Education news nuggets
Dear Education news nuggets readers: Thanks for letting me have a say in your daily education news nuggets.
Dear Education news nuggets readers: Thanks for letting me have a say in your daily education news nuggets.
?On whose behalf do you want to make the mistake ? the kids or the teachers? We've always erred on behalf of the adults before.'' ? Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust
Mike hopes that education-types will not be ?distracted by the [achievement] gap.? The ?real goal,? he says, is ?improvements for all groups of kids.? But is that so?
Summers past have brought us front-page firestorms and inane back-to-school stories.
There's a lot to be said about the $10 billion federal jobs bill (?Edujobs?) which will purportedly save 160,000 teachers' jobs nationally, 5,500 of which were/are/could be? at stake in the Buckeye State. You can choose what part of Edujobs makes you most concerned:
I was sorry not to make Education Next's top 40 education books of the decade.? (The polls are still open; vote for three.)? That could be because I haven't written it yet!? Details, details.
September's already here (how shocking!), so get ready for National Punctuation Day by submitting your own punctuation haiku here.
?Public school employment has risen 10 times faster than enrollment. There are only 9 percent more students today, but nearly twice as many public school employees.'' ? Andrew Coulson, director of Cato's Center for Educational Freedom
The University of Florida ?cuts faculty and budgets? but manages to spend, spend, spend on the important things. ?Liam Julian
The UK's least-productive primary schools will be converted into ?academies? (basically, charter schools), says the country's secretary of state for education, Michael Gove.
Standardized tests are biased against students who don't care. (If rough language offends you, don't click the link. And don't leave your house.) ?Liam Julian
The U.S. Department of Education just announced ?that a consortium of states led by Massachusetts will receive a $170 million federal grant to come up with a standardized testing system that would replace a patchwork of tests used by individual states.? ?Liam Julian
Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America, writes in today's Wall Street Journal that she is optimistic about the future of K-12 education. ?Liam Julian
Yesterday, the Professional Staff Union of the Ohio Education Association went on strike.??
The questions change but one key finding stays the same
See Martin West's blog this morning at Education Next about the new research from Jonah Rockoff and Benjamin Lockwood (Columbia Business School) showing serious negative side effects fr
Not a lot of new ground is broken here, but Sam Dillon of the New York Times does a good job summarizing the issues ? including the hot-button topic?of naming names ? surrounding value-added assessments. ?Peter Meyer
Last Friday, we laid down a challenge of great intellectual might.? We asked you, our intrepid readers, to give a caption to the following picture:
?We've gotten out and told our members, if you don't get involved in this election, the alternative is much worse.? ?David A. Sanchez, President of the California Teachers Association
The commandant of the Rick Hess Straight Up blog was?deflated by what?he heard from Education Secretary Arne Duncan and the head of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, on ABC's Sunday-morning, political talk show, This W
New Jersey's former education commissioner, Bret Schundler, is now claiming that the state's governor ?defamed? him. ?I will not accept being defamed by the governor for something he knows I did not do,? Schundler wrote. ?Liam Julian
The critic Carlin Romano, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, wonders if ten years hence books will be largely vestigial:
Sharron Angle is a Nevadan running for the U.S. Senate. And according to the Think Progress blog, she is not in favor of funding public schools. ?Liam Julian
Since Ohio won Race to the Top money last week, districts that didn't sign on to the state's proposal (nearly half of them) have gone on the defensive about why they didn't accept the federal dollars.??
The Thomas B. Fordham Institute has analyzed the academic performance of schools in Ohio’s Big 8 cities annually since 2003.