- Pittsburgh may be the Steel City, but if Aspen’s new paper is any indicator, it’s got a heart of gold. “Forging a New Partnership” documents how the city’s breakthrough labor-management collaboration in education has aided the district. The recommendations are commonsensical. But the story is uplifting.
- Ron Tupa, Director of State Legislatures for Democrats for Education Reform pops the bubble of Illinois’s much-praised SB7 legislation. That statute is rife with loopholes and escape clauses, among other things, he explains. Tell us again about collaboration?
- The latest addition to the “cool interactive map” gang is The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly from the Institute for a Competitive Workforce. It displays how states fare on nine indicators, from standards, data systems, and charter laws, to student achievement and graduation rates. Interesting—and depressing—stuff.
- No quippy words are needed to entice readers to the Wall Street Journal’s recent article explaining the consequences of a government “diversity” program in India, which forces private schools to accept a quota of underprivileged youth. It’s just that interesting.
- The New Yorker reminds us of an important point: States have made great strides in data collection (especially surrounding individual student achievement). But for the data to be worthwhile, policymakers will actually need to use it—which they have, historically, been remiss to do.
- The shroud of conspiracy is lifted, revealing that there is no conspiracy. Three original signers of the controversial Shanker Institute manifesto, Randi Weingarten, Tom Kean, and Susan Neuman, explain in the New Jersey Star-Ledger: The manifesto has been misrepresented by its critics. It calls for many sets of voluntary national curricular materials—not lesson scripts, pedagogical formulae, or even one national curriculum.
