Stretch yourself, Bruce Baker
On Friday, Rutgers education professor Bruce Baker issued a 4,600 word rebuttal to a 4,000 word policy brief released by Marguerite Roza and me the da
On Friday, Rutgers education professor Bruce Baker issued a 4,600 word rebuttal to a 4,000 word policy brief released by Marguerite Roza and me the da
??for education reform, 2011 could be the best of times.'' * ?Michelle Rhee, Former Washington, D.C.? School Chancellor
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said yesterday that he would like to see Kaya Henderson, Washington, D.C.'s interim schools chancellor, stay in her position ?for the long haul.?
Education Week's ?Quality Counts? 2011 is out and contains, as did its earlier iterations, the misleading Chance for Success Index, albeit with some mitigating modifications.
The College Board is redesigning A.P. Next month, reports the New York Times, the nonprofit ?will release a wholesale revamping of A.P. biology as well as United States history?
Michelle Rhee's new education advocacy group, Students First, just released its policy agenda and is garnering the former chancellor of DC Public Schools (and Ohio native!) more
Education Week just issued their Quality Counts 2011 report. Expect a proper analysis of the report and what it means for Ohio and K-12 education in tomorrow's Ohio Education Gadfly. But one thing jumped out at me in the fine print. In a section of the report headed ???An Engine of Job Recovery???
Note: This piece originally appeared in the January 6th Education Gadfly. Love what you see? Sign up to receive the Gadfly in your inbox.
?To cover the underfunded pension obligations to teachers and other public employees, cities and states have little choice but to divert money from what would otherwise be their operating budgets?education will get significantly shortchanged as we make up for past underfunding.?*
I wanted to flag an?Associated Press?piece?about Michelle Rhee and her new group, Students First.
The Washington Post's prescient economics columnist Robert Samuelson wonders if perhaps the American-schools-are-losing-ground-to-China-et-al panic isn't overblown, its premises mostly wrong. For one, ?economic competitiveness depends on more than good schools,?
?This story shows California is behind the rest of the nation. We do not invest in education the way we need to. We have an emergency?* ?Tom Torlakson, California Superintendent of Public Schools
Kirti Baranwal and Gillian Russom are teachers in Los Angeles. Today the Los Angeles Times published an op-ed they wrote: ?Education Reform the Union Way.?
Now that it's alright to Huck Finn the Constitution, why not give kids the right to vote?
The New York Times ?most e-mailed? list can be hilarious in its predictability; as I write, the top three articles are about restoring children's play, cost-cutting travel tips, and strengthening individual marriages (where are the stories about getting accepted to college?and yoga?).
This policy brief lists fifteen concrete ways that states can "stretch the school dollar" in these difficult financial times. It is written by Marguerite Roza, senior data and economics advisor at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Michael J. Petrilli, executive vice president at the Fordham Institute.
??if there is a ?national standard,' what prevents the same people who are using the present ?standardized tests' from continuing to demonize teachers???* ?Joel Shatzky, Former English Professor at SUNY-Cortland
This new policy brief lists fifteen concrete ways that states can ?stretch the school dollar? in these difficult financial times. Written by Marguerite Roza, senior data and economics advisor at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Michael J.
?It is fundamentally wrong to divide students up according to their racial group and teach them separately.'' ?Tom Hone, Arizona superintendent of public instruction
Ben Yagoda is an author and professor and on to something when he identifies a new-ish sort of bad writing, which he calls ?clunk.? One reads about pupils who blithely insert into school assignments text-message phrases such as LOL and various emoticons?e.g., . And perhaps this does frequently happen?
Rarely do I agree with the New York Times editorial page; today I mostly do. The Times editorialists are ?horrified?
The New Year is shaping up just as I predicted, with Diane Ravitch and the teachers unions criticizing budget-cutting proposals but offering no real alternatives of their own.
?[The charter school] approach could decimate our school system and use our diversity against us.'' ? Gene Maeroff, President of Edison, New Jersey's School Board
Today's NY Times Room for Debate poses the question, Do Home Schoolers Deserve a Tax Break? The question explores one of the proposals of the new Republicans in Congress ?
From the Core Knowledge blog we learn that ?purists? are ?predictably crying censorship and political correctness?
Every so often some people get the idea that a masterpiece could use a bit of, well, changing, just tweaking, really, and just here and there, and so they go off and make the changes and then claim that what they've really done is made the masterpiece more ?accessible? and so have actually, in changing it, shown it the respect it of course deserves.