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Quotable & notable
??for education reform, 2011 could be the best of times.'' * ?Michelle Rhee, Former Washington, D.C.? School Chancellor
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Duncan for Henderson
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said yesterday that he would like to see Kaya Henderson, Washington, D.C.'s interim schools chancellor, stay in her position ?for the long haul.?
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Unsuccessful
Education Week's ?Quality Counts? 2011 is out and contains, as did its earlier iterations, the misleading Chance for Success Index, albeit with some mitigating modifications.
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A.P. reassessment
The College Board is redesigning A.P. Next month, reports the New York Times, the nonprofit ?will release a wholesale revamping of A.P. biology as well as United States history?
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Michelle Rhee outlines new policy agenda, focuses on state-level policy changes
Michelle Rhee's new education advocacy group, Students First, just released its policy agenda and is garnering the former chancellor of DC Public Schools (and Ohio native!) more
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Is this for real?
Education Week just issued their Quality Counts 2011 report. Expect a proper analysis of the report and what it means for Ohio and K-12 education in tomorrow's Ohio Education Gadfly. But one thing jumped out at me in the fine print. In a section of the report headed ???An Engine of Job Recovery???
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Opinion: How states can stretch the school dollar
Note: This piece originally appeared in the January 6th Education Gadfly. Love what you see? Sign up to receive the Gadfly in your inbox.
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Quotable & notable
?To cover the underfunded pension obligations to teachers and other public employees, cities and states have little choice but to divert money from what would otherwise be their operating budgets?education will get significantly shortchanged as we make up for past underfunding.?*
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AP article about Rhee
I wanted to flag an?Associated Press?piece?about Michelle Rhee and her new group, Students First.
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Pondering PISA
The Washington Post's prescient economics columnist Robert Samuelson wonders if perhaps the American-schools-are-losing-ground-to-China-et-al panic isn't overblown, its premises mostly wrong. For one, ?economic competitiveness depends on more than good schools,?
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Quotable & notable
?This story shows California is behind the rest of the nation. We do not invest in education the way we need to. We have an emergency?* ?Tom Torlakson, California Superintendent of Public Schools
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The union way
Kirti Baranwal and Gillian Russom are teachers in Los Angeles. Today the Los Angeles Times published an op-ed they wrote: ?Education Reform the Union Way.?
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Education news nuggets
Now that it's alright to Huck Finn the Constitution, why not give kids the right to vote?
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Bringing playtime back
The New York Times ?most e-mailed? list can be hilarious in its predictability; as I write, the top three articles are about restoring children's play, cost-cutting travel tips, and strengthening individual marriages (where are the stories about getting accepted to college?and yoga?).
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School Finance
Stretching the School Dollar
This policy brief lists fifteen concrete ways that states can "stretch the school dollar" in these difficult financial times. It is written by Marguerite Roza, senior data and economics advisor at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Michael J. Petrilli, executive vice president at the Fordham Institute.
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Quotable & notable
??if there is a ?national standard,' what prevents the same people who are using the present ?standardized tests' from continuing to demonize teachers???* ?Joel Shatzky, Former English Professor at SUNY-Cortland
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Stretching the School Dollar: A Brief for State Policymakers
This new policy brief lists fifteen concrete ways that states can ?stretch the school dollar? in these difficult financial times. Written by Marguerite Roza, senior data and economics advisor at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Michael J.
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Quotable & notable
?It is fundamentally wrong to divide students up according to their racial group and teach them separately.'' ?Tom Hone, Arizona superintendent of public instruction
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Clunk
Ben Yagoda is an author and professor and on to something when he identifies a new-ish sort of bad writing, which he calls ?clunk.? One reads about pupils who blithely insert into school assignments text-message phrases such as LOL and various emoticons?e.g., . And perhaps this does frequently happen?
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More Finn fight
Rarely do I agree with the New York Times editorial page; today I mostly do. The Times editorialists are ?horrified?
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Instead of facing up to the budget crisis, the unions and their friends change the subject
The New Year is shaping up just as I predicted, with Diane Ravitch and the teachers unions criticizing budget-cutting proposals but offering no real alternatives of their own.
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Quotable & notable
?[The charter school] approach could decimate our school system and use our diversity against us.'' ? Gene Maeroff, President of Edison, New Jersey's School Board
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Checker weighs in on tax break for home schoolers
Today's NY Times Room for Debate poses the question, Do Home Schoolers Deserve a Tax Break? The question explores one of the proposals of the new Republicans in Congress ?
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A whole new world
From the Core Knowledge blog we learn that ?purists? are ?predictably crying censorship and political correctness?
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Pearls before swine
Every so often some people get the idea that a masterpiece could use a bit of, well, changing, just tweaking, really, and just here and there, and so they go off and make the changes and then claim that what they've really done is made the masterpiece more ?accessible? and so have actually, in changing it, shown it the respect it of course deserves.
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Fordham-sponsored KIPP Journey Academy making gains
In 2008 with Fordham as its authorizer, Ohio's first and only KIPP School moved into ?Linden Park, one of Columbus' poorest neighborhoods. The school had high hopes of providing area fifth and sixth graders with an excellent education.?