La cr??me de la cr??me
As Flypaper readers may have noticed (and if you haven't I'm a little bit offended!), I haven't been blogging lately. That's because I'm working on a book, which is consuming most of my time and attention.
As Flypaper readers may have noticed (and if you haven't I'm a little bit offended!), I haven't been blogging lately. That's because I'm working on a book, which is consuming most of my time and attention.
Since its creation early in President G.W. Bush's first term, the US Department of Education's Office of Innovation and Improvement has been involved in some of the most interesting education issues around. It continues to oversee a number of valuable programs and initiatives under the current administration.
Today's Education Gadfly and Wall Street Journal editorial both capture the most important news about Caroline Hoxby's
I just finished finished reading Secretary Duncan's speech on the future of ESEA/NCLB. Checker already weighed in here, but let me add a couple other thoughts.
My case study on the charter conversion of seven Washington, DC Catholic schools was just released by Seton Education Partners. If you're at all interested in urban charters, CMOs, Catholic schools, or the crisis of faith-based inner-city education, you might want to check it out.
A bill introduced by Ohio State Representatives Hite and Dubois would make it official state
Eight months into the Obama administration, the White House has been mute on its intentions regarding the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act, George W. Bush's signature education accomplishment--and a statute that nearly everyone in America believes needs a makeover. Of course there's no consensus as to what that makeover should look like--one reason that Messrs.
Rollin Binzer, directorDinosaurs of the Future ProductionsSeptember 25, 2009
Fifteen years after the fall of apartheid, South African schools are flatly failing as vehicles of social mobility; many black schools are plagued by teacher absenteeism (despite the highest teacher unionization rate in the world), scant accountability, even less authority in the hands of principals, and achievement scores that rank below poorer African peers.
Karin ChenowethHarvard Education PressSeptember 2009
Carnegie CorporationSeptember 2009
Caroline M. Hoxby, Sonali Murarka, and Jenny KangNew York City Charter Schools Evaluation ProjectSeptember 2009
I just returned from potentially one of the most portentous conferences in recent memory. If I’m reading the tea leaves correctly, we may soon see big changes in the urban education landscape with major implications for tens of thousands of low-income students, charter schooling, choice, and Catholic education.
Talk about an entrepreneurial spirit! As if one salary were not enough in tough economic times, Raquel Downing is pulling two--by running a side business from her seat in one of New York City’s notorious “rubber rooms.” Seems Ms.
While the Senate is consumed by health care, other problem topics are piling up. A recent arrival on its docket is the "Early Learning Challenge Fund," a complex federal pre-school collage, passed last week by the House with several worthy features but more than a little bad stuff.
The first Massachusetts charter school to unionize (nearly a year ago) now has a collectively-bargained contract with its teachers. Charters in other jurisdictions have unionized, so what’s so special about this one?
Every day, hundreds of backpack-toting children cross the Lake Amistad Dam Bridge in Del Rio, Texas. This wouldn't normally be cause for complaint except that the bridge spans the U.S.-Mexico border and many of the children crossing that line are likely attending American public schools without student visas. Plenty of such crossings are legal--students and parents who’re U.S.
What's the point of having standards if they're so low that everybody meets them? That’s the Q in Maryland this week following the announcement that only 11 of 62,000 students were denied graduation as a result of failing the state graduation exam (despite its many alternatives, loopholes, and escape clauses).
This article over at Education.com about the state of writing caught my eye.
The NYT reports this morning on Stanford Professor Caroline Hoxby's latest findings on the Big Apple's charters. The results are extremely encouraging. Here are two blurbs:
Here is a Washington Post article this morning about the draft standards for English and math that were made public yesterday. From the piece:
Quotable : ???To me it is the best thing they could have come up with. It's like I'm sending my kids to a private school and the county's paying for it.??? ??? Raquel Pelaez, parent of two students enrolled in Florida's Broward Virtual School
John Derbyshire is no optimist... that is when it comes to education policy. In an excerpt from his soon-to-be-released??We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism, he explains how education policy has nothing new under the sun. One particular common theme?
Here is the take of the House Education & Labor Committee GOP staff on the common core draft standards for English-language arts and math.
The public draft of the Common Core State Standards is considerably improved from the version that was circulated two months back and it's evident that the drafters are trying to incorporate responsible feedback. I trust they will continue to.
So much that's true--and important--has been written about the late Irving Kristol, I can add but a few recollections.
To learn more about the new book, "From Schoolhouse to Courthouse," here's an interview??(podcast) with its co-editor, Joshua Dunn of the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs.
Quotable: "When we tell kids they ought to go to universities who shouldn't, we set them up for failure.?? We need to get more young people in skills training to get them capacity to be successful early in life." - Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour
I gave a presentation this morning to some state- and district-level education leaders working on a state committee charged with addressing persistently low-performing schools. They asked a number of thought-provoking questions and made several insightful, real-world implementation comments that are typically missing in the 30,000-foot DC policy debate.