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.?
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.
How does your local school spend its money? If your district received funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Arne Duncan knows:
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.
?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.'' *
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.
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 --?
Sometimes the right thing doesn't look great politically.
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.
?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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Here's the "Statement of Administration Policy on H.R. 471 - Scholarships for Opportunity and Results Act."
?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.
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.*
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
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.
This post appears today on the New York Times' Room for Debate blog. The question: How can the United States raise the status of teachers and teaching?
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.
Parents in Volusia County, Florida (it's always Florida, it seems) are picketing outside an elementary school that recently instituted several regulations to protect a six-year-old student who has a serious peanut allergy.
If Horace Mann was the key educational figure of the 19th century, and John Dewey of the first half of the 20th, then Al Shanker, the legendary leader of the American Federation of Teachers, deserves t
?Unfortunately, it is a characteristic of reform movements?for its participants to feel they are on the edge of history, solving with new ideas and new tools the problems that flummoxed everyone before..'' *
Well, it's official.? According to Sam Dillon in the NYT, Steve Barr and the charter organization he founded, Green Dot, are going their separate ways.? In fact, the separation has been long in coming.?
Though Deborah Meier's newest post on Bridging Differences is ostensibly about hypocrisy (she says she tells her left-wing friends that ?we should
