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Confessions of a battered idealist school reformer
In reading Liam's post about idealists being chewed up by the DC culture of inertia and status quo I couldn't help but think of the brilliant Ralph Waldo Emerson quote, ???Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.???
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Contest Time
Our little school district just got word that our share of the RttT pie (nearly $700 million in NY) will be $55,000 per year for?four years. ?Wow! But here's the challenge?and it is real and it applies just as much to Cory Booker with his $100 million as to us:?How do we spend it?
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Meyer's Musings
While reading Liam's musings this morning??armies of grown-ups who had gone gaga for a certain presidential candidate's mellifluous vapidities about change and hope?
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Quotable & Notable
?If you're failing my children, get out of the way.'' ?Cory A. Booker, Mayor of Newark, New Jersey
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Did you get a raise for not dying this summer?
That question, and others, is posed on 25 billboards throughout greater Cincinnati.
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New Fordham report: Cracks in the Ivory Tower? The Views of Education Professors Circa 2010
Today Fordham released results from a national survey of education school professors in the US.
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Data from three education surveys converge around the importance of effective teaching
If you’re clamoring to know what Americans think about myriad K-12 education issues, then you’ve just struck gold. Three recent surveys provide a plethora of opinion data on issues ranging from charter schools and teachers unions, to taxpayer-funded increases in education spending and hot-button issues like teacher evaluations.
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Stuck in the Middle: Impacts of Grade Configuration in Public Schools
Jonah E. Rockoff & Benjamin B. Lockwood Columbia Business SchoolFall 2010
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High-performing, high-poverty schools
Our recent study, Needles in a Haystack: Lessons from high-performing, high-need urban schools, lifted up the successes of, and tried to extrapolate lessons from, urban schools that serve large numbers of poor kids well. But poverty exists beyond city borders.
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If there were a button, we'd "like" Facebook CEO's investment in Newark schools
Social networking and school reform. An unlikely pair? Not any more, given Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent donation of $100 million to struggling public schools in Newark, New Jersey. Check out the New York Times’ coverage of the announcement here.
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The new normal in public education: doing more with less
“When we get back to a more normal economic cycle in Ohio, this is very doable.” This was Governor Strickland’s response to a question about how he plans to add billions of new state money over the next decade to pay for the state&rsquo
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Bias, faulty research cloud valid message in charter school report
Last week, Policy Matters Ohio released a report on charter school accountability. The primary finding was that when charter schools are operated by management organizations, for-profit and non-profit alike, too often the management organizations are running the show, not the independent boards that are legally the schools
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Top-performing urban middle schools
Each year Fordham analyzes performance data of schools and districts in Ohio’s Big 8 cities, and provides a ranking of each city’s schools by Performance Index (PI) score, a weighted average of proficiency results among all tested students in that school.
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Reinventing Alternative Education: An Assessment of Current State Policy and How to Improve It
Cheryl Almeida, Cecilia Le, Adria Steinberg, Roy CervantesJobs for the FutureSeptember 2010
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Education News Nuggets
Is there such a thing as too much knowledge? Not exactly sure, but don't let these guys find out.
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Dillon Does It Again
This story ? front page of today's NYT ? ought to shake some gremlins out of the code-cracking trees:? ?4,100 Massachusetts Students Prove Small Isn't Always Better.?? All roads keep leading to ?. the basics. ?Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow
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Back to School: Ravitch's New Year Agenda
Love her or hate her, Diane Ravitch is back to Bridging Differences (the blog she shares with Deborah Meier) with a list?of discussion
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Musings
Two pieces in today's Washington Post are worth noting: Dana Milbank's ?A sadder but wiser Axelrod packs his bags,?
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Bravo Brockton!
A great school is a great school is a great school. It may be big, it may be small. Brockton High School is one of the largest in America and is now producing very strong (not yet stellar) results. More remarkably, it used to produce dreadful results.
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Waiting for Gallipoli
For once, Davis Guggenheim is right. For once, Mike is wrong. Almost nobody uses their own kids as tools of school reform?and nobody should. You don't send your child to a school to improve the school.
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Quotable & Notable
?Excellent teachers value most the opportunity to work with other talented teachers under a strong and fair principal.? ?Robert Schwartz, Academic Dean of Harvard's Graduate School of Education
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?Education Nation?? is good
It's great TV ? er, Internet.??Watch the live streaming video here. During the President's interview with Matt Lauer, Obama said a few things that caught my attention.? ?Money without reform will not solve the problem,?
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Hasta la Vista, Arts and Foreign Language?
The highly publicized career of Arnold Schwarzenegger as the governor of California is quickly coming to a close.? It was only a short seven years ago that the former body-builder and action movie superstar was elected to the highest political office in his home state.? Sadly, one of the last moves he may make as the ?Governator?
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Teacher Quality: What you need to know
It's all right here, courtesy of the Joyce Foundation. -Mike Petrilli