The same old from Albany
In what the New York Times generously described as “baby steps,” the Empire State’s appalling legislature last week passed several spending reforms designed to close the state’s $3.2 billion budget deficit.
In what the New York Times generously described as “baby steps,” the Empire State’s appalling legislature last week passed several spending reforms designed to close the state’s $3.2 billion budget deficit.
By 2011, if the states stick to their policy guns, all eighth graders in California and Minnesota will be required to take algebra. Other states are sure to follow. In recent years, the conventional wisdom of American K-12 education has declared algebra to be a “gatekeeper” to future educational and career success.
Education SectorNovember 2009 This latest report from Education Sector summarizes the operational challenges that face nonprofit charter management organizations (CMOs) as they attempt to grow and support their networks of charter schools.
The Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) has some powerful supporters, including the NEA, Cisco, Intel, and Microsoft. Fourteen states have also climbed aboard its effort to refocus American K-12 education on global awareness, media literacy and the like--and to defocus it on grammar, multiplication tables and the causes of the Civil War.
It’s no secret that schools of education teach all manner of nonsense. So when the University of Minnesota’s College of Education and Human Development launched its Race, Culture, Class, and Gender Task Group, we might well have expected trouble. But the reality is worse than that.
Is success genetic or environmental? For educators trying to change the prospects of disadvantaged youth, new research on this timeless question might have wide-ranging implications.
To the editor:Should a thousand flowers bloom in the charter school world? Gadfly thinks not (“No oaks needed,” December 3, 2009), and I agree. But would you extend the reasoning, as I think you should, to the nonprofit world generally?
Quotable: "The class teaches values that America doesn't really hold that much anymore. ??I've learned to think about cowboy values when tough things come my way."
Very interesting document from Pennsylvania's state chief to districts regarding the Race to the Top.
Quotable: "It is no exaggeration to say...that [impending layoffs] will be the end of public education in the city of Los Angeles as we know it, and that is admitting that the service we already provide is not enough."
A recent UCLA Civil Rights Project report lamented that the charter school movement is contributing to the resegregation of our public schools. It's not that charters are allowing white families to escape to exclusive enclaves (as some had feared might happen).
This Education Week article about P21 is well worth reading, as is Lynne Munson's no punches pulled post.
Two recent stories indicate that reform is a lot harder to sustain than to initiate.
Last week, the Department released final documents for the $3.5 billion School Improvement Grant program.
New report: charters make up 74% of schools with extended learning time (charters represent only??5% of all public schools) Gist making it tougher to become a teacher in RI
Quotable: ???If you're at a hedge fund, [education reform] is definitely the hot cause???These are the kind of guys who a decade ago would have been spending their time angling to get on the junior board of the Met, the ballet.??? ??? Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform
Earlier this week, I spoke to a group of California school board members about the ARRA and RTT. I love talking to these groups because their questions and concerns typically serve as a great wake-up call. That is, what we're talking about in DC is often not at all what's on their minds.
Alyson Klein over at Ed Week dug through the Department's SIG application and found two very interesting quotes. The first explains why the Department isn't giving locals more flexibility.
Let me admit upfront that I don't know Texas Education Agency Commissioner Robert Scott hardly at all; I think I've been in the same room with him once or twice. But his reputation is as a thoughtful policy wonk and adept administrator-a "good government," non-ideological type.
New York City (followed closely by New Orleans) is my favorite city for education reform.
I had the soggy pleasure yesterday of trudging, in the pouring rain, over to 101 Constitution Ave. for the latest update on the Common Core Standards Initiative from NGA and CCSSO. Apparently attendees didn't mind getting wet because it was a packed house.
Interesting event at??Brookings yesterday afternoon about media coverage of education. The focus was a paper by Russ Whitehurst, E.J.
Thomas Dee and Brian JacobNBER Working PaperNovember 2009
Gadfly’s high hopes and expectations for New York State Education Commissioner David Steiner were sustained by his first major policy move. In a presentation to the Regents, Steiner made an impassioned case for reform of teacher preparation.
What to think when a self-proclaimed Jewish-American ex-Trotskyist Muslim-convert neoconservative comments on the treatment of Islam in state history standards in a post-9/11 world?
We have schools that teach Ebonics, schools that don’t assign grades or tests, schools that promote Afro-centric or