You could be forgiven for thinking that the education messiah will arrive on June 2, considering all the hype, angst, dither and pother that already surround next week’s promised unveiling of the final “common core” state standards (CCSS).
Robin Lake, ed. Center on Reinventing Public Education 2010
The final drafts of the Common Core State Standards for English language arts and math are slated to be released next week. While there has been some controversy in a handful of states over their adoption, the majority of states seem poised to adopt these standards quickly and with little fanfare.
Don't miss this week's Ohio Education Gadfly for coverage of all this and more.
I just got around to Monday's optimistically-titled NYT article, ?Glimmers of Hope for Grads.? (The web page header is ?Job Prospects Improve Slightly for Graduates? ? maybe that one ended up in the print version). In any event, one of the stats really stuck out to me:
Maryland's Race to the Top application fails to garner the support of nearly all of the state's unions and a number of districts, including its largest LEA, Montgomery County.
?Without that, it doesn't really matter how much you spend on the car you are likely to crash.? ? Bret Schundler, New Jersey Education Commissioner, on appropriate student data tracking systems
A recent flurry of news about Ohio charter schools makes a strong case for clearer lines of charter school accountability in the Buckeye State.
Last Saturday, the Columbus Dispatch ran an op-ed by Fordham Institute policy and research analyst Jamie Davies O’Leary about the growing trend of states incorporating teacher performance into evaluations.
Is school choice a genie you can put back into the bottle? The Dayton Public School District wants to try.
From Ball State University comes the latest report, Charter School Funding: Inequity Persists, which measures the extent to which states demonstrate funding fairness toward charter schools.
Reading scores for Cleveland’s fourth and eighth graders on the National Assessment of Educational Progress’s (NAEP) Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) aren’t much better than the
Ohio offers multiple options for high-school students to earn free college credit, but these pathways remain a mystery to most families and high schoolers. KidsOhio, School Choice Ohio, and the Columbus Urban League have teamed up to produce a simple, informative brochure to help students and their families understand their options for “jumpstarting” their college careers.
There's an important new report out today confirming what Fordham first helped unearth in 2005, and what charter school supporters and leaders have long known: public charters receive less funding than do district schools, by a wide margin
Nobody is satisfied with the academic performance of the schools serving Ohio's poor, urban youngsters ? and nobody should be. In the 2008-09 school year, almost half of the quarter million students in the state's ?Big 8? cities attended schools rated ?D? or ?F? by the state.
This summer, I'm heading north to Trenton to become the Deputy Commissioner of Education for the state of New Jersey.?Though I'm sad to leave my home state of Maryland and the DC ed reform co
?I'm not anti-union; I'm not anti-teacher. I'm anti-our-children-not-getting-a-good-education.? ? Kevin Johnson, Mayor of Sacramento
If you wanted to dream up an example of the ill consequence of ?one size fits all? federal policy, you'd be hard pressed to do better than Arne Duncan and company's treatment of Massachusetts right now.
At the college level, transparency may not always be a good thing. At the national level, there are 10 problems edu-preneurs must solve.
Here in Ohio, where the state has avoided even some of the least controversial reforms related to teacher evaluation and pay, Emmy and I have noted plenty of other districts and states taking bold action. ?We wrote an op-ed about this very topic, highlighting four such examples: D.C.
?We do a disservice to children when we shield them from the truth, just because some people think it is painful or doesn't fit with their particular views.? ? Arne Duncan, US Secretary of Education
Eduwonk has a very good post on the NYT article on charters from this weekend. His take is worth the read.
In two weeks, Harvard's excellent Program on Education Policy and Governance is hosting a conference on performance pay for teachers.
In a previous post, I discussed the probability that Secretary Duncan will have reason to forgo spending down the remaining Race to the Top funding and send money back to the Treasury.
Make sure to check out the excellent Forbes article on the nation's best charters, forward-thinking districts, and the use of data. Lots of name-checking of ed reforms biggest stars, like Achievement First, Wireless Generation, the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, the Gates Foundation, New York City Public Schools, and more.
