- Though House of Cards returned magnificently to form last weekend, ESEA doesn’t look like it’s headed for a similar renewal any time soon: Friday’s expected House vote on the Student Success Act went up in a puff of smoke and a fit of Mephistophelean laughter from the spirit of Frank Underwood. The Republican bill suffered somewhat from the mad rush to keep the lights on at the Department of Homeland Security, which took most of the air out of the chamber. Ideology played a role, too—after the Heritage Foundation and Club for Growth came out strongly against proposal, conservative votes were hard to find. Let’s just hope members of the leadership can find some common ground and pass a bill soon, without resorting to a string of murders and expository narration.
- When thinking about ways to improve educational outcomes, it’s natural to start from the bottom and move up. We start with the kids themselves, making sure they begin their schooling with the literacy and socialization tools they need to excel; then we focus our attention on teacher quality, the gradual improvement of which demands better ed programs and sensible forms of evaluation; we might even ponder our opaque system of cultivating principals and superintendents. But how often do we discuss the highest level of local education leadership, the school board? That’s what Paul Hill and Ashley Jochim do in their new book, profiled briefly by the Wall Street Journal. The two scholars argue that these ubiquitous small-scale democracies have amassed powers and resources far too grand for their purpose, and the only solution is to scale them back. It’s a topic Fordham’s investigated before, and one that demands greater consideration.
- If you want to know what the Republican presidential contenders have to say about education, they’re happy to tell you—often with the help of a megaphone (and, when the subject turns to Common Core, a wink and a nod). But the Democratic slate is much less transparent, mostly because there is no Democratic slate. The once and future frontrunner, Hillary Clinton, is maintaining a sphinxlike inscrutability on the issue that Education Week’s Alyson Klein has helpfully begun to penetrate in a terrific profile. Going back to her days as the first lady of Arkansas, Klein reveals, Clinton has championed standards, bashed merit pay, proposed universal pre-K, and stated her firm support for Mom and apple pie. The piece is a useful guide to where she may end up as a candidate…if she ever declares.
- The New York Times has a dispiriting look at the New Jersey parents instructing their kids to sit out the new PARCC exams this week. If opposition to the new, more rigorous assessments is as strong there as it is across the river in New York, tens of thousands of children could avoid participating. The cost of that avoidance—though you wouldn’t know it from the frenzied Facebook groups and union-sponsored television advertisements arrayed against PARCC and Common Core—is that the state will be deprived of vital information on how its schools are performing and whether its students are learning. Anyone telling their kids to skip school obligations has actually “opted out” of a responsible way to lodge their complaints.
