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Education news nuggets
What's topping my list of ?Things Never to Do: anger New York City parents. Let's go to Long Island for a nicer picture of school reform.
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Full disclosure?
The question arises: Should the Los Angeles Unified School District have voluntarily made its value-added test-score data public? Not necessarily.
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Get Ravitch some Rolaids
It is not presumptuous to suppose that most people would react hostilely were their job-performance assessments spattered across the newsprint of a major metropolitan daily. But the teachers of Los Angeles have only their district and union to blame here.
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Forget STEM: ?To the dreadful summit of the cliff?*
Mark Bauerlein has a wonderfully refreshing piece in the new Education Next, ?Advocating for Arts in the Classroom.? It is especially welcome to ?those beleaguered liberal arts and humanities folks among us who feel so un-21st century.
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Education News Nuggets
Administrators in Kansas understand there's no place like home ? unless you're trying to balance a budget.
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But what about the kids?
Dana Milbank?the Washington Post's answer to Maureen Dowd?goes after President Obama for ?bullying teachers, civil rights groups,? and even ?community organizers? by enhancing the authority of standardized testing.
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Teachable moment alert
Diane Rehm this morning devoted the first hour of her radio show to debate about the planned mosque/Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero: viz., whether said mosque/Islamic cultural center should be built at the proposed location. The seminal word is should.
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Reporting worth reading
The Los Angeles Times began on Sunday a series of articles in which it?is publicizing the findings of a value-added analysis it conducted of seven years of English and math test scores of Los Angeles Unified School District students. And the paper is naming names:
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Edujobs: What's hyperbole and what's real?
Edujobs is the ed-policy topic du jour, and probably rightly so ? it'll send $10 billion to states to save an alleged 160,000 teachers' jobs; for Ohio, the US Department of Education places the estimate at $361 million to prevent 5,500 pink slips.
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Stop the Presses!*
Another front-page story in the New York Times this morning is sure to stoke the Gotham education fires.? ?Triumph Fades on Racial Gap in New York City Schools?
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Quotable & notable
?We cannot ask a second-grader to come back and complete their studies five years from now when the economy has turned around.'' ?Jim Doyle, Governor of Wisconsin
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Diane Ravitch: Bloomberg and Klein refuse to accept responsibility for inflated claims
I should have known better; when you're dealing with New Yorkers there's no such thing as a ?final word.?
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Sol Stern: Hooray, NYC is better than Buffalo!
Two weeks ago we ran an editorial by Sol Stern in the Education Gadfly in which he argued that ?For Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, test inflation was the gift from Albany that kept on giving, and they found ways to bui
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Education news nuggets
IKEA has taken over my living room, and now Swedes are setting their sights on charter schools.
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Bully for them
There's more than Russlynn Ali's pledge to root out seven-year-old misogynists that's dubious about the federal anti-bullying conference and it is the federal anti-bullying conference.
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A new sheriff
The federal government's first anti-bullying summit concluded yesterday. Modern-day bullying, it seems, is no longer the semi-amusing stuff of high-school-themed movies and sitcoms; swirlies and wedgies have given way to what Secretary of Education Arne Duncan described in his opening remarks as ?racial, sexual, or disability harassment prohibited by the civil rights laws.?
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Quotable & notable
?The question is, are we intentionally setting up charter schools to fail.'' ? Larry Maloney, owner of Aspire Educational Consulting Company and author of a recent Ball State charter school study
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Fordham book sparking new and nuanced thinking about charters
This week Fordham hosted two discussions revolving around our latest book, Ohio's Education Reform Challenges: Lessons from the Frontlines, wh
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Who's accounting?
Katherine writes, ?In the past, too many states set standards and administered assessments that had no real teeth.? Teachers then ignored these edentulous standards, ignored these gummy assessments, at least until the ?few weeks leading up to test administration.?
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An inexorable march?
The point has been made but deserves reiteration: how predictable to read, in last week's Gadfly, that national standards supporters are already starting to move for a national
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Staying Focused on Results
Now that the battle over adoption of the Common Core ELA and math standards is largely over (with more than three quarters of students in America now in Common Core states), attention is turning sharply?and appropriately?in the direction of implementati
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The Gray Lady, Part 2: The Other Shoe Drops
In my previous post about the New York Times, I intentionally ignored a small elephant in the room (skunk at the garden party?), one best described in a recent Whitney Tilson email blast?? I quote, ?He's baaaaaack??
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The little statute that couldn't
Remember that small law named No Child Left Behind? While Washington has been swept up in talk of RTT, SIG, i3, and a host of other acronyms, the one we all love to hate is still going strong. So are its infamous supplemental educational services (i.e., free tutoring), required when a school has been failing for three or more years in a row.
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NYC students: undeniable progress under Mayor Bloomberg
In a guest editorial here last week, Sol Stern observed that New York State had significantly raised the bar for meeting proficiency requirements on state tests and that fewer students are meeting the new standard (“The testing mess,” August 5, 2010).
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Engendering learning
They say boys are from Mars, and girls are from Venus, and Imagine Southeast Public Charter School in D.C. couldn't agree more. Part of a growing experiment in single-sex education, Imagine is a "dual academy," which means it serves both boys and girls, but keeps them separated in different classrooms except for special occasions.
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Childhood and adolescent onset psychiatric disorders, substance use, and failure to graduate high school on time
Joshua Breslau, Elizabeth Miller, W-J Joanie Chung, and Julie B. Schweitzer; UC Davis School of MedicineJournal of Psychiatric ResearchJune 2010
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Addressing summer reading setback among economically disadvantaged elementary students
Richard Allington, Anne McGill-Franzen, Gregory Camilli, Lunetta Williams, Jennifer Graff, Jacqueline Zeig, Courtney Zmach, Rhonda Nowak; University of Tennessee, KnoxvilleJournal of Reading PsychologySeptember 2010, forthcoming
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Education news nuggets
What is the biggest challenge in education? For these colleges, it's not the race gap.
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Local food movement, continued
Yesterday I noted that the most exciting efforts to improve school food are occurring locally, not nationally. A tip-top example is the goings-on in Washington, D.C., where a fresh D.C.