I was just finishing up my ?Sunday morning, big picture memo about school district priorities when the phone rang. I should know better by now than to answer a phone on Sunday morning.? But I did.
When Congress starts to debate education funding in coming weeks and months, keep the following headlines in mind. All of them refer to federal dollars that flowed from the $100 billion education stimulus. At Avondale Elementary, 90 new iPads help students ?app'ly themselves
Now it's an AP report, via the Wall Street Journal, telling us that Mayor Bloomberg will have to lay off lots of teachers ?unless teacher seniority rules are changed.?
Don't miss Bill Tucker's new post on the Education Next page. He takes out?after the Times for a piece they did about digital learning in Florida.
Maybe we need to stop worrying about the kids; teenagers are the ones coming up with real solutions (if they aren't suspended, that is).
Reuters is reporting that Mayor Michael Bloomberg is set to lay off 15,000 teachers in New York City in anticipation of State deficit crunches.
?Given my choice, I'd much rather absorb the cost of running the assessment office than taking on the teacher pensions?'' * ?Bud Church, Worcester County, Maryland Commissioner President
In a world where snow days are now e-days, it comes as no surprise that we have problems on our hands.
It's not a new sci-fi movie ? but it's a longstanding issue for charter schools: finding space ? that's not outer!
It's not that I think it's my job to point out when education-related writing is bubbling over with clich?s; with tear-soaked appeals to care for the children; with flag-waving vapidities about vague, now-nearly-meaningless things like ?international competitiveness?; with trying-to-be-stirring phrases like ?now is the time? and ?we must act for?the future? and suchlike.
Arne Duncan was in Minnesota last week. He talked of a ?sense of urgency.? And he talked about how Minnesota, which has a large achievement gap, really should feel terrible about it and should be doing more to shrink it.
A decade ago, when federal lawmakers on the left and right came together to design and then enact No Child Left Behind, it solidified what was already a ?Washington Consensus? in education policy.
?When you have 92 percent of your employees receiving a bonus, you've got to ask yourself, ?Is it really a bonus program, or is it a program where you're spreading out $42 million?''' * ?Terry Grier, Superintendent of the Huston Independent School District
If there's a Pulitzer nomination for investigative reporting worth making, it's the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for the work its team of reporters has been doing on the Atlanta Public ?Schools cheating scandal.?
Paul Peterson at Ed Next has done a great job translating the President's State of the Union address comments on education into English?(here).
Referring to the Model T, Henry Ford famously said, ?A customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.? It turns out that Dr. Jerry Weast, the superintendent in Montgomery County, Maryland, where I live, feels the same way about school choice ?
Rhee, Ravitch, and others give their opinions on Obama's State of the Union address over at the New York Times?s Room for Debate. ?Liam Julian, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow
At Commentary?s blog, Contentions, Ted Bromund cuts up Obama's ?Sputnik moment? talk:
As we rhapsodize about the talents of Indian students, the country's burgeoning middle class, its phalanxes of engineers and its high-tech hubs, let us not forget that India is a country in which 421 million people are desperately poor (more destitute people there, in fact, than in all sub-Saharan Africa) and some 800 million depend on agriculture for their livelihoods.
I've been trying to figure out what to say about a State of the Union address that, on education at least, offered plenty of encouraging rhetoric but nothing new of substance.
?Here in America, it's time we treated the people who educate our children with the same level of respect. We want to reward good teachers and stop making excuses for bad ones'' * ?Barack Obama, President of the United States
While Obama certainly put education in the spotlight in the State of the Union Address, a few critics do some fact-checking.
If you're not at a rally for school choice, you might want to contribute to education in another way by answering some questions: Should
This weekend the Akron Beacon Journal highlighted parents who ?cheat? to get their kids into preferred schools, lifting up the story of an Akron woman who faces criminal charges (and 10 days in jail) for putting her kids in a neighboring, better school.
There are some subjects that lend themselves to free association more than others.? Tenure, for instance, is not one of those subjects, for me.? Collaboration, however, is. And if I let my mind wander too far, I'll end up singing Kumbaya.
The Washington Post checks the facts in the president's State of the Union address: ?Half a century ago, when the Soviets beat us into space with the launch of a satellite called Sputnik, we had no idea how we'd beat them to the moon.?
Word on the street is that the president, tonight in his State of the Union performance, may use the phrase ?Sputnik moment? or some variation to rationalize gobs more of what's euphemistically called ?investment? in K-12 education. Obama has said similar things before, and if he says them again just remember this:
A new, Republican-heavier Congress could mean new life for the Washington, D.C., voucher program that was allowed to expire in 2009. But, as Alyson Klein reports in Education Week, the ?traditional opponents of vouchers?
