Quotable & notable
?We'll just stop taking graduates from institutions that aren't producing effective teachers.?* - Jason Kamras, Personnel Chief, D.C. Public Schools
?We'll just stop taking graduates from institutions that aren't producing effective teachers.?* - Jason Kamras, Personnel Chief, D.C. Public Schools
?Scaling back on early childhood programs is something that is not in the best interest of our communities, or ultimately our states, because we have to close achievement gaps."* - Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education
The Hechinger Report and the Education Writers Association have teamed up with Michele McNeil, Education Week's federal policy editor, to produce a comprehensive report on the impact of the gargantuan education stimulus program from two years ago ?
Rarely do I come home from a school board meeting without wanting to scream, ?Call in the National Guard!?? To change metaphors, I could spin the globe, eyes closed, and put my finger just about anywhere on our little school district map to find what to my eyes looks like a train wreck and to others, based on the reactions,?the regular delivery van.?
State mandates are coming under attack from local governments feeling pain from shrinking state payments. This paragraph in the New York Times' recent article on Texas schools is worth highlighting:
A seminal problem with No Child Left Behind was that law's focus on race, not just because an overwhelming, overriding focus on race is bad, which it is, but because NCLB's racial categories?black, white, Hispanic, etc.?always seemed overbroad and largely unworkable. Dad's from Chile and Mom's from Italy. Who am I? Dad's ancestors came over on a slave ship and Mom's came over on a Boeing.
Fordham Institute President Chester Finn will be participating in?an education event in Atlanta one week from today -- on Monday, February 21 (Presidents' Day). The topic?
Though I have never been a big fan of our obsession with race and poverty as? useful?tools for improving academic achievement ? what starts as a sociological construct (thank you, James Coleman), quickly becomes a general principal, which, by the time you get to the classroom trenches has become a horribly self-fulfilling and deterministic pedagogy ?
In fact, as the cover story in New York magazine begins, ?Cathie Black is lost in Queens?. Usually when Black goes east, she's headed to her $4 million house in Southampton,? not the Coney Island elementary school where the new Gotham schools chief was supposed to be going.????
As Alyson Klein of Ed Week reported yesterday, the House GOP offered a ?slice and dice?
"If we have managed to be the world's most powerful country, politically, economically and militarily, for the last 47 years despite our less than impressive math and science scores, maybe that flaw is not as important as film documentaries and political party platforms claim."*
Alyson Klein at K-12 Politics (Education Week) is reporting what?may not be too surprising: that conservatives on the Hill don't much care for increased federal
As Bianca noted yesterday, legislators in Ohio are pushing major changes to the collective bargaining rights of public sector unions in the state, among them teacher unions. Many of the proposed changes, like eliminating step-and-lane salary increases, would be very positive.
It's only Thursday, but there's no reason we can't have a little fun. Have the perfect caption for this picture of the School Turnaround Group's Justin Cohen? Post it in the comments section below or send a tweet to @educationgadfly.
In 1973 William F. Buckley Jr. gave a speech at the New York Conservative Party's annual dinner in which he addressed the fall of Spiro Agnew, who had resigned his office just five days earlier. ?There was,? Buckley recalled years later, ?a fleeting temptation, encouraged by emissaries of Mr. Agnew, to think him victimized.? The speechmaker resisted temptation.
"Michelle Rhee shouldn't have?and shouldn't have had to?claim to have raised student test scores astronomically in order to be considered for DC schools chancellor."* - Alexander Russo, Writer for This Week in Education
Last year at this time I was unveiling my Share the Pain plan (I liked the coincidence that STP is a famous fuel additive, ?with the racer's edge"), which included a staff salary freeze and cutting out busing for anyone who lived within a half mile of school.? Those two items alone would have saved nearly a million dollars and the jobs of a couple dozen teachers.?
Watch out. The Common Core State Standards are a Death Knell for literature.? Extreme? Probably.
"We know now from research that a lot of kids that drop out in high school really drop out in middle school. They just leave in high school"* - Laura Bush, Former First Lady
Mark your calendars for a book event coming up next week. On Wednesday, February 16?there will be?a cocktail reception and book signing for Samuel Casey Carter's book, On Purpose: How Great School Cultures Form Strong Character.
In case you missed it?..On February 2 -- Groundhog Day -- we held a terrific (& quite lively) event to discuss the seemingly eternal problem of low-performing schools and what to do about them. We tied it loosely to the cult classic movie Groundhog Day, in which the main character lives the same day over and over.
Liam's post yesterday about Malcolm Gladwell's critique of U.S. News & World Report's college rankings ? ?one wonders,?
Doug Lasken, writing on FlashReport, says it will cost California $1.6 billion to replace its current educational standards with the newly developed Common Core standards being pushed by President Obama. Lasken writes:
Malcolm Gladwell takes apart the U.S. News & World Report college rankings. He clarifies the obvious: that the U.S. News rankings are self-fulfilling; the magazine's metrics prize prestige and its top-rated schools are the most prestigious.
Well, let's talk about a sobering effect?not only do we have to worry about increased teen pregnancy and children in poverty as well as