This week's Gadfly is now available for public consumption. Fordham's nascent research director, Amber Winkler, makes her Gadfly debut with a smart editorial about Reading First (she says it's not yet dead).
Check out this New York Daily News column about career and technical education (formerly vocational education).
It's not quite as bad as Marion Barry embracing vouchers, but is it necessarily a positive development that the United Way has selected dropout prevention as one of its three key initiatives?
It's tough to capture a summer internship at Fordham. Expectant mothers often email us tabula rasa resumes on behalf of promising blastocysts, in fact, to be updated as??Embryonic Emmy??and Zygote Zach grow and garner accomplishments over the impending score. This summer, however, we have an unexpected internship opening!
Someone once wrote, "You can't trust Alexander Russo to report on a school bake sale and give an accurate account of the price of brownies," so one hesitates to put much stock in this post.
School Funding's Tragic Flaw ,??a new paper from Education Sector's Kevin Carey and Marguerite Roza of the Center on Reinventing Public Education is a nice, quick introduction to the reasons that school funding is often inequitable and unfair and??under-funds the neediest schools.
To further illustrate the point that contamination may have occurred among Reading First and presumably "non" Reading First schools, a point I made in my piece in??today's Gadfly,??Connie Choate, the director of Arkansas Reading First, writes:
U.S. Department of EducationApril 2008
Jay P. Greene and Marcus A. WintersCenter for Civic Innovation, The Manhattan InstituteApril 2008
Kevin Booker, Brian Gill, Ron Zimmer, Tim R. SassRAND CorporationMay 2008
I appreciated Gadfly's recent coverage of Massachusetts ("Wishing for a Massachusetts miracle?"). About 18 months ago, the Massachusetts Board of Education raised the state graduation standard, but in a flexible way.
The interim evaluation of Reading First has all sorts of people upset for all manner of reasons.
Arnold Schwarzenegger revels in his role as an unconventional politician. How many other Hummer-driving, global warming-fighting Republican governors can you name? Yet his big promises, like those of so many elected officials, can evaporate when the heat rises. Observe how his "Year of Education" was scrapped as California realized it was in a fiscal crisis.
It is generally agreed that academically able American high school graduates should attend college, regardless of their financial circumstances. That's a time-honored education goal in this country and a worthy one.
Regarding last week's Gadfly piece "Wishing for a Massachusetts miracle?": The rush to college readiness is muddying the original intent of the graduation requirement of the Massachusetts Ed Reform Law.
The Economist aimed its reporting lens last week on charter schools in New York City and Chicago. In the Big Apple, demand for charter schools has overwhelmed supply, especially in Harlem: at the Harlem Success Academy Charter School lottery, 3,600 applied for 600 available spots.
The NAACP believes that Anne Arundel County, Maryland, is suspending too many black students.
Reid Lyon, former Reading Czar and one of the creators of Reading First, posted a comment about Shep Barbash's Education Next article
Lisa Graham Keegan, school reform trailblazer and former state superintendent of Arizona, has quit her day job to spend most of her time working on behalf of Senator John McCain's campaign, reports the Arizona Republic:
Mississippi has passed legislation, and the governor has signed it, that would fire superintendents whose districts are labeled "under
Here's another interesting video from The New Yorker Conference (those New Yorker people are always so darn interesting!). In this one, the magazine's financial columnist, James Surowiecki, chats with Service Employees International Union President Andy Stern about the future of unions.
Mushy Mike knows it's not news that college graduates live longer than high-school graduates. The article??to which he refers??is a comment on the lousy healthcare that many poor Americans receive, and it really doesn't have??much to do with getting a college education.
Ohio AG Marc Dann isn't the only one coming in for a beating.
Back when the controversy over unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers exploded (no pun intended) in the middle of the 2008 Democratic primary, Senator Barack Obama used an unfortunate analogy to defend his association with the bomb-thrower:
Amber and Christina discuss the good and bad of the Reading First interim evaluation report: httpv://youtube.com/watch?v=KCgR_VC2KTk
While Americans feel no particular love for the U.S. Department of Education (see this graphic from Sunday's New York Times Magazine), I have found that, in education circles at least, particular scorn is heaped??upon state departments of education and their civil service employees.
