Education news nuggets
It's Friday, and I am telling you to stop fearing fun. You may be asking, ?do I even have a (school) choice??
It's Friday, and I am telling you to stop fearing fun. You may be asking, ?do I even have a (school) choice??
?Rather than stick with the same strategies and hope things somehow magically change, Congress should find more room in the budget to support the Obama administration's declared approach: to try new strategies and abandon failed ones; to expand and test programs with strong evidence of success, even if that evidence is inconclusive; and to learn from mista
The newest Washington Monthly just came?and it's the college rankings issue, with articles by Ben Miller (?College Dropout Factories?); Kevin Carey (?The Mayo Clinic of Higher Ed,? and ?America's Best Community Colleges?); and Erin Dillon (?America's Best Master's Universities and Baccalaureate Colleges?).
In this Sunday's Washington Post one?will find Diane Ravitch's selection of three books that ?have the power to change the national discussion of what now passes for ?school reform.'? And the winners are:
Paul Tough's op-ed in today's New York Times is called ?Don't Drop Out of School Innovation.? The innovation in question is the devotion of millions of dollars to construction, in cities across the land, of ?Promise Neighborhoods?
The columnist Dana Milbank's newspaper has allowed its pages to be used against him.
Yesterday, the ACT released its 2010 ?Condition of College and Career Readiness,? and the results are less-than-encouraging. According to the results, fewer than 1 in 4 students who took the exam is actually ready for college-level coursework.
I wasn't going to wade into the L A Times teacher brouhaha, but the responses to Liam Julian's Flypaper post yesterday have goaded me into the ring.
?You know who that chronically truant 6-year-old is going to be? The ?menace to society' that everyone will be knocking on our door about, asking me to prosecute.'' ? Kamala Harris, San Francisco district attorney and candidate for state attorney general
So entreats the New Republic's Jonathan Chait in his new TRB column. Chait compares Obama's current struggle to straighten a sclerotic school system to?the president's?earlier exertion to even out an entangled medical establishment.
Emerging from a two-and-a-half hour school board meeting the other night ? a short one! ? as I emerge from most of these sessions (drained), I was anxious to read Rick Hess's Ed Week post, ?School Boards as a Sympton, not the Cause,?
Albany Times Union education reporter Scott Waldman writes this morning
AFT's Randi Weingarten and Washington Teacher's Union's George Parker are close to a good old-fashioned school yard scuffle (it'll have to be after school though, because
?Even if I get brought back this year, what's going to happen next year? It's really discouraging.'' ? Latravis Bernard, teacher from Miramar, Florida who was laid off last spring
Herewith, my final words on the L.A. dustup. Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute writes that he ?wanted to endorse?
Mark Bauerlein has a wonderfully refreshing piece in the new Education Next, ?Advocating for Arts in the Classroom.? It is especially welcome to ?those beleaguered liberal arts and humanities folks among us who feel so un-21st century.
What's topping my list of ?Things Never to Do: anger New York City parents. Let's go to Long Island for a nicer picture of school reform.
The question arises: Should the Los Angeles Unified School District have voluntarily made its value-added test-score data public? Not necessarily.
It is not presumptuous to suppose that most people would react hostilely were their job-performance assessments spattered across the newsprint of a major metropolitan daily. But the teachers of Los Angeles have only their district and union to blame here.
Edujobs is the ed-policy topic du jour, and probably rightly so ? it'll send $10 billion to states to save an alleged 160,000 teachers' jobs; for Ohio, the US Department of Education places the estimate at $361 million to prevent 5,500 pink slips.
Another front-page story in the New York Times this morning is sure to stoke the Gotham education fires.? ?Triumph Fades on Racial Gap in New York City Schools?
Administrators in Kansas understand there's no place like home ? unless you're trying to balance a budget.
?We cannot ask a second-grader to come back and complete their studies five years from now when the economy has turned around.'' ?Jim Doyle, Governor of Wisconsin
Dana Milbank?the Washington Post's answer to Maureen Dowd?goes after President Obama for ?bullying teachers, civil rights groups,? and even ?community organizers? by enhancing the authority of standardized testing.
Diane Rehm this morning devoted the first hour of her radio show to debate about the planned mosque/Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero: viz., whether said mosque/Islamic cultural center should be built at the proposed location. The seminal word is should.
The Los Angeles Times began on Sunday a series of articles in which it?is publicizing the findings of a value-added analysis it conducted of seven years of English and math test scores of Los Angeles Unified School District students. And the paper is naming names:
I should have known better; when you're dealing with New Yorkers there's no such thing as a ?final word.?
Two weeks ago we ran an editorial by Sol Stern in the Education Gadfly in which he argued that ?For Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, test inflation was the gift from Albany that kept on giving, and they found ways to bui
IKEA has taken over my living room, and now Swedes are setting their sights on charter schools.