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Fordham Danctitute
This post was a part of our April Fool's Day edition of The Gladfly! Please don't think we're serious about this. Follow a typical, Glee-ful day at Fordham
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Review: Ravitching: Loving Myself as an Immortal
This post was a part of our April Fool's Day edition of The Gladfly! Please don't think we're serious about this.
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Schools finally stop being a total drain on the taxpayer
This post was a part of our April Fool's Day edition of The Gladfly! Please don't think we're serious about this.
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We now return you to our regularly scheduled program
We hope you enjoyed this year's edition of The Gladfly! We certainly did!
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Fools' nuggets
This post was a part of our April Fool's Day edition of The Gladfly! Please don't think we're serious about this.
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Education News Nuggets
To drink or to study? That is the question. Here's another one: Did you know that some grass cutters and stock clerks earn more than veteran teachers?
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Curriculum & Instruction
LAUSD drops open court in favor of "California Treasures"
Several years ago, then superintendent Roy Romer mandated that elementary teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District use Open Court?a proven literacy program that he believed would help drive reading achievement in the district.
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New York holds the line on taxes: Cuts school aid by a billion
Teachers rallied at the State Capitol in Albany last night, in a last-ditch effort to get the legislature and governor to restore funds to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's?deficit slashing budget proposal. It doesn't seem to have worked.?
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The leadership limbo continues
If you believe the two sides currently duking it out over collective bargaining in Wisconsin, Ohio, and other states, contracts with teacher unions are either the only thing saving American education from utter ruin or they're the greatest impediment to reforming the system.
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Give us more spending data
How does your local school spend its money? If your district received funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Arne Duncan knows:
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Winning the future, or just winning contracts?
James Surowiecki made the case last month in the New Yorker that the president's plan to spend money on research and development, infrastructure, and education in these glass-half-empty economic times makes sense.
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Quotable & notable
?So what this means is, is that our workforce is going to be more diverse; it is going to be, to a large percentage, Latino. And if our young people are not getting the kind of education they need, we won't succeed as a nation.'' *
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Field notes: Of budget deficits, baseball fields, and the messiness of democracy
It was standing room only yet again at Monday night's meeting of the board of education, of which I am a member, in our 2000-student upstate New York school district; nearly 200 people were jammed into the high school cafeteria when I arrived.? This was not good.
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Field notes: I am not alone
As I was writing up the account of my recent board meeting, I had to keep pinching myself to make sure I wasn't dreaming. ?And just at that moment, it seemed, there came a flurry of emails from a listserve I am a member of --?
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NYC's technology investments are smart even in tough times
Sometimes the right thing doesn't look great politically.
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Questions for Rhee
Michelle Rhee, in Indianapolis this week, spoke with reporters from that city's paper, the Star, and answered questions about her education-related positions and philosophy.
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Quotable & notable
?Unions should have every right to continue representing their members, speaking up for teachers as they negotiate salaries, professional development and benefits.'' * -Michelle Rhee, CEO and Founder of StudentsFirst
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Curriculum & Instruction
In defense of mandating Betamax
Today, Jay Greene has an Ed Next column arguing against government mandated standards and curriculum. ?Most of the important elements of American education are already standardized,? he argues.
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Curriculum & Instruction
Learning from the Golden State
One of the many reasons I think that states should get out of the curriculum- and textbook-adoption business is that, when state governments start to dive too deep into the implementation weeds, they tend to do far more harm than good.
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Mike on the radio: How to raise the status of teachers
If you haven't yet, steer yourself over to the latest "Room for Debate" conversation at the New York Times, entitled ?How to Raise the Status of Teachers.? It features some excellent pieces, including one by Fordham's own Mike Petrilli.
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Cutting off the hand to spite the foot
As state and district education budgets shrink, it becomes doubly important to scrutinize line items, to think through cuts, and to trim fat in ways that won't negatively affect schoolchildren. Moore County, North Carolina seems to have missed that memo. ?The district is set to close one of its smaller elementary schools, Academy Heights.
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What would Al Shanker do?
One of the reasons Candidate Obama was so appealing was his call for participants in our democracy to "disagree without being disagreeable." Though he hasn't always lived up to that standard, it's a worthy ob
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Charter Schools
The Obama Administration's shameful opposition to the DC scholarship program
Here's the "Statement of Administration Policy on H.R. 471 - Scholarships for Opportunity and Results Act."
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Quotable & notable
?One thing I never want to see happen is schools that are just teaching the test because then you're not learning about the world, you're not learning about different cultures, you're not learning about science, you're not learning about math.
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Paint by numbers isn't artistry
Last week, Justin Baeder at Ed Week's "On Performance" blog had a post arguing that adopting policies that force teachers to copy the teaching strategies of effective teachers is bound to fail.*
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Curriculum & Instruction
CA districts take the lead on curriculum and instruction
Catherine Gewertz (via John Fensterwald of the "Educated Guess" blog) has a post today about a group of seven California districts who are coming together to draft Common
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Rhode Island loves data nerds
It's Christmas in Rhode Island: the state Department of Education has released a comprehensive new set of financial data for district and charter schools throughout the state.
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Fewer tests, sez prez
Barack Obama was at Bell Multicultural High School in Washington, D.C., today, answering education-related questions at an event organized by Univision. Responding to a question about standardized exams, the president said that pupils are currently tested too frequently and are under too much pressure to perform well on the high-stakes exams they're given.