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.
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:
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?).
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.
Well, it seems that we have a lot of 'F' (for forgot)-rated news stories today.
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]
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.
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??
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.
?? 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.'' *
In case you missed it, our president Chester Finn moderated a very interesting panel discussion last month (February 21, 2011) in Atlanta.
Don't worry too much if you haven't yet received a 'likely' letter from your top choice ivy; your rock star dad and
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.
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?
?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
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.
Robert Pondiscio over at Core Knowledge wrote a very thoughtful response to my post the other day.
So, I watched Katie Couric's 60 Minutes segment about The Equity Project (TEP) charter in New York City.
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.
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.
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.
??children don't need another reform imposed on them. Instead, they need to be the authors of their own education.'' ' * -Susan Engle, Author of Red Flags or Red Herrings: Predicting Who Your Child Will Become
The president said today he wants a No Child Left Behind rewrite before students' summer vacations end this September. And he wants other things, too.
I don't always agree with Marc Tucker but he knows a heckuva lot about how other countries organize their education systems; and it turns out that knowledge extends to how their teacher unions have evolved, what roles the unions play, and how their bargaining processes work. The differences set forth in his exceptionally interesting new paper?between the U.S.
The Ed Next book club podcast is back for round two.
?[Teachers] are America's heroes, and they should be recognized as such. Sadly, they aren't.'' * -Joel Klein, Former Chancellor of New York public schools
I almost didn't get past the second sentence of Nicholas Kristof's brilliant NY Times essay this morning, as he opened with mention of Wisconsin and the ?pernicious fallacy? he?said the fracas there had generated: that teachers are over-paid.
Over in the more feverish corners of the blogosphere, and sometimes even in saner locales, the Shanker Institute's call for "common content" curriculum to accompany the Common Core standards has triggered a panic attack.
