The real problem with Bill Ayers
According to Sol Stern, it's not his (literal) bomb-throwing past but his (figurative) bomb-throwing present:
According to Sol Stern, it's not his (literal) bomb-throwing past but his (figurative) bomb-throwing present:
You can find a different take on George Will's column over at The Quick and the Ed. The author, Kevin Carey, is a very detail-oriented guy, but one wonders if today he hasn't missed the forest for the trees.
Now is as good a time as any to mention that the deadline for Fordham Fellows applications--the day by which all those who wish for Fellowship must submit the apposite materials--is nearing: April 30th it is.
The Economist has an article about the challenges confronting South Dakota's rural schools and school districts.
Are you a teacher looking for field trip ideas, now that testing season is over? Do you live in the greater Washington, D.C., area? Would you like to totally gross out your students? This oughta do the trick.*
Not so many moons ago, Boston University's college of education was the brightest spot in the dim universe of U.S. ed schools, full of heterodox thinkers on important issues (e.g., Charles Glenn, David Steiner, Kevin Ryan, Steve Tigner).
The White House Summit on Inner-City Children and Faith-Based Schools, underway at this moment, has about 300 attendees, all of whom already agree with each other about nearly all the issues on the table. No bad thing to rally the troops or (changing metaphors) preach to the choir.
Mike and Christina discuss Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings's latest round of changes to No Child Left Behind. httpv://youtube.com/watch?v=dwkaKllgyBY
Whitney Tilson, who blogs on education here , reflects level-headedly in today's New York Daily News on the struggles facing the UFT's c
This Wired Magazine article sheds some light, however obliquely, on why it's so difficult to replicate successful school models in different places.
In the United Kingdom today, over 8,000 schools were shut down by a strike of the National Union of Teachers, angry because its members' pay, which has risen 19 percent in real terms since 1997, is scheduled for only a 2.45 percent bump next year. Thus, no school for little Nigel.
NewSchools Venture Fund & FSG Social Impact AdvisorsMarch 2008
Perched atop a soap box in the New York Daily News, United Federation of Teachers boss (and upcoming AFT chieftain) Randi Weingarten steps up her ongoing assault on logic and reason. Schools Chancellor Joel Klein wants to consider student test scores when awarding tenure to teachers. Almost everybody in the real world (i.e., outside the field of education) concurs.
Seems Australia's new government has pulled a bait and switch, promising citizens Down Under significant education reform and then forgetting about most of it.
You have to hand it to U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings and her team: they are hardly dawdling during their Administration's closing months.
Finally, we know what separates great teachers from their more-middling peers: "unconditional love." So writes educator Mark Ryan in an op-ed for The Arizona Republic, a respected newspaper that doesn't usually print pieces about love, joy, sunshine, and kittens. But this is a time of hope, we're told, and Ryan's article fits the bill.
Denial of hard facts and unwelcome implications runs the gamut. At its outer edge, we find a few sorely misguided folks denying that the Holocaust occurred, doubting the wickedness of Stalin, contending the greatness of Lincoln. Once upon a time, the Catholic Church denied Galileo's discovery that the planets revolve around the sun.
Regarding the April 17th story, "Failing schools usually are," the research is consistent and clear: there is a low statistical correlation between the performance of schools measured by point-in-time, year-end test scores (as used in NCLB to measure "Adequate Yearly Progress") and those measured by ho
Anticipating tomorrow's White House summit on inner-city children and faith-based schools, former Secretary of Education William J.
Yesterday, on the Wall Street Journal's expanded opinion pages, Alan Ehrenhalt reviewed Bill Bishop's new book, The Bi
One of Thomas Sowell's points, that college education is being watered down because too many people are obtaining it, is a fine one.
The obvious rejoinder to Mike's post is that when people cluster in "communities of sameness, among people with similar ways of life, beliefs and in the end, politics," they also cluster among people of the same race and socioeconomic status.
Mike tells me (as he runs out the door to catch a flight) that he's already answered my question about standards and tests thusly:
You have to hand it to U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings and her team: they are hardly dawdling during these last months of the Administration.
Marvin's and Mike's mothers coordinated on the phone last night before laying out their sons' outfits. (Click the photo for a bigger version.)
Like Goldilocks's search for the perfectly sized chair in the classic children's fable, educators have long sought the perfectly sized school.
School principals and administrators take note: the Education Sector's newest report, The Benwood Plan: A Lesson in Comprehensive Teacher Reform, shows readers how drastic improvements can be made with just a little bit of elbow grease and creative school-based reforms.
The Ohio Department of Education (ODE) is on the hook for a potential payout of tens of millions of dollars to school districts whose students opted to attend charter schools unless the Ohio Supreme Court rules on behalf of the state.
State leaders have not taken education reform seriously enough, nor have they moved fast enough to implement change, although one improvement they should definitely consider is modernizing the way students are funded, argues a new briefing paper from The Ohio Grantmakers Forum (