History of IDEA
Jeannie Oakes, Founder and Former Director
Youth Voice in School Finance
NEW REPORT: Los Angeles' road to A-G for all
Without Dollars and Sense Powerpoint
Past Educational Opportunity Reports
Will San Diego's public schools survive?
- 11-02-2011
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Blog by Diane Ravitch/Education Week
Dear Deborah, As I travel the country, I am frequently asked to identify an urban district where public education is working. My first impulse is to say that public schools everywhere have been hemmed in and harmed by the mandates of No Child Left Behind; one has to look far and wide for an urban district that has managed to sustain a vision of good education, untainted by the federal law's pressure to produce higher test scores every year. But then I remember San Diego. When I first visited there in early 2007, I found a district recovering from a contentious era of top-down reform that started in 1998, when the business community won control of the school board. For nearly seven years, from 1998 to 2005, the school board was bitterly divided, the district leadership was at war with the teachers' union, and the fate of the district hinged on the school board election every two years. I devoted a chapter to that era in my recent book, because many other districts experienced similar upheavals. It was a different story when I returned to San Diego in 2010. (more...)
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