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Bethany Little, the uber-insider
We've already weighed in on what president-Elect Obama's selection of Arne Duncan as the next U.S. Secretary of Education may mean for education policy.
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Can school districts be bribed to do the right thing?
There's been a lot of debate recently about the degree to which the feds can coerce states or school districts to do things they don't want to do (see here,
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"Competitive effects" in Washington, DC
"It's hard to find a better example of the positive change that can come from charter school competition than this statement by Washington Teachers Union president George Parker (part of an interview published by the National Council on Teacher Quality)...." Read it here
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Dear Saint Nick
I've been running a bit behind all week...but this weekend's New York Times column by Nicholas Kristof deserves a comment.
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Debbie Phelps's school didn't make AYP
"I'm not just following the Education Olympics coverage; I'm also addicted to the regular Olympics as well. And during last night's broadcast I heard for the first time that Michael Phelps's mother is a middle school principal...." Read it here.
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Do black single-parent families explain the achievement gap?
An article by Stephan Thernstrom in the Wall Street Journal last week caught my eye.
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Does Education Trust hate high-achieving children?
"That's the impression I get from reading Karin Chenoweth's post about Fordham's high-achieving students study...." Read it here.
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Do teachers pine for the George W. Bush era?
I just happened to be reading the latest Metlife Survey of the American Teacher, and came across this fascinating chart…Notice what happened during the George W.
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Duncan to parents: Look in the mirror
The issue of parental involvement is vexing for education reformers. Everybody knows that it matters, but nobody really knows how to encourage it. In a free society, how do schools, or governments, make sure that parents provide the love, attention, discipline, nurturing, and care that their kids need to succeed? The short answer is: they can’t.
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Experience matters for cabinet secretaries, too
I've been musing for days (here and here) about who should be the next Secretary of Educatio
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Father Coughlin, Huey Long, and me?
Today we live in a different country than we did even 10 days ago. Back then we were partaken with partisanship and infected with invectiveness. Now we watch with awe as the sitting president and the president-elect prepare for yet another peaceful, democratic transition of power.
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Good voucher news is bad news for Obama
Releasing bad news on a Friday afternoon is a time-honored tradition among governments of all political leanings. (The public is distracted by weekend plans; few people read the Saturday paper.) The Obama Administration is showing itself to be no different; it's no coincidence that the latest (very positive) findings about the D.C.
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Howard Fuller and Harriet Tubman vs. Rick Hess and Sol Stern
"I'm in Scottsdale, Arizona, today (projected high: 99 degrees) for an education reform summit hosted by the State Policy Network, the Alliance for School Choice, and the Friedman Foundation.
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Hubris alert!
There's plenty to like about [Jonathan] Alter's piece; I love the quote by House education committee chairman George Miller that "the debate is between incrementalists and disrupters, and I'm with the disrupters." (Alter must have sat in on an editorial board meeting with his Post colleagues because they used that terminology too.) But Mr.
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If you want to retain great teachers, remove the bad ones
I attended an advisory panel meeting today for a study looking at how to retain talented Gen Y teachers in the classroom. I was rather skeptical from the beginning, as I doubt that it's possible to keep talented young people in any job for more than a few years.
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Introducing the Obama Administration Education Reform-o-Meter!
For months, pundits of all persuasions have debated whether or not President Obama will turn out to be a bona fide education reformer. But now, the wait is over!
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It's the states, stupid
Last week I made the fairly obvious argument that GOP governors are the key to the Republican Party's renewal, including on the education issue.
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Joel Klein, my personal stalker
"I suppose we'd been warned, weeks ago, that the New York City Department of Education was watching us.
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Linda Darling-Hammond bows out
As first reported by Politics K-12 yesterday, Stanford Professor Linda Darling-Hammond has decided to return to Palo Alto rather than seek a top position in the Obama Administration.
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Maybe there's no "teacher quality gap" after all
It’s taken as an article of faith in the education reform community: we’re screwing poor kids by giving them less effective teachers than their more affluent peers enjoy. The evidence seems pretty much open-and-shut.
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New NCES analysis: Big declines at the top during the NCLB era
A new analysis of U.S. performance on the international PISA exam in mathematics shows significant declines for students at the top and middle of the achievement distribution from 2003 to 2006.* This is the strongest evidence to date that the performance of America’s highest-achieving students dropped during the early years of No Child Left Behind’s implementation.
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Obama endorses education industry's goal to rein in costs
From the Washington Post: "In his quest to transform American education, President Obama appeared yesterday to put his faith in pledges from some of the interest groups that helped scuttle reform in years past, but the industry's promises fell well short of the White House's expansive claims."...Oh wait, just kidding...Read it
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On scaling-up and turning-around
There's a lot of buzz in the policy community right now around scaling up high-performing charter schools and turning around low-performing public schools.
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Our limits on school choice are better than your limits on school choice
In the brouhaha over last week’s UCLA Civil Rights Project report on charter school “segregation,” one talking point seems unimpeachab
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OutMATCHed
"This over-the-top, the sky-is-falling article from the Boston Globe is yet more evidence that the concept of 'standards' has taken a beating in public discourse. At issue is the MATCH public charter school, one of the nation's best, according to Newsweek...." Read it here.
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Pity the $30,000 a year teacher
"You know, it's tough to ask a teacher who's making $30,000 or $35,000 a year to tighten her belt when people who are making much more than her (sic) are living pretty high on the hog." --Senator Barack Obama, October 7th presidential debate.
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President Bush left behind
There's a lot of talk about bipartisanship right now, what with the stimulus bill making its way through Congress and President Obama obviously yearning for Republican support.
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"Proficiency" Pollyanas
The No Child Left Behind hard-liners are striking back at President Obama’s call to move beyond the goal of getting 100 percent of American students to “proficiency” by 2014, and working instead to get most students “college and career-ready” by the time they graduate. Sandy Kress
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Race, class, and charter schools
Earlier this month, the Institute of Education Sciences released a major charter school study…But an important caveat…got mostly overlooked: charters serving lots of poor or low-performing kids made a significant positive impact on math achievement, while “middle class” charter schools had a negative