?In my opinion, I'm not some old fart who wants to defend mediocrity. I am a wise, handsome middle-aged dude who questions whether the change will improve things.'' * ?Michael Goldstein, Founder of MATCH Charter School
?It's fair game to disagree with Michelle Rhee on the issues, but to put her picture in a tiara on a website seems too far. This was clearly a personal attack. After this, it's only going to get nastier.'' * ?Mike Petrilli, Executive Vice President of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute
Mike's ?Stop the Madness!? plea to New York makes a lot of sense. ?But, for better or worse, education governance is nothing if not political, which, as we know, is nothing if not a tad bloody.?
Yes, believe it or not, the ideological wars can be brought to the teaching of mathematics.? So argues a professor of education at the University of Delaware School of Education, Tonya Bartell, in an article she's written for the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics:?
Now that Hurricane Irene is gone, students will go back to school to learn how to
?Teachers, I believe, are pumping their fists for the wrong reasons.'' * ? Ama Nyamekye, Teacher A Teacher Finds Good in Testing Education Week
Thank goodness for Fordham's Peter Meyer, a master at turning policy gibberish into plain English.
Last week we kicked off our series of achievement analyses, an annual look at how students in Ohio's Big 8 urban districts and charters are performing.
Of the many theories that have overtaken educational policy and practice, few have been as influential as the belief that every child learns in his or her own way (see Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind:The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, 1983, which set the ?one size fits all? world on fire).?
?We're raising young people who are, by and large, historically illiterate.'' * ? David McCullough, Pulitzer Prize-winning author
Things are rocky for icons Rhee, Jobs, and King, but perhaps not as bad as they could be for
It's back to school ? and perhaps to court -- for the New York State Board of Regents (NYBOR) and the New York State Education Department (NYSED).?
When AFT President Randi Weingarten and Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute sat down for their conversation, ?When Ref
?The Missile should add ?Rehab one-size-fits-all school councils, even if community groups go ballistic' to the checklist and ram change through.'' * ? James Warren, New York Times reporter on Rahm Emanuel's mayoral priorities
If you step back from day to day vitriol that characterizes the current education-policy ?debate,? and glimpse the larger picture, two worldviews on education reform emerge. One, articulated by the likes of Linda Darling-Hammond, Marc Tucker, David Cohen, and others, obsesses about curricular ?coherence,? and the lack thereof in our nation's schools.
The big news out of Gotham this week (Times,?
If memory serves, the old TV show Hart to Hart used to begin with the narrator intoning, ?And when they met, it was murder.? Well, earlier this week AFT honcho Randi Weingarten and I engaged in a hard-hitting but genial debate at the Fordham Institute. Within a couple hours, we experienced the most severe East Coast earthquake in sixty-plus years. A coincidence? You decide.
Mike and Rick get punchy this week, asking Arne Duncan what he was thinking going after Rick Perry, why the cheating scandals are snowballing (and why people thought it would be otherwise), and if four-day weeks are as bad as they seem. Amber goes back to ed school to pad her GPA and Chris reminds a Florida teacher of his first-amendment rights. [powerpress]
Watch AEI's Rick Hess and the AFT's Randi Weingarten discuss Wisconsin at an August Fordham event.
At the heart of the Wisconsin debate was whether or not public workers should be allowed to bargain collectively.?
?Taking a course online, by yourself, is not the same as being in a classroom with a professor who can respond to you, present different viewpoints and push you to work a problem'' * ? Johann Neem, Associate Professor of History at?Western Washington University
The Ohio Department of Education released student achievement data for the 2010-11 school year earlier today, and the results for Dayton provide a picture of what's happening per school performance in Fordham's hometown.
In case you missed it or were distracted by, say, the D.C. earthquake, the video of yesterday's thought-provoking ?When Reform Touches Teachers?
?The past twenty years of education reform consist of brilliant people working?very, very hard?to achieve?moderate gains.''* ? Neerav Kingsland, Chief Strategy Officer of New Schools for New Orleans
It's silly season again, and I'm not referring to the Republican primaries. No, I'm thinking about the all-out battle for proponents and opponents of "reform" to stick a nasty label on the other side and claim the mantle of truth and goodness for themselves.
To follow up on my Taunting Michelle Rhee post yesterday, I note that Whitney Tilson reminded his email readers today that
