The day of reckoning has arrived, except for education
President Obama's address to Congress is earning plaudits for its honesty, candor, and can-do/will-do/must-do spirit.
President Obama's address to Congress is earning plaudits for its honesty, candor, and can-do/will-do/must-do spirit.
Districts and states across the land are all making changes to save some change. A few are even eyeing the long-sacred cow of small class sizes.
If you lead a charter school that's about to be closed for poor performance, how do you fight back? Well, you might misrepresent successful schools on the editorial page of your local newspaper. Sounds bizarre that but that's the tactic employed by Michael Mayo, executive director of Uphams Corner Charter in Massachusetts, whose charter has been revoked by the state.
In 2006, Fordham published a report with the playful name To Dream the Impossible Dream, which outlined several plausible paths to national academic standards. That dream seems less impossible today.
Once upon a time, little Susie was sent to the office for the errant spitball or wayward paper airplane landing in Ms. Beasley's coiffed beehive. Fast forward to 2009 and Susie--or in this case, a 14-year-old troublemaker from Wauwatosa, Wisconsin--has instead landed herself in the pen for a misuse-of-technology infraction. Her offense?
As reported by The Hoff at Education Week's NCLB Act II blog, earlier this week the nation's governors unanimously agreed to work toward common (i.e., national) standards. Were it not for our imploding economy this surely would have been front-page news.
Nancy Pelosi's troops are on quite a tear. First they went after Reading First, a program that by most accounts is doing wonders helping disadvantaged children gain basic literacy skills.
Ohio Governor Ted Strickland surprised most observers (including us) when he left the state's education voucher program intact in his biennial budget proposal. The Educational Choice Scholarship is available to up to 14,000 students assigned to chronically underperforming public schools.
Greetings from Fordham's 7th Floor conference room, which is jam-packed with a standing-room-only crowd to hear a debate about the "21st Century Skills" movement, staged by Common Core. Here's the line-up: Panelists: Diane Ravitch, Research Professor of Education, New York University
Diane Ravitch, an historian of education, is carefully deconstructing the "21st Century Skills" movement by demonstrating that its key ideas are direct descendants of loopy nostrums from the past 100 years. "The cause that animated schools of education throughout the 20th century??was the search for the one discovery that would unshackle schools from teaching content," she said.
Don??Hirsch, founder of Core Knowledge and author of Cultural Literacy, says that students do, indeed, need these "21st Century Skills." But, he's arguing, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills is deeply misguided in its understanding of how students can develop these skills.
Dan Willingham is a cognitive scientist, and takes P21 apart step by step. The Partnership for 21st Century Skills assumes, he says, that first, knowledge and skills are separate. But research shows that not to be true.
Ken Kay, the head of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, is here to defend himself. He says that most of what we're doing in education is subject-matter focused. Most of the assessments are subject-matter focused. But we aren't producing enough students with critical thinking skills. So clearly subject-matter is not enough.
The latest Education Next is out, and its cover story is an excellent piece by Richard Lee Colvin previewing the Obama education agenda and contemplating the Democratic Party's schism over school policy.
Imagine, you have been laid off and you can't find another job earning anywhere close to what you were making. Your savings have been decimated by the disaster on Wall Street. You may be renting now that you lost your home. Maybe your pension is a lot less, too.
Do you wait anxiously for another Obama Reform-o-meter???Do you refresh the Flypaper homepage repeatedly or check your RSS feed hourly wanting to see how the Administration is doing? Well your prayers are answered: Obama Reform-o-meters 24-7.
As first reported by Politics K-12 yesterday, Stanford Professor Linda Darling-Hammond has decided to return to Palo Alto rather than seek a top position in the Obama Administration.
With the stroke of a pen on Tuesday, President Barack Obama's economic stimulus plan became the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. I'm no economist but I certainly buy the president's basic argument about the need for such a stimulus.
While you're waiting for the Gadfly to appear in your inboxes (who isn't, honestly?) next Thursday (February 26), you could attend this neat event at AEI: Jim Cibulka, recently elected president of NCATE, the National Council for Accreditation o
Ohio's governor is being assailed, and rightly so, for his education plan, with its preference for creating adult jobs over ensuring that students learn.
I spent the morning doing a "radio tour" of talk shows around the country, explaining our new Accountability Illusion report. A common question is why it matters that states are implementing NCLB so differently. After all, states had very different accountability systems before NCLB.
This just in, from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's office:
Take away all the jargon, emotion, envy, confusion, and embarrassment and much of the No Child Left Behind debate comes down to this: Which schools are good, which are bad, and does NCLB do a decent job of telling the difference?
Just last week, we learned that Michael "Noah" Bloomberg would pack his ark with four charter-converted Brooklyn Catholic schools. Unfortunately, though not unexpectedly, the seas for this journey are already proving stormy.
Achieve, Inc.American Diploma Project NetworkFebruary 2009
Jill Constantine, Daniel Player, Tim Silva, Kristin Hallgren, Mary Grider, and John DekeMathematica Policy ResearchInstitute of Education SciencesFebruary 2009
Paul E. Peterson and Matthew M. ChingosJohn F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard UniversitySpring 2009