.

Mir is BF’s headquarters and will be used in support of these projects as well as Studio of the Sea and the Planetary Coral Reef Foundation.

Biosphere Foundation is collaborating with individuals and institutions in both Singapore and Indonesia to further these conservation projects under the names of Biosphere Society Singapore and Yayasan Biosfir Indonesia.


© Biosphere Foundation, http://www.biospherefoundation.org

Planetary Coral Reef Foundation

Planetary Coral Reef Foundation:

Wastewater Gardens® are a 100% ecological, low cost, low maintenance solution to the problem of human waste which is particularly important in coastal regions. Using no mechanical or moving parts and no chemicals, all wastewater is recycled via a gravity system into elegant, biodiverse gardens which produce lovely flowers as well as fruit and vegetables that can be eaten by humans and fodder crops for animal consumption. The systems are carefully sealed so no wastewater contaminates the soil, ground water or coastal waters.

Wastewater Gardens

® were developed by the Planetary Coral Reef Foundation (PCRF) and they have been successfully installed in Mexico, Bali, the Bahamas, Belize, France, Poland, the Philippines, Maldives, United States and Australia. To date, the largest Wastewater Gardens® installed is located in the Xpu-Ha EcoPark near Akumal, Mexico which was designed to recycle the human waste produced by 1500 visitors a day.
PCRF is proud to have collaborated with Seacology, Livingry Fund and
the people of Bali to install Wastewater Gardens® as a
community project at the Tirtigangga Water Palace.

John Stossel's 'Stupid in America' - ABC News

John Stossel's 'Stupid in America' - ABC News:

John Stossel's 'Stupid in America'

How Lack of Choice Cheats Our Kids Out of a Good Education

By JOHN STOSSEL

Jan. 13, 2006 —

"Stupid in America" is a nasty title for a program about public education, but some nasty things are going on in America's public schools and it's about time we face up to it.

Kids at New York's Abraham Lincoln High School told me their teachers are so dull students fall asleep in class. One student said, "You see kids all the time walking in the school smoking weed, you know. It's a normal thing here."

We tried to bring "20/20" cameras into New York City schools to see for ourselves and show you what's going on in the schools, but officials wouldn't allow it.

Washington, D.C., officials steered us to the best classrooms in their district.

We wanted to tape typical classrooms but were turned down in state after state.

Finally, school officials in Washington, D.C., allowed "20/20" to give cameras to a few students who were handpicked at two schools they'd handpicked. One was Woodrow Wilson High. Newsweek says it's one of the best schools in America. Yet what the students taped didn't inspire confidence.

One teacher didn't have control over the kids. Another "20/20" student cameraman videotaped a boy dancing wildly with his shirt off, in front of his teacher.

If you're like most American parents, you might think "These things don't happen at my kid's school." A Gallup Poll survey showed 76 percent of Americans were completely or somewhat satisfied with their kids' public school.

Education reformers like Kevin Chavous have a message for these parents: If you only knew.

Even though people in the suburbs might think their schools are great, Chavous says, "They're not. That's the thing and the test scores show that."

Chavous and many other education professionals say Americans don't know that their public schools, on the whole, just aren't that good. Because without competition, parents don't know what their kids might have had.

And while many people say, "We need to spend more money on our schools," there actually isn't a link between spending and student achievement.

Jay Greene, author of "Education Myths," points out that "If money were the solution, the problem would already be solved ... We've doubled per pupil spending, adjusting for inflation, over the last 30 years, and yet schools aren't better."

He's absolutely right. National graduation rates and achievement scores are flat, while spending on education has increased more than 100 percent since 1971. More money hasn't helped American kids.

Ben Chavis is a former public school principal who now runs an alternative charter school in Oakland, Calif., that spends thousands of dollars less per student than the surrounding public schools. He laughs at the public schools' complaints about money.

"That is the biggest lie in America. They waste money," he said.

To save money, Chavis asks the students to do things like keep the grounds picked up and set up for their own lunch. For gym class, his students often just run laps around the block. All of this means there's more money left over for teaching.

Even though he spends less money per student than the public schools do, Chavis pays his teachers more than what public school teachers earn. His school also thrives because the principal gets involved. Chavis shows up at every classroom and uses gimmicks like small cash payments for perfect attendance.

Since he took over four years ago, his school has gone from being among the worst in Oakland to being the best. His middle school has the highest test scores in the city.

"It's not about the money," he said.

He's confident that even kids who come from broken families and poor families will do well in his school. "Give me the poor kids, and I will outperform the wealthy kids who live in the hills. And we do it," he said.

Monopoly Kills Innovation and Cheats Kids

Chavis's charter school is an example of how a little innovation can create a school that can change kids' lives. You don't get innovation without competition.

To give you an idea of how competitive American schools are and how U.S. students performed compared with their European counterparts, we gave parts of an international test to some high school students in Belgium and in New Jersey.

Belgian kids cleaned the American kids' clocks, and called them "stupid."

We didn't pick smart kids to test in Europe and dumb kids in the United States. The American students attend an above-average school in New Jersey, and New Jersey's kids have test scores that are above average for America.

Lov Patel, the boy who got the highest score among the American students, told me, "I'm shocked, because it just shows how advanced they are compared to us."

The Belgian students didn't perform better because they're smarter than American students. They performed better because their schools are better. At age 10, American students take an international test and score well above the international average. But by age 15, when students from 40 countries are tested, the Americans place 25th.

American schools don't teach as well as schools in other countries because they are government monopolies, and monopolies don't have much incentive to compete. In Belgium, by contrast, the money is attached to the kids -- it's a kind of voucher system. Government funds education -- at many different kinds of schools -- but if a school can't attract students, it goes out of business.

Belgian school principal Kaat Vandensavel told us she works hard to impress parents.

She told us, "If we don't offer them what they want for their child, they won't come to our school." She constantly improves the teaching, saying, "You can't afford 10 teachers out of 160 that don't do their work, because the clients will know, and won't come to you again."

"That's normal in Western Europe," Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby told me. "If schools don't perform well, a parent would never be trapped in that school in the same way you could be trapped in the U.S."

Last week Florida's Supreme Court shut down "opportunity scholarships," Florida's small attempt at competition. Public money can't be spent on private schools, said the court, because the state constitution commands the funding only of "uniform . . . high-quality" schools. Government schools are neither uniform nor high-quality, and without competition, no new teaching plan or No Child Left Behind law will get the monopoly to serve its customers well.

The longer kids stay in American schools, the worse they do in international competition. They do worse than kids from poorer countries that spend much less money on education, ranking behind not only Belgium but also Poland, the Czech Republic and South Korea.

This should come as no surprise if you remember that public education in the United States is a government monopoly. Don't like your public school? Tough. The school is terrible? Tough. Your taxes fund that school regardless of whether it's good or bad. That's why government monopolies routinely fail their customers. Union-dominated monopolies are even worse.

In New York City, it's "just about impossible" to fire a bad teacher, says Schools Chancellor Joel Klein. The new union contract offers some relief, but it's still about 200 pages of bureaucracy. "We tolerate mediocrity," said Klein, because "people get paid the same, whether they're outstanding, average or way below average."

Here's just one example from New York City: It took years to fire a teacher who sent sexually oriented e-mails to "Cutie 101," a 16-year-old student. Klein said, "He hasn't taught, but we have had to pay him, because that's what's required under the contract."

Only after six years of litigation were they able to fire him. In the meantime, they paid the teacher more than $300,000. Klein said he employs dozens of teachers who he's afraid to let near the kids, so he has them sit in what are called rubber rooms. This year he will spend $20 million dollars to warehouse teachers in five rubber rooms. It's an alternative to firing them. In the last four years, only two teachers out of 80,000 were fired for incompetence. Klein's office says the new contract will make it easier to get rid of sex offenders, but it will still be difficult to fire incompetent teachers.

When I confronted Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers, she said, "They [the NYC school board] just don't want to do the work that's entailed." But the "work that's entailed" is so onerous that most principals just have just given up, or gotten bad teachers to transfer to another school. They even have a name for it: "the dance of the lemons."

Zoned Out of a Good Education

I talked with 18-year-old Dorian Cain in South Carolina, who was still struggling to read a single sentence in a first-grade level book when I met him. Although his public schools had spent nearly $100,000 on him over 12 years, he still couldn't read.

So "20/20" sent Dorian to a private learning center, Sylvan, to see if teachers there could teach Dorian to read when the South Carolina public schools failed to.

Using computers and workbooks, Dorian's reading went up two grade levels -- after just 72 hours of instruction.

His mother, Gena Cain, is thrilled with Dorian's progress but disappointed with his public schools. "With Sylvan, it's a huge improvement. And they're doing what they're supposed to do. They're on point. But I can't say the same for the public schools," she said.

Lying to Beat the System

Gena Cain, like most parents, doesn't have a choice which public school her kids attend. She followed the rules, and her son paid the price.

In San Jose, Calif., some parents break the rules to get their kids into Fremont Union schools. They're so much better than neighboring schools that parents sometimes cheat to get their kids in by pretending to live in the school district.

"We have maybe hundreds of kids who are here illegally, under false pretenses," said District Superintendent Steve Rowley.

Inspector John Lozano works for the district going door-to-door to check if kids really live where they say they live. And even seeing that a child is present at a particular address isn't enough. Lozano says he needs to look inside the house to make sure the student really lives there.

Think about what he's doing. The school district police send him into your daughter's bedroom. He even goes through drawers and closets if he has to.

At one house he found a computer and some teen magazines and pictures of a student with her friends. He decided that student passed the residency test.

But a grandmother who listed an address in his district is caught. The people who answered the door when Lozano visited told him she didn't live there.

Two days later, I talked with the grandmother who tried to get her grandson into the Fremont schools.

"I was actually crying. I was crying in front of this 14-year-old. Why can't they just let parents to get in the school of their choice?" she asked.

Why can't she make a choice? It's sad that school officials force her to go to the black market to get her grandson a better education. After we started calling the school, the school did decide to let him stay in the district.

School-Choice Proponents Meet Resistance

When the Sanford family moved from Charleston to Columbia, S.C., the family had a big concern: Where would the kids go to school? In most places, you must attend the public school in the zone where you live, but the middle school near the Sanford's new home was rated below average.

It turned out, however, that this didn't pose a problem for this family, because the reason the Sanfords moved to Columbia was that Mark Sanford had been elected governor. He and his wife were invited to send their kids to schools in better districts.

Sanford realized how unfair the system was. "If you can buy a $250,000 or $300,000 house, you're gonna get some great public education," Gov. Sanford said. Or if you have political connections.

The Sanfords decided it was unfair to take advantage of their position as "first family" and ended up sending their kids to private school. "It's too important to me to sacrifice their education. I get one shot at it. If I don't pay very close attention to how my boys get educated then I've lost an opportunity to make them the best they can be in this world," Jenny Sanford said.

The governor then proposed giving every parent in South Carolina that kind of choice, regardless of where they lived or whether they made a lot of money. He said state tax credits should help parents pay for private schools. Then they would have a choice.

"The public has to know that there's an alternative there. It's just like, do you get a Sprint phone or an AT&T phone," Chavous said.

He's right. When monopolies rule, there is little choice, and little gets done. In America the phone company was once a government-supported monopoly. All the phones were black, and all the calls expensive. With competition, things have changed -- for the better. We pay less for phone calls. If we're unhappy with our phone service, we switch companies.

Why can't kids benefit from similar competition in education?

"People expect and demand choice in every other area of their life," Sanford said.

The governor announced his plan last year and many parents cheered the idea, but school boards, teachers unions and politicians objected. PTAs even sent kids home with a letter saying, "Contact your legislator. How can we spend state money on something that hasn't been proven?"

A lot of people say education tax credits and vouchers are a terrible idea, that they'll drain money from public schools and give it to private ones.

Last week's Florida court ruling against vouchers came after teacher Ruth Holmes Cameron and advocacy groups brought a suit to block the program.

"To say that competition is going to improve education? It's just not gonna work. You know competition is not for children. It's not for human beings. It's not for public education. It never has been, it never will be," Holmes said.

Why not? Would you keep going back to a restaurant that served you a bad meal? Or a barber that gave you a bad haircut? What if the government assigned you to "your" grocery store. The store wouldn't have to compete for your business, and it would soon sell spoiled milk or stock only high profit items. Real estate agencies would sell houses advertising "neighborhood with a good grocery store." That's insane, and yet that's what America does with public schools.

Chavous, who has worked to get more school choice in Washington, D.C., said, "Choice to me is the only way. I believe that we can force the system from an external vantage point to change itself. It will never change itself from within. ... Unless there is some competition infused in the equation, unless that occurs, then they know they have a captive monopoly that they can continue to dominate."

Competition inspires people to do what we didn't think we could do. If people got to choose their kids' school, education options would be endless. There could soon be technology schools, science schools, virtual schools where you learn at home on your computer, sports schools, music schools, schools that go all year, schools with uniforms, schools that open early and keep kids later, and, who knows what else. If there were competition, all kinds of new ideas would bloom.

Copyright © 2010 ABC News Internet Ventures

American Indian Model Schools

American Indian Model Schools:

American Indian Model (AIM) schools operate using an educational model developed by Dr. Ben Chavis. Guided by this model, Dr. Chavis took over as the principal of the American Indian Public Charter School (AIPCS) of Oakland in 2000. During his tenure, AIPCS went from a failing school on the brink of extinction to the top performing school in the county. Though Dr. Chavis has retired, others have carried on his work. The American Indian Public Charter School II and the American Indian Public High school now join AIPCS at the top of Oakland’s educational food chain. These schools have proven that AIM’s back-to-basics approach of discipline, structure, hard work, and high expectations are the keys to academic success.

Manhattan Institute Scholar | Jay P. Greene

Manhattan Institute Scholar | Jay P. Greene:

Jay P. Greene is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and endowed chair and head of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas. Greene conducts research and writes about education policy, including topics such as school choice, high school graduation rates, accountability, and special education.

His research was cited four times in the Supreme Court's opinions in the landmark Zelman v. Simmons-Harris case on school vouchers. His articles have appeared in policy journals, such as The Public Interest, City Journal, and Education Next, in academic journals, such as The Georgetown Public Policy Review, Education and Urban Society, and The British Journal of Political Science, as well as in major newspapers, such as the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. He has appeared on numerous national TV and radio shows, such as CBS's 60 Minutes, ABC's 20/20, and NPR's Talk of the Nation. Jay Greene is the author of Education Myths: What Special-Interest Groups Want You to Believe About our Schools—and Why It Isn't So (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).

Greene has been a professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Houston. He received his B.A. in history from Tufts University in 1988 and his Ph.D. from the Government Department at Harvard University in 1995. He lives with his wife and three children in Fayetteville, AR.

Select Media:

• Upfront with Vicki McKenna, WIBA, 8-20-09
• Lars Larson Show, Westwood One, 4-13-09
• Jan Mickelson Show, WHO, 4-9-09
• Bill Bennett's Morning in America, Salem Radio Network, 4-8-09
• Curtis Sliwa Show, WABC, 4-6-09
• All Things Considered, NPR, 3-12-09
• Bill Bennett's Morning in America, Salem Radio Network, 3-11-09
• Lee Rodgers Show, KSFO, 2-11-09

Articles/Op-eds

• Retaining Students Forces Schools To Act, Indianapolis Star, 02-21-10
• So Much for the Evidence, Education News, 02-05-10
• Obama's Education Rhetoric Doesn't Come Close To Reality, Washington Examiner, 02-03-10
• Where the Unemployment Isn’t, National Review Online, 01-06-10
• End the Special-Ed Racket, National Review Online, 10-19-09
• The Case for Special Education Vouchers, Education Next, 10-07-09
• Funding May Push Special Ed Labeling, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 09-23-09
• The Problems with Special Ed, National Review Online, 09-14-09
• Vouchers Control Special Ed Growth, Tampa Bay Online, 09-03-09
• The Special Ed DC Bubble, Education Next, 08-24-09
• Special Ed Vouchers Work For Everybody, Washington Examiner, 08-18-09
• Special-Education Stigmatization, Forbes.com, 08-18-09
• The Union War on Charter Schools, Wall Street Journal, 04-16-09
• Vouchers: Not Dead Yet, National Review Online, 04-08-09
• Change that Won’t Happen . . . Thankfully, National Review Online, 02-04-09
• Schools Don't Need Snake Oil, Northeast Arkansas Morning News, 02-03-09
• A Special Plan for Palin, National Review Online, 09-09-08
• No Holding Back: All We Need to do is Follow the Law, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 07-13-08
• Pro-con On Social Promotion, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 07-13-08
• Why Arabian Gulf Countries Donate to US Universities, Front Page Magazine, 06-09-08
• School Choice Helps Disabled Ariz. Students, East Valley Tribune, 05-03-08
• The Politics of Special-Ed Vouchers - Part III, Washington Times, 05-01-08
• Vouchers for Special-Ed Students - Part II, Washington Times, 04-30-08
• A Special-Ed Fix, New York Post, 04-30-08
• Vouchers and Special Education - Part I, Washington Times, 04-29-08
• Reforming Drop-Out Rates, The New York Sun, 04-08-08
• Charters Elevate Everyone, Business Week, 03-15-08
• Students Lose When Diversity Is Main Focus, Investor's Business Daily, 01-08-08
• Freston as Scapegoat, The New York Sun, 11-08-07
• Union Days, National Review Online, 09-12-07
• Merit Pay Could Boost Learning, The Oklahoman, 08-05-07
• The Odd Couple, Education Next, 08-02-07
• Four Score and Seven Manatees Ago, National Review Online, 07-03-07
• Debunking a Special Education Myth, Education Next, 03-15-07
• Steve Jobs Has Guts, The New York Sun, 02-21-07
• Teachers Are Better Paid Than You Think, Providence Journal, 02-09-07
• Myths of the Teachers Unions, Front Page Magazine, 01-09-07
• A “Comprehensive” Problem, Education Next, 11-09-06
• Reason To Rethink Social Promotion, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 10-01-06
• Promoting The End of Social Promotion: Students Should Be Held Back If They Can't Pass the Test, Says a New Study, Chicago Sun-Times, 09-17-06
• School Officials Shouldn’t Go Wobbly On Social Promotion, Examiner.com, 09-14-06
• Social Promotion Is Running Before Walking, The Tampa Tribune, 09-14-06
• Advancement, National Review Online, 09-13-06
• "Losing Ground" in Education Reform, National Review Online, 07-27-06
• There's a Dropout Crisis in Dallas Public Schools, Dallas Morning News, 05-03-06
• Educating From the Bench, Wall Street Journal, 04-27-06
• Merit Pay: A Tool for Teaching, Arkansas Democrat Gazette, 04-24-06
• The Boys Left Behind, National Review Online, 04-19-06
• Chicago Must Find Way To Help Students Finish High School, Chicago Sun-Times, 04-19-06
• Making the Grade, New York Daily News, 04-16-06
• The Dropout Crisis, Examiner.com, 04-16-06
• Stop the Train, Arkansas Democrat Gazette, 04-04-06
• Missing the Mark on Graduation Rates, Education Week, 03-29-06
• Getting Ahead, Education Next, 03-20-06
• The 65-Cent Delusion, National Review Online, 03-02-06
• The State of the Union Health Care Proposals, Medical Progress Today, 02-10-06
• A New Yardstick For Education, Arkansas Democrat Gazette, 01-15-06
• Stupid Judge Tricks, National Review Online, 01-11-06
• Benefits of educational options clear, The Arizona Republic, 12-15-05
• Ever-Larger Spending Won't Improve Our Schools, Arkansas Democrat Gazette, 10-23-05
• Education myths cry out for debunking, Providence Journal, 10-19-05
• Five Myths . . ., Albuquerque Journal, 10-01-05
• The Teacher-Pay Myth, New York Post, 09-22-05
• Education Myths, National Review Online, 09-07-05
• Tougher Standards Opening More Doors, The Philadelphia Inquirer, 06-19-05
• Tougher Standards Are Already Yielding Results, USA Today, 05-30-05
• Drop The Skepticism: Cleveland's High School Graduation Rate Is Up, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, 03-29-05
• Proficiency 101, The Philadelphia Inquirer, 02-28-05
• Wasting the Windfall, New York Post, 02-01-05
• Judge: Children Must Fail, The New York Sun, 01-19-05
• California Should end Social Promotion, The San Diego Union-Tribune, 12-09-04
• Yanking Schools Back From Oz, New York Post, 12-08-04
• Guest Column: Ending social promotion works, Vero Beach Press-Journal, 12-08-04
• Put To the Test, Unearned Passes Don't Help Kids, Chicago Sun-Times, 12-08-04
• Push Forward Schools, Leave Behind Skeptics, Newsday, 11-21-04
• Choice Battle Needs A Real Truce, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, 11-20-04
• GEDs Just Don't Cut It, New York Post, 10-01-04
• A Long-Term Choice, National Review Online, 09-30-04
• Another View of Arizona Students, The Arizona Republic, 09-14-04
• Colorado Students Soaring Over Obstacles, Rocky Mountain News, 09-13-04
• Quit Blaming the Kids, National Review Online, 09-13-04
• Connecticut’s Schools are Worse Than They Look, Hartford Courant, 09-09-04
• Yardstick lifts School Ranking, The Oklahoman, 09-08-04
• No Comparison: Jay P. Greene On the Truth About Charter Schools, Free Republic, 08-20-04
• Killing Opportunity, National Review Online, 08-19-04
• Kerry's College Plan Fails Poor Kids, Los Angeles Times, 08-18-04
• Making Education Spending Really Pay Off: An Interview with Jay Greene, Rocky Mountain News, 08-12-04
• Charters Ease Florida Public-School Crowding, Vero Beach Press-Journal, 08-06-04
• The Public Schools' Dirty Little Secret, New York Post, 07-02-04
• Competition Passes the Test, Education Next, 06-12-04
• Dollars in the Classroom, World and I, 06-01-04
• High School Exit Exams Don't Cause Dropouts, The San Diego Union-Tribune, 05-19-04
• It’s Elementary, National Review Online, 05-12-04
• The Voucher Challenge, National Review Online, 05-11-04
• Exit Exams Don't Cause Increase In Dropout Rate, Arkansas Democrat Gazette, 05-02-04
• The Positive Effects Of Exit Exams, The Indianapolis Star, 05-02-04
• Give Klein A Break, New York Post, 02-27-04
• High-Stakes Editorializing, National Review Online, 02-23-04
• The Myth Of The Wholesome Suburban High School, Hartford Courant, 01-29-04
• Meaningless Diplomas Hurt Hispanic Students, Education Week, 01-21-04
• Let Vouchers Help Special-Education Students, Rocky Mountain News, 01-11-04
• Support Multiple School Districts, The Honolulu Advertiser, 12-23-03
• Bad-Mouthing Texas, National Review Online, 12-19-03
• Vouchers Do Help Disabled Students, The Tampa Tribune, 12-11-03
• Cooking the Graduation Numbers, Los Angeles Times, 12-11-03
• S.C. Schools Need Vouchers, Charleston Post and Courier, 12-08-03
• Use Vouchers For Integration, Hartford Courant, 11-30-03
• Falling Behind West Virginia, New York Post, 11-16-03
• Smaller Classes Mean Less-Qualified Teachers, National Post, 10-02-03
• Houston isn't alone when it comes to dropouts, Houston Chronicle, 09-16-03
• Throwing Money At Education, The Philadelphia Inquirer, 07-14-03
• Accountability, Choice Pay Off, Orlando Sentinel, 07-01-03
• Shorter School Day Hurts Teachers, Students, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, 06-23-03
• A New Model For Special Ed; Voucher Plan Could Ease Mass. Woes, The Boston Herald, 06-15-03
• Small Classes: Union Scam, The New York Sun, 06-12-03
• Books & Bombers, National Review Online, 05-22-03
• An Unfair Grade for Vouchers, Wall Street Journal, 05-16-03
• Teachers Unions v. the Teachers, The New York Sun, 02-21-03
• Does FCAT Pass The Test?, The Tampa Tribune, 02-12-03
• What Every Student Needs to Know, The San Francisco Chronicle, 02-11-03
• Widespread Exploitation, National Review Online, 02-10-03
• Choice Helps Public Schools, The New York Sun, 01-14-03
• School Choice is Good Move For All Students, Austin American-Statesman, 01-14-03
• Burning High-Stakes Testing at the Stake, The Education Gadfly, 01-09-03
• The Money Threat to Special Education, The New York Sun, 12-16-02
• Choice Proves Beneficial For Public Schools, Too, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, 10-17-02
• Raise Standards, Not Money, Wall Street Journal, 10-07-02
• Get More Local Control With Smaller School Districts, South China Morning Post, 09-23-02
• Indiana’s Graduation Rate Doesn’t Add Up, The Indianapolis Star, 09-21-02
• Let’s Not Pay More For Less, The Florida Times-Union, 09-03-02
• The City’s Special-Ed ‘Crisis’, The New York Sun, 08-06-02
• Choosing Integration, Wall Street Journal, 07-08-02
• The Business Model, Education Next, 06-28-02
• The Myth of the Special Education Burden, Education Week, 06-02-02
• Blaming Special Ed, National Review Online, 05-23-02
• The Myth of the Special Ed Burden, The Education Gadfly, 05-09-02
• Not-Quite High School, National Review Online, 04-24-02
• The New Brown, National Review Online, 02-21-02
• Graduation Statistics: Caveat Emptor, Education Week, 01-16-02
• Double Standard in Voucher Research, The Education Gadfly, 01-16-02
• The Looming Shadow, Education Next, 12-01-01
• Bush’s School Plan: Why We Know It’ll Work, New York Post, 02-21-01
• Grading States on Their Education Freedom, Wall Street Journal, 09-20-00
• Fixing The NYC Schools, New York Post, 07-30-00
• A “Comprehensive” Problem, Education Next, 00-00-00
• Consolidating school districts not always beneficial Arkansas Democrat Gazette, 07-21-08
• The effects of exemptions to Florida's test-based promotion policy: Who is retained? Who benefits academically? Jay P. Greene and Marcus Winters, Economics of Education Review, April, 2008 (subscription only)
• The Myth of the Underpaid Teacher By Jay P. Greene and Marcus A. Winters, Philadelphia Daily News, 02-07-07
• Try altering incentives for teachers By Jay P. Greene and Marcus A. Winters, The Inquirer, 5-4-06
• Testing High-Stakes Tests: Can We Believe the Results of Accountability Tests? By Jay Greene, Marcus Winters & Greg Forster, TCRecord.com, 3-15-06
• Florida vouchers ruling shows courts go too far, The Philadelphia Inquirer, 1-13-06

Testimony

• Testimony of Jay P. Greene on the CFE Lawsuit, 01-08-05

Reports

• Expanding Choice in Elementary and Secondary Education: A Report on Rethinking the Federal Role in Education, The Brookings Institution, February 2010
• How Special Ed Vouchers Keep Kids From Being Mislabeled as Disabled Civic Report 58, August 2009
• Building on the Basics: The Impact of High-Stakes Testing on Student Proficiency in Low- Stakes Subjects Civic Report 54, July 2008
• The Effect of Special Education Vouchers on Public School Achievement: Evidence From Florida's McKay Scholarship Programs Civic Report 52, April 2008
• What's in a Name? The Decline in The Civic Mission of School Names Civic Report 51, July 2007
• How Much Are Public School Teachers Paid? Civic Report 50, January 2007
• Getting Farther Ahead by Staying Behind: A Second-Year Evaluation of Florida's Policy to end Social Promotion Civic Report 49, September 2006
• Leaving Boys Behind: Public High School Graduation Rates Civic Report 48, April 2006
• An Evaluation of the Effect of D.C.'s Voucher Program on Public School Achievement and Racial Integration After One Year Education Working Paper 10, January 2006
• The Effect of Residential School Choice on Public High School Graduation Rates Education Working Paper 9, April 2005
• Public High School Graduation and College-Readiness Rates: 1991–2002 Education Working Paper 8, February 2005
• An Evaluation of Florida's Program to End Social Promotion Education Working Paper, December 2004
• The Teachability Index: Can Disadvantaged Students Learn? Education Working Paper 6, September 2004
• Pushed Out or Pulled Up? Exit Exams and Dropout Rates in Public High Schools Education Working Paper 5, May 2004
• Sex, Drugs, and Delinquency in Urban and Suburban Public Schools Education Working Paper 4, January 2004
• Public High School Graduation and College Readiness Rates in the United States Education Working Paper 3, September 2003
• When Schools Compete: The Effects of Vouchers on Florida Public School Achievement Education Working Paper 2, August 2003
• Apples to Apples: An Evaluation of Charter Schools Serving General Student Populations Education Working Paper 1, July 2003
• Vouchers for Special Education Students: An Evaluation of Florida’s McKay Scholarship Program Civic Report 38, June 2003
• This Works: Improving Urban Education Civic Bulletin 34, March 2003
• Testing High Stakes Tests: Can We Believe the Results of Accountability Tests? Civic Report 33, February 2003
• Effects of Funding Incentives on Special Education Enrollment Civic Report 32, December 2002
• Public School Graduation Rates in the United States Civic Report 31, November 2002
• Rising to the Challenge: The Effect of School Choice on Public Schools in Milwaukee and San Antonio Civic Bulletin 27, October 2002
• High School Graduation Rates in Washington State Civic Report 27, August 2002
• 2001 Education Freedom Index Civic Report 24, January 2002
• High School Graduation Rates in the United States Civic Report (with BAEO), November 2001
• An Evaluation of the Florida A-Plus Accountability and School Choice Program Civic Report (with Florida State University and PEPG), February 2001
• Education Freedom Index Civic Report 14, September 2000
• The Effect of School Choice: An Evaluation of the Charlotte Children’s Scholarship Fund Program Civic Report 12, August 2000
• A Survey of Results from Voucher Experiments: Where We Are and What We Know Civic Report 11, July 2000
• Choice and Community: The Racial, Economic, and Religious Context of Parental Choice in Cleveland A Buckeye Institute Policy Report, November 1999
• An Evaluation of the Cleveland Voucher Program After Two Years Program on Education Policy and Governance, Harvard University, June 1999
• Lessons From the Cleveland Scholarship Program Program on Education Policy and Governance, Harvard University, October 1997

Books

• Education Myths: What Special-Interest Groups Want You to Believe About our Schools—and Why It Isn't So (Rowan & Littlefield, September 2005)

City Journal articles

• So Much for the Evidence 3 February 2010
• The Uses of Vouchers 28 July 2009
• Is School Choice Enough? 24 January 2008
• Adding Up to Failure Winter 2008
• Four Score and Seven Manatees Ago Summer 2007
• Four Score and Seven Manatees Ago 2 July 2007
• Out-in-Left-Field Trips Spring 2007
• The Special-Ed Hoax 2 August 2002
• Why Vouchers are Constitutional 14 March 2002
• GEDs Aren’t Worth the Paper They’re Printed On Winter 2002
• The Texas School Miracle Is for Real Summer 2000
• The NEA’s Racket? Summer 2000

Center for Education Reform - CER Mission

Center for Education Reform - CER Mission: "The Center for Education Reform drives the creation of better educational opportunities for all children by leading parents, policymakers and the media in boldly advocating for school choice, advancing the charter school movement, and challenging the education establishment.

Through its storehouse of data and unique insights into American communities, CER uses information to turn parents into activists, policymakers into advocates, and educators into reform leaders.

The Center for Education Reform changes laws, minds and cultures to allow good schools to flourish.

The Center for Education Reform is a 501c(3) public, non-profit corporation organized in the District of Columbia in 1993. Support for CER comes from more than 1,000 individuals, foundations, and civic leaders."

Olin College - SCOPE

Olin College - SCOPE:

Sponsor Forms

The primary goal of SCOPE is educational. SCOPE provides a first-class project team, and the sponsor provides an authentic engineering project, supported by an educational grant to Olin College. For more on the program's contractual arrangements, please consult the contract draft below:

• Draft_SCOPE Project Sponsorship Agreement 2010(PDF - 34.8KB)
• SCOPE Fact Sheet(PDF - 727KB)
• SCOPE Brochure (PDF - 519KB

UC Statewide Integrated Pest Management Program

UC Statewide Integrated Pest Management Program:

	Manage and identify insects, mites, diseases, nematodes, weeds, and vertebrates Homes, gardens, landscapes, and turf (including Pest Notes) Agriculture and floriculture (Pest Management Guidelines) Natural environments Exotic and invasive pests Use tools to help make decisions Weather data and products Degree-days Interactive tools and models
	Publications and other materials Workshops and events Training programs Pesticide information
	Grants programs Results of funded projects Research tools and databases