A plague of violence in Chicago: What can schools do?
NPR's Morning Edition has been running a series on youth violence in Chicago ? this morning's story is here.? And it's worth paying attention to.
NPR's Morning Edition has been running a series on youth violence in Chicago ? this morning's story is here.? And it's worth paying attention to.
Ever since their creation two decades ago, charter schools have been defined by three fundamental?if somewhat contradictory?ideas: accountability for results, school-level autonomy, and meaningful parental choice. That the charter notion has stood the test of time is a testament to the power of these three ideas.
While incentives are offered to states to raise college graduation rates, law students are offered?dogs?
?Even professions like long-jump or tackling people on a football field or hitting a baseball, the average ability is so much higher today because there's this great feedback system, measurement system'' *
A brilliant report from Mike Antonucci at?the Education Intelligence Agency (EIA) paints a dark picture of what the recent public union defeats in Wisconsin and elsewhere mean to the National Education Association.? ?There should be no mistake about it,? he writes, ?NEA sees them as a threat to its very existence.?
Today, Vice President Joe Biden will formally announce another round of competitive, federal education grants, this time for colleges. According to the New York Times, the grants are designed to help the administration ?meet its goal of adding eight million college graduates by 2020? and making the U.S.
Bob Herbert writes about race and schools in today's New York Times, specifically, about how ?poor black and Hispanic public school students? will never receive decent educations until the ?toxic concentrations of poverty? that exist in their schools are dispersed.
?Nobody wants to be in a fiscal crisis?this sucks?.Look, teachers are going to lose their jobs. That's not a good thing. But as long as that is a reality that we're facing, let's do it in a smart way.'' * -Michelle Rhee, Founder and CEO of StudentsFirst
The CCSS ELA standards are, as you may remember, heavily (though certainly not exclusively) skills driven. The choice to focus on skills rather than content was deliberate and the standards authors themselves acknowledged that states would likely want to enhance these skills-driven standards with additional content.
At last night's school board budget ?workshop? I felt the sinking sensation that passengers on the Titanic must have felt:??it's too late for life boats. The trouble is, I felt that way last year as well.??The big difference between the Titanic and my school district is this: our ship doesn't really sink and we don't change directions.?
Last week I showed that, by one measure at least, teachers in non-collective bargaining districts actually earn more than their union-protected peers?$64,500 on average versus $57,500.
America's vice president and education secretary will be in Delaware today, spending the afternoon at Howard High School of Technology to commemorate the one-year anniversary of Delaware's receipt of more than $100 million in Race to the Top dollars.
Last week, Education Secretary Arne Duncan was on the Washington Post's op-ed page, pouring cold water all over America's March Madness excitement.
Eric Smith, Florida's education commissioner since 2007, will resign at the end of the school year, reports the Orlando Sentinel.
Randi Weingarten is talented at making crazy ideas sound sensible.
?It's, 'This is so hard, so bless your heart for trying.' That's not how you become a real profession. We need to be honest about that conversation'' * -Jason Kamras, Key Architect of IMPACT
See this fundraising letter from President Obama's political arm, Organizing for America. There's surely no talk of the "new normal" as far as I can see! And it's not at all clear where they are getting their numbers from (55,000 teacher jobs at stake?).
No, these students weren't accepted to their colleges because of a computer glitch, but they are members of 10 of the 68 men's teams in the NCAA tournament are not on track to graduate half of their players.
Well, it seems that we have a lot of 'F' (for forgot)-rated news stories today.
Mike and Rick unpack findings from Fordham's latest report, scratch their heads about teacher reform, and pour one out for Detroit. Amber tears apart Roland Fryer's new paper and Chris tells potty-mouths to pay up. [powerpress]
Educator pension systems are becoming increasingly expensive and, in a number of states, plagued by severe problems of underfunding. Given concerns about cost and long-term sustainability, several states have cut benefits, usually for new teachers, and many more are considering doing so. However, in making these changes, policymakers should carefully consider their labor-market effects.
I emerged from our Board of Ed Curriculum Committee meeting yesterday smiling.?
Listeners of the Education Gadfly Show Podcast may recall my segment from February 24th highlighting the decision of Rockingham County, North Carolina to ban corporal punishment. Following some internal debate that took place afterward, I took it upon myself to do some more research on the matter.
Young teachers turned around a poorly-performing elementary school in Oakland, and now they're all at risk of being fired in a LIFO (seniority-based) layoff mandated by state law:
One of the most striking arguments made against Republican governors' efforts to curtail the bargaining rights of teachers is that it's an "attack on the middle class." I'm more sympathetic to that line of reasoning than you might think; for all their evils, unions have been successful in giving millions of people a path to prosperity.
?? the people setting up the [teacher] measurement formulas don't seem to know what the qualities of a good teacher are. Most of them can name only the ability to generate high student test scores, while the rest go blank after adding the ability to manage classroom behavior.'' *
In case you missed it, our president Chester Finn moderated a very interesting panel discussion last month (February 21, 2011) in Atlanta.
You shouldn't need 3-D glasses to see the need for a good curriculum. So why, then, does Neal McClaskey at Cato think that a national curriculum is ?not possible in this dimension??