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The Budget Blinking Begins
As Alyson Klein of Ed Week reported yesterday, the House GOP offered a ?slice and dice?
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The Money Pit
Alyson Klein at K-12 Politics (Education Week) is reporting what?may not be too surprising: that conservatives on the Hill don't much care for increased federal
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Treat the disease
As Bianca noted yesterday, legislators in Ohio are pushing major changes to the collective bargaining rights of public sector unions in the state, among them teacher unions. Many of the proposed changes, like eliminating step-and-lane salary increases, would be very positive.
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Quotable & notable
"If we have managed to be the world's most powerful country, politically, economically and militarily, for the last 47 years despite our less than impressive math and science scores, maybe that flaw is not as important as film documentaries and political party platforms claim."*
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Caption contest!
It's only Thursday, but there's no reason we can't have a little fun. Have the perfect caption for this picture of the School Turnaround Group's Justin Cohen? Post it in the comments section below or send a tweet to @educationgadfly.
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Anthropomorphizing the ideal
In 1973 William F. Buckley Jr. gave a speech at the New York Conservative Party's annual dinner in which he addressed the fall of Spiro Agnew, who had resigned his office just five days earlier. ?There was,? Buckley recalled years later, ?a fleeting temptation, encouraged by emissaries of Mr. Agnew, to think him victimized.? The speechmaker resisted temptation.
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Field notes: Welcome (back) to the funding cliff
Last year at this time I was unveiling my Share the Pain plan (I liked the coincidence that STP is a famous fuel additive, ?with the racer's edge"), which included a staff salary freeze and cutting out busing for anyone who lived within a half mile of school.? Those two items alone would have saved nearly a million dollars and the jobs of a couple dozen teachers.?
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Quotable & notable
"Michelle Rhee shouldn't have?and shouldn't have had to?claim to have raised student test scores astronomically in order to be considered for DC schools chancellor."* - Alexander Russo, Writer for This Week in Education
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Rank rankles
Liam's post yesterday about Malcolm Gladwell's critique of U.S. News & World Report's college rankings ? ?one wonders,?
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Education news nuggets
Watch out. The Common Core State Standards are a Death Knell for literature.? Extreme? Probably.
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Quotable & notable
"We know now from research that a lot of kids that drop out in high school really drop out in middle school. They just leave in high school"* - Laura Bush, Former First Lady
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On Purpose' book event
Mark your calendars for a book event coming up next week. On Wednesday, February 16?there will be?a cocktail reception and book signing for Samuel Casey Carter's book, On Purpose: How Great School Cultures Form Strong Character.
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Charter Schools
Event Recap: Are Bad Schools Immortal?
In case you missed it?..On February 2 -- Groundhog Day -- we held a terrific (& quite lively) event to discuss the seemingly eternal problem of low-performing schools and what to do about them. We tied it loosely to the cult classic movie Groundhog Day, in which the main character lives the same day over and over.
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Education news nuggets
Well, let's talk about a sobering effect?not only do we have to worry about increased teen pregnancy and children in poverty as well as
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You think you're ready for college???think again
In?their continuing drive to ratchet up learning standards, New York State's education leaders?are now sounding the alarm?about high school diplomas. According to a new study, done for NY's State Ed department, fewer than half the kids in the state holding a diploma are ready for college.
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Abjure the core
Doug Lasken, writing on FlashReport, says it will cost California $1.6 billion to replace its current educational standards with the newly developed Common Core standards being pushed by President Obama. Lasken writes:
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Rank
Malcolm Gladwell takes apart the U.S. News & World Report college rankings. He clarifies the obvious: that the U.S. News rankings are self-fulfilling; the magazine's metrics prize prestige and its top-rated schools are the most prestigious.
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Quotable & notable
"The thing we said then, in looking at the business world, is that if you sit on [New York school data], you become the Enron of test scores, the Enron of graduation rates."* - Merryl H. Tisch, Chancellor of the Board of Regents
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Thoughts on diversity
Justin Cohen, a panelist at Fordham's recent Are Bad Schools Immortal? event, said that nobody should oppose, and nobody he knows opposes, engineering public schools' student bodies to be more racially varied.* But is the first part, the ?should? part, true?
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New blog design
We've undergone a facelift overnight but we're having some technical difficulties. You may see some older posts showing up among the new ones but, pardon our dust, we're looking to get that straightened out as soon as possible. As always, thank you for reading Flypaper!
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Merit pay? Not so fast!
A new study released by Education Next will cool some jets among proponents of performance-based pay for teachers.?
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Duncan to Atlanta board: Grow up!
?I'm not sure if Atlanta school board members were included in Rick Hess's latest survey of school boards, but if they were, let's hope they aren't representative.??
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Superintendents to the woodshed!
New York hates to be behind its Hudson River rival ? New Jersey ? but new Empire State Governor Andrew Cuomo is doing a nice job keeping up with his Garden State comrade-in-chief Chris Christie with education blasts.?
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Unsung examples from international education
We've got a fantastic coffee mug at the Fordham office, gifted to us by the kind folks over at the Schwab Foundation. On it is printed a single cartoon image, two boys standing outside a classroom holding white pieces of paper. The caption on the bottom of the picture says: ?Big deal, an A in math. That would be a D in any other country.?
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Money matters
Selective public high schools in DC, educating mostly affluent students, receive more dollars per pupil than open enrollment neighborhood schools.
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Tweet all about it
Did you miss our event -- Are Bad Schools Immortal? -- last week? Want a recap? Check out the Twitter feed below for some play-by-play action.