- Sure, you might die for your kids…but would how long would you sleep outside for them? That’s the question one Cincinnati dad had to answer when it was time to enroll his children in a coveted local school. The Fairview-Clifton German Language School, one of a handful of the city’s high-performing magnet schools, awards most of its kindergarten seats on a first-come, first-served basis rather than doing so exclusively via lottery. The result is a prolonged, nightmarish waiting game (on school grounds!) that now stretches over two weeks, with parents camping in tents and braving sub-freezing temperatures for a chance at one of a few dozen slots. The pageant of endurance is great for Fairview-Clifton, which ultimately selects it students from the most dedicated families in the city; but it’s terrible for parents who lack the resources to take time off work and pull a Grizzly Adams on behalf of their children. Going forward, the city (and every city) needs to offer more high-quality kindergarten seats. Until then, they should at least end this pathetic spectacle.
- Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton drew a lot of headlines for her economic speech on Monday, predominantly for embracing liberal orthodoxy on class and inequality more forthrightly than either President Obama or her husband. The question now, posed by New York’s political commentator Jonathan Chait, is whether she’ll also steer leftwards on the issue of education. She picked up the endorsement of the American Federation of Teachers over the weekend, to the chagrin of some of its members, but offered laughably few specifics in her speech on any of education’s hot-button issues. So far she’s been skillful at avoiding tough questions from the press—or anyone else—but eventually she’ll have to show her cards.
- Meanwhile, presumptive Republican also-ran Chris Christie is empaneling a commission of teachers and state policymakers to conduct a six-month review of Common Core standards and assessments in New Jersey. The move comes a month after his Cirque du Soleil-quality backflip on the issue last month, when he tore into the standards just a few years after pledging to keep them. A responsible sequence of listening tours and town hall meetings might not be a bad idea, especially in a state that’s seen massive resistance to new testing regime from parents who feel they haven’t been consulted. Let’s just keep the presidential politics out of the process, please.
- Then again, even if the governor gets his wish and kills Common Core in time to be seen as some unholy cross between Ronald Reagan and Jon Bon Jovi, it may not make much difference. According to a new piece from Education Week, the use of CCSS-aligned curricula and materials has jumped even in states that refuse to adopt the standards (or, in the case of Oklahoma, repealed them after first adopting them). More than eighty thousand downloads of the well-regarded EngageNY ELA and math curricula, first developed by New York, have originated in Texas (the indignity!). According to one Omaha teacher, “Everyone uses some, sometimes without fully realizing the materials are Common Core. We just don’t use the words openly [in Nebraska]….We’re dancing around it.”
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