Mass unionization
The first Massachusetts charter school to unionize (nearly a year ago) now has a collectively-bargained contract with its teachers. Charters in other jurisdictions have unionized, so what’s so special about this one?
The first Massachusetts charter school to unionize (nearly a year ago) now has a collectively-bargained contract with its teachers. Charters in other jurisdictions have unionized, so what’s so special about this one?
Every day, hundreds of backpack-toting children cross the Lake Amistad Dam Bridge in Del Rio, Texas. This wouldn't normally be cause for complaint except that the bridge spans the U.S.-Mexico border and many of the children crossing that line are likely attending American public schools without student visas. Plenty of such crossings are legal--students and parents who’re U.S.
What's the point of having standards if they're so low that everybody meets them? That’s the Q in Maryland this week following the announcement that only 11 of 62,000 students were denied graduation as a result of failing the state graduation exam (despite its many alternatives, loopholes, and escape clauses).
This article over at Education.com about the state of writing caught my eye.
The NYT reports this morning on Stanford Professor Caroline Hoxby's latest findings on the Big Apple's charters. The results are extremely encouraging. Here are two blurbs:
Here is a Washington Post article this morning about the draft standards for English and math that were made public yesterday. From the piece:
Quotable : ???To me it is the best thing they could have come up with. It's like I'm sending my kids to a private school and the county's paying for it.??? ??? Raquel Pelaez, parent of two students enrolled in Florida's Broward Virtual School
John Derbyshire is no optimist... that is when it comes to education policy. In an excerpt from his soon-to-be-released??We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism, he explains how education policy has nothing new under the sun. One particular common theme?
Here is the take of the House Education & Labor Committee GOP staff on the common core draft standards for English-language arts and math.
The public draft of the Common Core State Standards is considerably improved from the version that was circulated two months back and it's evident that the drafters are trying to incorporate responsible feedback. I trust they will continue to.
So much that's true--and important--has been written about the late Irving Kristol, I can add but a few recollections.
To learn more about the new book, "From Schoolhouse to Courthouse," here's an interview??(podcast) with its co-editor, Joshua Dunn of the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs.
Quotable: "When we tell kids they ought to go to universities who shouldn't, we set them up for failure.?? We need to get more young people in skills training to get them capacity to be successful early in life." - Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour
I gave a presentation this morning to some state- and district-level education leaders working on a state committee charged with addressing persistently low-performing schools. They asked a number of thought-provoking questions and made several insightful, real-world implementation comments that are typically missing in the 30,000-foot DC policy debate.
Is there a connection between the raging health care debate and education in America today? You bet, argues Checker in this piece on NRO (which also will run in our weekly Gadfly newsletter).
Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) has replaced the late Ted Kennedy as chairman of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. Many interest groups are ecstatic, many school reformers wary, seeing Harkin as an old-style Democrat who opposes charter schools and merit pay and works on behalf of the establishment. But there could be a silver lining.
Marilyn Thomas and Crystal CollinsSouthern Regional Education Board2009
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development2009
Surprise! TFA is serious about teacher quality. Not only do they recruit and retain the most qualified applicants, but they also boast a professional development program that puts most to shame.
In last week's Recommended Reading Dangerously confusing (September 10, 2009), we blamed the disingenuous school report cards issued by New York City on the poor psychometrics of the state Regents tests.
A current proposal from the Philadelphia School Reform Commission (SRC) would force charter schools that want to increase their enrollments or reconfigure their grade levels to do so as part of the contract renewal process (which occurs every five years), instead of through a separate, less-regulated process of amendment. Under the new rules, charters seeking to expand would need to submit
What kind of education would one need to make sense of the current health-care debate? As America rethinks its academic standards and international competitiveness, this is not a bad time to ask what U.S.
Who were Julius Caesar, Leif Ericsson, and Charles Darwin? Know the answer? Well that’s because you, dear reader, are not a recent or current product of British schools—state, independent, or otherwise--where the Romans, Vikings, and Victorians, amongst others, can be skipped in history class so that students have time to learn how to use social networking sites like Twitter.
Many years hence, as the students of Cushing Academy hold their faces close to their electronic book readers, they probably won't even know of those distant days of yore when people discovered literature by browsing shelves.
The L.A.
One of the hottest slogans in education today is "21st Century Skills." Though it certainly sounds compelling--who could be against teaching our students the skills they need in this budding century?--this is much more than a feel-good, everyone-jump-onboard valence issue.
I am in no way keen on the "research" produced by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) but I have to admit that they have raised an important issue in their latest report that merits attention--that is, if you can stomach the rhetoric it's clothed in.
Just wanted to echo/add to what Andy wrote earlier. Led by Common Core, nearly 30 leaders (including Checker) signed onto a statement today that strongly criticizes the program put forth to states by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, known as P21.
One frequently hears arguments that redirect blame from failing schools (and their teachers and principals) to ubiquitous social monsters that are bigger and hairier (poverty, broken families, crime) but also impossible to hold accountable. I get this. There are undeniable correlations between student achievement and socioeconomic status.
Primary-secondary education is obviously not the only realm of increased litigation in American life and intense court involvement in social policy. It's most definitely not the only field in which the fruits of such litigation have sometimes turned out to be mushy if not rotten.