Commentary
When common ground is just common
Randi Weingarten is talented at making crazy ideas sound sensible.
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Happy birthday, Race to the Top
America's vice president and education secretary will be in Delaware today, spending the afternoon at Howard High School of Technology to commemorate the one-year anniversary of Delaware's receipt of more than $100 million in Race to the Top dollars.
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Another sort of madness
Last week, Education Secretary Arne Duncan was on the Washington Post's op-ed page, pouring cold water all over America's March Madness excitement.
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Smith leaving Florida
Eric Smith, Florida's education commissioner since 2007, will resign at the end of the school year, reports the Orlando Sentinel.
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Re: Losing their bargaining rights won't send teachers to the poorhouse
Last week I showed that, by one measure at least, teachers in non-collective bargaining districts actually earn more than their union-protected peers?$64,500 on average versus $57,500.
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Quotable & notable
?It's, 'This is so hard, so bless your heart for trying.' That's not how you become a real profession. We need to be honest about that conversation'' * -Jason Kamras, Key Architect of IMPACT
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Curriculum & Instruction
Field notes: Curriculum in the trenches
I emerged from our Board of Ed Curriculum Committee meeting yesterday smiling.?
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What Do You Know About Corporal Punishment?
Listeners of the Education Gadfly Show Podcast may recall my segment from February 24th highlighting the decision of Rockingham County, North Carolina to ban corporal punishment. Following some internal debate that took place afterward, I took it upon myself to do some more research on the matter.
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Hurricane LIFO hits Oakland
Young teachers turned around a poorly-performing elementary school in Oakland, and now they're all at risk of being fired in a LIFO (seniority-based) layoff mandated by state law:
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Education News Nuggets
No, these students weren't accepted to their colleges because of a computer glitch, but they are members of 10 of the 68 men's teams in the NCAA tournament are not on track to graduate half of their players.
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Education news nuggets
Well, it seems that we have a lot of 'F' (for forgot)-rated news stories today.
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The politics of education spending
See this fundraising letter from President Obama's political arm, Organizing for America. There's surely no talk of the "new normal" as far as I can see! And it's not at all clear where they are getting their numbers from (55,000 teacher jobs at stake?).
Commentary
PODCAST: Aflac! And other dirty words
Mike and Rick unpack findings from Fordham's latest report, scratch their heads about teacher reform, and pour one out for Detroit. Amber tears apart Roland Fryer's new paper and Chris tells potty-mouths to pay up. [powerpress]
Commentary
Opinion: A modest proposal for pension reform
Educator pension systems are becoming increasingly expensive and, in a number of states, plagued by severe problems of underfunding. Given concerns about cost and long-term sustainability, several states have cut benefits, usually for new teachers, and many more are considering doing so. However, in making these changes, policymakers should carefully consider their labor-market effects.
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Curriculum & Instruction
Curricular confusions
You shouldn't need 3-D glasses to see the need for a good curriculum. So why, then, does Neal McClaskey at Cato think that a national curriculum is ?not possible in this dimension??
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Commentary
Losing their bargaining rights won't send teachers to the poorhouse
One of the most striking arguments made against Republican governors' efforts to curtail the bargaining rights of teachers is that it's an "attack on the middle class." I'm more sympathetic to that line of reasoning than you might think; for all their evils, unions have been successful in giving millions of people a path to prosperity.
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Quotable & notable
?? the people setting up the [teacher] measurement formulas don't seem to know what the qualities of a good teacher are. Most of them can name only the ability to generate high student test scores, while the rest go blank after adding the ability to manage classroom behavior.'' *
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Video of ATL Event: Education Leadership for the 21st Century
In case you missed it, our president Chester Finn moderated a very interesting panel discussion last month (February 21, 2011) in Atlanta.
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Education news nuggets
Don't worry too much if you haven't yet received a 'likely' letter from your top choice ivy; your rock star dad and
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Curriculum & Instruction
Reading skills and strategies are a means to an end
Catherine Gewertz has a piece in this week's Education Week describing a New York City pilot program that has teachers analyzing the complexity of the texts they will be assigned in their classrooms. As you probably remember, text complexity features prominently in the Common Core standards.
Commentary
The same thing, over and over
The title of Rick Hess's newish book can be applied to most any education policy issue, no sweat broken. Here is Sam Dillon in the New York Times, writing an article titled ?U.S. Urged to Raise Teachers' Status?
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Quotable & notable
?In South Korea, teachers are known as ?nation builders,' and I think it's time we treated our teachers with the same level of respect.'' ' * -Barack Obama, President of the United States of America
Report
Accountability & Testing
American Achievement in International Perspective
The latest results of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) garnered all the usual headlines about America's lackluster performance and the rise of competitor nations. And to be sure, the findings that America's 15-year-olds perform in the middle of the pack in both reading and math are disconcerting for a nation that considers itself an international leader, priding itself on its home-grown innovation, intellect, and opportunity. But that's not the entire story. Read on to learn more.
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Curriculum & Instruction
Do we really want a common curriculum?
Robert Pondiscio over at Core Knowledge wrote a very thoughtful response to my post the other day.
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The $125,000 Teacher: the Day After
So, I watched Katie Couric's 60 Minutes segment about The Equity Project (TEP) charter in New York City.
Commentary
The merit pay mirage
Much ink has been spilled in the past week over what the pay for performance experiment in New York City's public school system means. Roland Fryer's finding that the NYC pay scheme didn't improve student achievement does not imply that differentiated pay for teachers doesn't work, however.
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From the Department of Bad Ideas
Let kids run their own schools. This is the reduced-to-essence message of author Susan Engel's?contribution to?today's New York Times.
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U.S. performance on PISA: The rest of the story
Today, in advance of this week's International Summit on the Teaching Profession, Fordham is releasing a little paper by Janie Scull and me, American Achievement in International Perspective.