From the Washington Post: In his quest to transform American education, President Obama appeared yesterday to put his faith in pledges from some of the interest groups that helped scuttle reform in years past, but the industry's promises fell well short of the White House's expansive claims.
The very positive test results out of NYC showing significant gains for the city's traditional public schools seem to validate many of
Expert author David Whitman alerted me to an important video on the Duncan closures-starts issue (click here then scroll to "Part 2:????Arne Duncan on the McKinsey
Got a really interesting note from an excellent program officer at the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation.
Collectively, we should be increasingly alarmed about the education portion of the ARRA. ????States have begun to file their applications for the first big batch (~$33 billion) of stabilization funds.
As I've alluded to a number of times, I'm convinced that turnarounds are not a scalable strategy for fixing America's struggling urban school systems.
Long-time antagonists????Eva Moskowitz????(former NYC education committee chair and founder of Harlem Success Academy charter schools) and Randi Weingarten (AFT and UFT president) debated on NYC television. ????It's gripping in parts.
Yesterday I reported on the New Yorker profile of Green Dot founder Steve Barr, and speculated that it might inspire a movie version.
New state????test scores from NY show gains for kids in the Big Apple! Or do they? ????Read to the bottom of the article and you'll see that Mike P, among others, is skeptical.
The debate over progress in NYC is a microcosm of a much bigger discussion in ed reform circles: For all of the money and effort expended, have America's schools really gotten any better?
The administration released its 2010 budget proposal yesterday.????Check out the specifics here. Just a few highlights???????
Hollywood loves to glamorize the heroic inner-city teacher, and occasionally celebrates the heroic inner-city principal .
Some high-school senior pranks leave lasting damage and result in criminal charges for the perpetrators. Other antics live in memoriam after the cow has been coaxed off the school roof.
Speaking of Los Angeles, over the past fifteen years, the LA Unified School District boasts a total of 159 review cases for firing tenured teachers--159 in fifteen years.
Steve Barr has an "'Oh shucks, you know me--I can't control my mouth' persona," explains President of the California State Board of Education Ted Mitchell. It comes in handy as the Founder and Chairman of Green Dot, a charter school organization based in the Sunshine State. "He's a public curmudgeon and a private negotiator," continues Mitchell.
I'm reminded again and again of America's need for independent education-achievement testing-and-audit bureaus to track and report student performance and school achievement and to sort out the claims and counterclaims regarding when these indicators have risen and when not--and perhaps also to explain why.
Sean F. Reardon, Allison Atteberry, Nicole Arshan, and Michal KurlaenderInstitute for Research on Education Policy and Practice at Stanford UniversityApril 2009
The 1997 release of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) results was a wake-up call for the United States--and for Germany.
Bobby Rampey, Gloria Dion, and Patricia DonahueNational Center for Education Statistics, Institute of Education SciencesApril 2009
Disappointing news from the Obama administration today. While the President's budget will include funding for the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program, it will formalize the Department's recent decision to not allow any new students to join.
In the midst of the school-funding battle here in the Buckeye State, it is easy to lose sight of the other major education reforms on Governor Strickland'
We just concluded our daylong conference??on "International Lessons about National Standards," centered around Bill Schmidt's excellent policy brief??of the same name.
It's National Charter Schools Week, and the Alliance has all kinds of activities planned and news to share. Here are a couple highlights:
If you've ever hired anyone, you know that that colleague you get is nearly always quite different than the candidate you interviewed--sometimes better, sometimes worse, but always different.
If you're like me, you're generally skeptical of this Twitter business. ????It seems kind of like LoJack but for people. ????But I've come around lately, thanks in part to my colleagues here at TBFI.
