Commentary
Education news nuggets
While Obama certainly put education in the spotlight in the State of the Union Address, a few critics do some fact-checking.
Commentary
Education news nuggets
If you're not at a rally for school choice, you might want to contribute to education in another way by answering some questions: Should
Commentary
Quotable & notable
?Here in America, it's time we treated the people who educate our children with the same level of respect. We want to reward good teachers and stop making excuses for bad ones'' * ?Barack Obama, President of the United States
Commentary
Atlanta: Still burning
If there's a Pulitzer nomination for investigative reporting worth making, it's the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for the work its team of reporters has been doing on the Atlanta Public ?Schools cheating scandal.?
Commentary
Stand up and Cheer for Obama
Paul Peterson at Ed Next has done a great job translating the President's State of the Union address comments on education into English?(here).
Commentary
Charter Schools
The Henry Ford model of school choice
Referring to the Model T, Henry Ford famously said, ?A customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.? It turns out that Dr. Jerry Weast, the superintendent in Montgomery County, Maryland, where I live, feels the same way about school choice ?
Commentary
Fact check: Sputnik & Race to the Top
The Washington Post checks the facts in the president's State of the Union address: ?Half a century ago, when the Soviets beat us into space with the launch of a satellite called Sputnik, we had no idea how we'd beat them to the moon.?
Commentary
A satellite's enduring appeal
Word on the street is that the president, tonight in his State of the Union performance, may use the phrase ?Sputnik moment? or some variation to rationalize gobs more of what's euphemistically called ?investment? in K-12 education. Obama has said similar things before, and if he says them again just remember this:
Commentary
New life?
A new, Republican-heavier Congress could mean new life for the Washington, D.C., voucher program that was allowed to expire in 2009. But, as Alyson Klein reports in Education Week, the ?traditional opponents of vouchers?
Commentary
Smile for the camera!
From the department of terrible ideas comes this gem: lawmakers in Wyoming have proposed putting video cameras in classrooms ?to help evaluate teachers' performance.?
Commentary
Education news nuggets
Urgent: Parents, do not send your children to Hitler's ?Nazi tyrent? charter schools! And don't think you can escape the criticism, either?
Commentary
Quotable & notable
??if we feel we need a ?nanny cam' in every classroom in America?then we have lost our sense of teachers as trusted molders of minds and citizens.'' * ?Jon Eckert, assistant professor of education at Wheaton College
Commentary
Powerful vignette for National School Choice Week
This weekend the Akron Beacon Journal highlighted parents who ?cheat? to get their kids into preferred schools, lifting up the story of an Akron woman who faces criminal charges (and 10 days in jail) for putting her kids in a neighboring, better school.
Commentary
Randi's wave, part two
There are some subjects that lend themselves to free association more than others.? Tenure, for instance, is not one of those subjects, for me.? Collaboration, however, is. And if I let my mind wander too far, I'll end up singing Kumbaya.
Commentary
Commentary
The time has come
From Foreign Policy magazine: ?American Decline: This time it's real.??According to the authors:
Commentary
The fierce urgency of now
?Minnesota has lost its ?sense of urgency' to improve education and needs to take bolder steps to reduce the achievement gap between student groups and foster nontraditional pathways to teaching, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan told a group of business and community leaders Friday in Minneapolis.?
Commentary
National School Choice Week
What doesn't have a week? Regardless, today begins National School Choice Week, and the libertarian folks over at Reason magazine have lots planned. One wonders, though, how worthwhile Reason's coverage will be.
Commentary
Testing for learning
The hot, of-the-moment education-related article, which ran in Thursday's New York Times, reports on a study from the journal Science that found testing to be the surest path to learning. The key, according to researchers, is struggle:
Commentary
A threat?
Checker is not wrong to be concerned about China (although I think his worries over the test scores of students in Shanghai are overb
Commentary
Quotable & notable
?The current budget cuts that the Republican leadership is talking about making could turn out to be very damaging to making progress in education reform? * ?George Miller, U.S. House of Representatives Congressman- 7th District, California
Commentary
Randi's catching a wave
The Times has some kind words for Randi Weingarten today?in an editorial called ?Reform and the Teachers' Unions.?
Commentary
Commentary
Commentary
Quotable & notable
?No one I'm talking to is defending the status quo; everyone I talk to really shares my sense of urgency that we have to do better for our children? * ?Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education
Commentary
Mike on ABC
Fordham's?Mike Petrilli discusses the state of education on ABC's This Week with Christiane Amanpour. Check it out while you sip your morning coffee this weekend. ?Amy Fagan
Commentary
Choice marches on: Charters for the middle class?*
From the beginning, charter schools have been sold as a vehicle of choice for the poor ? and they have done a remarkable job, for the most part, providing that outlet.?
Commentary
Commentary
Groundhog Day Event ? Are Bad Schools Immortal?
When it comes to low-performing schools, we seem to be witnessing the same thing over and over?not unlike the classic movie, Groundhog Day.
Commentary
Quotable & notable
?Even controlling for demographic factors, there was no clear relationship between spending and results.? * ?John Podesta, Former Chief of Staff for President Bill Clinton