When asked how he would go about improving Pittsburgh, Frank Lloyd Wright offered a simple solution: “Abandon it.” But that Price-is-Right hosting, Michael Moore look-a-like (minus the baseball hat and hammer-and-sickle) Drew Carey won’t drop the commitment to his hometown Cleveland that easily.
National Bureau of Economic ResearchJ. Angrist, S. Dynarski, T. Kane, P. Pathak, & C. WaltersFebruary 2010
Education Next featured TBFI president Chester E. Finn, Jr.
In our last issue, Gadfly erroneously reported that GE Lighting is based in Cincinnati, when any student of Ohio history should know that the Lighting & Electrical Institute is housed at the
Columbus Collegiate Academy, one of six charter schools authorized by the Thomas B.
Ohio has positioned itself to be among the first states to adopt the “common” academic content standards, created through a state-led process coordinated by the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association Center fo
The Fordham Institute's expert reviewers have analyzed the draft Common Core K-12 education standards (made public on March 10) according to rigorous criteria. Their analyses lead to a grade of A- for the draft mathematics standards and B for those in English language arts. Read on to find out more.
The Senate version of the health care bill is now law, and as this New York Times blog post explains, a few key provisions go into effect right away.
Who said the decline of the mainstream media would be deleterious to healthy, informed debate? (Moreover, who said it was healthy and informed to begin with?)
Anyone who's been following the debate over national standards knows that two weeks ago, the National Governors Association (NGA) together with the Council of Chief State Schools Officers (CCSSO) released the much-anticipated public draft of the K-12 math and English language arts (ELA) Common Core State Standards.[quote]
A sense of resignation has set in as I've gone through the details of state RTT applications. States, including the finalists, are not proposing the bold, game-changing reforms this program deserves. Massachusetts is just the latest finalist with a timid approach and plenty of delayed decisions.
That's the charge from George Will, who picks up on Joshua Dunn's recent Flypaper post to give the Secretary of Education a hard time for crusading for "civil rights"
The Wall Street Journal penned a convoluted editorial this morning on national standards.
A new documentary film focuses on New York City's infamous "rubber rooms" and finds teachers sleeping, doodling and (in at least one case) forming a musical duo. The eight rubber rooms are places where banned teachers await their disciplinary fate -- with full pay. According to an article in the New York Post:
Important and worrisome Ed Week article on Secretary Duncan's speech to the Council of the Great City Schools. Urban superintendents want even more flexibility on turnaround rules. That's bad news. Rather than closures and new starts, here's more reason to believe we're going to see more of the meek and ultimately unsuccessful interventions of the past.
The section on teachers in Louisiana's RTT application is considerably weaker than I expected. This should bring us pause since LA is not only a finalist but also, in the conventional wisdom, among the??front-runners.
Kentucky may have the most maddeningly indecipherable teacher section of any state RTT application. It certainly has as weak a section as any of the finalists. After reading it three times, I still can't figure out how teachers will be evaluated--and that's supposed to be the core of the entire section.
"Bottled water we stopped doing, stopped buying textbooks. But, we did very carefully not lay off anybody." ??? Tom Budde, superintendent, Central Union High School District in southern California
My level of frustration with RTT applications--and the Department's decisions on finalists--is growing.
Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, gave a mostly robotic interview to NPR's All Things Considered yesterday.
Education reformers on both sides of the aisle are torn between pressing for their preferred policies from Washington, DC, and acknowledging the federal government is too far removed from classrooms to do good without doing harm, too.
In a break from testifying before Congress and working on his bracket, Arne Duncan called for a
James Merriman, the head of the New York City Charter School Center and former chief of SUNY's Charter School Institute (a state authorizer), writes a level-headed assessment of CSI's decision to grant a short-term renewal to the UFT's charter school in NYC.
Anyone interested in what to do about America's most persistently failing schools--and especially those caught up in today's turnaround craze--should consider Part II of this report a must-read. A MUST-read.
I just went through the teacher provisions of Hawaii's RTT application, and they rival Connecticut's for placement at the bottom of the list. HI admits that currently tenured teachers get evaluated once every five years (!). It hopes to change that along with its rules governing tenure, performance pay, and the removal of low-performing teachers.
From Mike's Desk Fickle on federalism (What should we make of the Department's mixed messages on the federal role in education?)
