The future of education leadership in ATL
Fordham Institute President Chester Finn will be participating in?an education event in Atlanta one week from today -- on Monday, February 21 (Presidents' Day). The topic?
The race card: Where is it?
Peter MeyerThough I have never been a big fan of our obsession with race and poverty as? useful?tools for improving academic achievement ? what starts as a sociological construct (thank you, James Coleman), quickly becomes a general principal, which, by the time you get to the classroom trenches has become a horribly self-fulfilling and deterministic pedagogy ?
Cathie Black: The first 42 days, 6 hours, 3 minutes, 26 seconds! Fagedaboutit!
Peter MeyerIn fact, as the cover story in New York magazine begins, ?Cathie Black is lost in Queens?. Usually when Black goes east, she's headed to her $4 million house in Southampton,? not the Coney Island elementary school where the new Gotham schools chief was supposed to be going.????
The Budget Blinking Begins
Peter MeyerAs Alyson Klein of Ed Week reported yesterday, the House GOP offered a ?slice and dice?
Quotable & notable
"If we have managed to be the world's most powerful country, politically, economically and militarily, for the last 47 years despite our less than impressive math and science scores, maybe that flaw is not as important as film documentaries and political party platforms claim."*
The Money Pit
Peter MeyerAlyson Klein at K-12 Politics (Education Week) is reporting what?may not be too surprising: that conservatives on the Hill don't much care for increased federal
Treat the disease
Chris TessoneAs Bianca noted yesterday, legislators in Ohio are pushing major changes to the collective bargaining rights of public sector unions in the state, among them teacher unions. Many of the proposed changes, like eliminating step-and-lane salary increases, would be very positive.
Caption contest!
Michael J. PetrilliIt's only Thursday, but there's no reason we can't have a little fun. Have the perfect caption for this picture of the School Turnaround Group's Justin Cohen? Post it in the comments section below or send a tweet to @educationgadfly.
Anthropomorphizing the ideal
In 1973 William F. Buckley Jr. gave a speech at the New York Conservative Party's annual dinner in which he addressed the fall of Spiro Agnew, who had resigned his office just five days earlier. ?There was,? Buckley recalled years later, ?a fleeting temptation, encouraged by emissaries of Mr. Agnew, to think him victimized.? The speechmaker resisted temptation.
Quotable & notable
"Michelle Rhee shouldn't have?and shouldn't have had to?claim to have raised student test scores astronomically in order to be considered for DC schools chancellor."* - Alexander Russo, Writer for This Week in Education
Field notes: Welcome (back) to the funding cliff
Peter MeyerLast year at this time I was unveiling my Share the Pain plan (I liked the coincidence that STP is a famous fuel additive, ?with the racer's edge"), which included a staff salary freeze and cutting out busing for anyone who lived within a half mile of school.? Those two items alone would have saved nearly a million dollars and the jobs of a couple dozen teachers.?
Education news nuggets
Watch out. The Common Core State Standards are a Death Knell for literature.? Extreme? Probably.
Quotable & notable
"We know now from research that a lot of kids that drop out in high school really drop out in middle school. They just leave in high school"* - Laura Bush, Former First Lady
On Purpose' book event
Mark your calendars for a book event coming up next week. On Wednesday, February 16?there will be?a cocktail reception and book signing for Samuel Casey Carter's book, On Purpose: How Great School Cultures Form Strong Character.
Event Recap: Are Bad Schools Immortal?
In case you missed it?..On February 2 -- Groundhog Day -- we held a terrific (& quite lively) event to discuss the seemingly eternal problem of low-performing schools and what to do about them. We tied it loosely to the cult classic movie Groundhog Day, in which the main character lives the same day over and over.
Rank rankles
Peter MeyerLiam's post yesterday about Malcolm Gladwell's critique of U.S. News & World Report's college rankings ? ?one wonders,?
Abjure the core
Doug Lasken, writing on FlashReport, says it will cost California $1.6 billion to replace its current educational standards with the newly developed Common Core standards being pushed by President Obama. Lasken writes:
Rank
Malcolm Gladwell takes apart the U.S. News & World Report college rankings. He clarifies the obvious: that the U.S. News rankings are self-fulfilling; the magazine's metrics prize prestige and its top-rated schools are the most prestigious.
Education news nuggets
Well, let's talk about a sobering effect?not only do we have to worry about increased teen pregnancy and children in poverty as well as
Quotable & notable
"The thing we said then, in looking at the business world, is that if you sit on [New York school data], you become the Enron of test scores, the Enron of graduation rates."* - Merryl H. Tisch, Chancellor of the Board of Regents
You think you're ready for college???think again
Peter MeyerIn?their continuing drive to ratchet up learning standards, New York State's education leaders?are now sounding the alarm?about high school diplomas. According to a new study, done for NY's State Ed department, fewer than half the kids in the state holding a diploma are ready for college.
Thoughts on diversity
Justin Cohen, a panelist at Fordham's recent Are Bad Schools Immortal? event, said that nobody should oppose, and nobody he knows opposes, engineering public schools' student bodies to be more racially varied.* But is the first part, the ?should? part, true?
New blog design
We've undergone a facelift overnight but we're having some technical difficulties. You may see some older posts showing up among the new ones but, pardon our dust, we're looking to get that straightened out as soon as possible. As always, thank you for reading Flypaper!
Tweet all about it
Did you miss our event -- Are Bad Schools Immortal? -- last week? Want a recap? Check out the Twitter feed below for some play-by-play action.
Quotable & notable
"America, not just Wake County, should stand up and say this is wrong and we're not going back to the days of segregated schools."* Rev. William J. Barber, President of North Carolina chapter of NAACP