What had Fordham's bloggers buzzing this week? Take a look back commentary from across the Gadfly Daily blogs:
- Summarizing a push by Connecticut lawmakers to study the “feasibility” of an opt-out plan for charter schools on the Choice Words blog, Adam Emerson warned, “This might be an agile way to retreat from a bad idea, but legislators should have killed the plan before committing state resources to its study.”
- When California announced it would apply for a NLCB waiver on its own terms, Mike lauded the state’s move on Flypaper. As he wrote, “While Jerry Brown, Tom Torlakson, and Mike Kirst deserve plenty of criticism for their indifference to education reform—kicking charter supporters off the state board, cozying up to the teacher unions—on this one they deserve nothing but kudos.”
- In a guest blog post for Board’s Eye View, National School Boards Association Executive Director Anne L. Bryant acknowledged the value of assessment and accountability before cautioning, “we’ve gone too far—we are currently too focused on testing and teaching rote memorization rather than inspiring creativity.”
- On the Ohio Gadfly Daily blog, Terry Ryan announced that, in its role as a charter authorizer, Fordham “would willingly be the first to go through a vetting process led by the Transformation Alliance” proposed by Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson.
- “Illinois lawmakers should resist the urge to kick the can down the road,” wrote Chris Tessone on Stretching the School Dollar, “instead passing radical reform of the pension system and providing teachers with a forward-thinking retirement plan.”
- Describing a new study of differences in how teachers provide feedback to students of different ethnicities on Common Core Watch, Kathleen Porter-Magee noted that there are “some pretty deep, possibly unconscious, biases at work that go beyond exposure to rigorous content and that manifest themselves through the way we praise students.”
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