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.
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.
It's not a new sci-fi movie ? but it's a longstanding issue for charter schools: finding space ? that's not outer!
?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
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.
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.
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
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 ?
?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
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?
From the department of terrible ideas comes this gem: lawmakers in Wyoming have proposed putting video cameras in classrooms ?to help evaluate teachers' performance.?
Urgent: Parents, do not send your children to Hitler's ?Nazi tyrent? charter schools! And don't think you can escape the criticism, either?
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.
??if we feel we need a ?nanny cam' in every classroom in America?then we have lost our sense of teachers as trusted molders of minds and citizens.'' * ?Jon Eckert, assistant professor of education at Wheaton College
From Foreign Policy magazine: ?American Decline: This time it's real.??According to the authors:
?Minnesota has lost its ?sense of urgency' to improve education and needs to take bolder steps to reduce the achievement gap between student groups and foster nontraditional pathways to teaching, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan told a group of business and community leaders Friday in Minneapolis.?
What doesn't have a week? Regardless, today begins National School Choice Week, and the libertarian folks over at Reason magazine have lots planned. One wonders, though, how worthwhile Reason's coverage will be.
The hot, of-the-moment education-related article, which ran in Thursday's New York Times, reports on a study from the journal Science that found testing to be the surest path to learning. The key, according to researchers, is struggle:
Checker is not wrong to be concerned about China (although I think his worries over the test scores of students in Shanghai are overb
The Times has some kind words for Randi Weingarten today?in an editorial called ?Reform and the Teachers' Unions.?
