PODCAST: Leaving a scorched earth of nicknames behind
From the vault: The best of the podcast bloopers.[powerpress]
From the vault: The best of the podcast bloopers.[powerpress]
We hope you enjoyed this year's edition of The Gladfly! We certainly did!
This post was a part of our April Fool's Day edition of The Gladfly! Please don't think we're serious about this.
This post was a part of our April Fool's Day edition of The Gladfly! Please don't think we're serious about this.
This post was a part of our April Fool's Day edition of The Gladfly! Please don't think we're serious about this.
James Surowiecki made the case last month in the New Yorker that the president's plan to spend money on research and development, infrastructure, and education in these glass-half-empty economic times makes sense.
To drink or to study? That is the question. Here's another one: Did you know that some grass cutters and stock clerks earn more than veteran teachers?
?So what this means is, is that our workforce is going to be more diverse; it is going to be, to a large percentage, Latino. And if our young people are not getting the kind of education they need, we won't succeed as a nation.'' *
Several years ago, then superintendent Roy Romer mandated that elementary teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District use Open Court?a proven literacy program that he believed would help drive reading achievement in the district.
Teachers rallied at the State Capitol in Albany last night, in a last-ditch effort to get the legislature and governor to restore funds to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's?deficit slashing budget proposal. It doesn't seem to have worked.?
If you believe the two sides currently duking it out over collective bargaining in Wisconsin, Ohio, and other states, contracts with teacher unions are either the only thing saving American education from utter ruin or they're the greatest impediment to reforming the system.
How does your local school spend its money? If your district received funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Arne Duncan knows:
Michelle Rhee, in Indianapolis this week, spoke with reporters from that city's paper, the Star, and answered questions about her education-related positions and philosophy.
?Unions should have every right to continue representing their members, speaking up for teachers as they negotiate salaries, professional development and benefits.'' * -Michelle Rhee, CEO and Founder of StudentsFirst
It was standing room only yet again at Monday night's meeting of the board of education, of which I am a member, in our 2000-student upstate New York school district; nearly 200 people were jammed into the high school cafeteria when I arrived.? This was not good.
As I was writing up the account of my recent board meeting, I had to keep pinching myself to make sure I wasn't dreaming. ?And just at that moment, it seemed, there came a flurry of emails from a listserve I am a member of --?
Sometimes the right thing doesn't look great politically.
One of the reasons Candidate Obama was so appealing was his call for participants in our democracy to "disagree without being disagreeable." Though he hasn't always lived up to that standard, it's a worthy ob
Here's the "Statement of Administration Policy on H.R. 471 - Scholarships for Opportunity and Results Act."
?One thing I never want to see happen is schools that are just teaching the test because then you're not learning about the world, you're not learning about different cultures, you're not learning about science, you're not learning about math.
Today, Jay Greene has an Ed Next column arguing against government mandated standards and curriculum. ?Most of the important elements of American education are already standardized,? he argues.
One of the many reasons I think that states should get out of the curriculum- and textbook-adoption business is that, when state governments start to dive too deep into the implementation weeds, they tend to do far more harm than good.
If you haven't yet, steer yourself over to the latest "Room for Debate" conversation at the New York Times, entitled ?How to Raise the Status of Teachers.? It features some excellent pieces, including one by Fordham's own Mike Petrilli.
As state and district education budgets shrink, it becomes doubly important to scrutinize line items, to think through cuts, and to trim fat in ways that won't negatively affect schoolchildren. Moore County, North Carolina seems to have missed that memo. ?The district is set to close one of its smaller elementary schools, Academy Heights.
This post appears today on the New York Times' Room for Debate blog. The question: How can the United States raise the status of teachers and teaching?
Barack Obama was at Bell Multicultural High School in Washington, D.C., today, answering education-related questions at an event organized by Univision. Responding to a question about standardized exams, the president said that pupils are currently tested too frequently and are under too much pressure to perform well on the high-stakes exams they're given.
Parents in Volusia County, Florida (it's always Florida, it seems) are picketing outside an elementary school that recently instituted several regulations to protect a six-year-old student who has a serious peanut allergy.
If Horace Mann was the key educational figure of the 19th century, and John Dewey of the first half of the 20th, then Al Shanker, the legendary leader of the American Federation of Teachers, deserves t