NYC has been going through the tragic annual ritual of charter school lotteries, during which thousands of parents hope to beat the odds and get their kids into much-demanded, high-performing charters.
That's where President Barack Obama says??he wants to take us. But does anyone else find this statement a little bit ironic, as we've just borrowed $100 billion from future taxpayers and spent it on bailing out today's education system?
The hiring machine is finally cranking up over there at 400 Maryland Avenue, in fact outpacing the Reform-o-Meter's ability to keep up. (Well, I shouldn't blame the Reform-o-Meter. It is always willing. I'm the one who has fallen behind!)
The board of the State Teachers Retirement System (STRS) of Ohio told members last month that it could not rely on a nine percent return on investment to fund future retirement benefits. The implication is that the board will continue to rely on a long-term return of eight percent.
Will Fitzhugh, founder of The Concord Review, has an interesting column in EducationNews.org today. He, like many others, bemoans the fact that so many students are ill-prepared and forced to take remedial college courses.
Would a school deemed "healthy" under the No Child Left Behind Act remain so if it were plopped down in another state? That was the basic premise of our major report, The Accountability Illusion, released earlier this year.
The board of the State Teachers Retirement System of Ohio told members last month that it could not rely on a nine percent return on investment to fund future retirement benefits. The implication is that the board will continue to rely on a long-term return of eight percent.
Tis the season for school reform and both President Obama and Gov. Strickland are pushing their school reform agendas hard. In comparing and contrasting the efforts of these two Democratic leaders some similarities emerge, but so do some interesting differences.
Gov. Strickland's school funding plan has come under heavy fire in recent weeks. Republican lawmakers-and outside experts on school finance-have criticized it for lacking any real evidence (see here).
Patrick Wolf, Babette Gutmann, Michael Puma, Brian Kisida, Lou Rizzo, Nada EissaInstitute of Education SciencesMarch 2009
The national education curriculum expert who helped design the country's premier standards and accountability system in Massachusetts will tell an Ohio Senate panel today that the 21st century skills-based program being proposed for Ohio will actually retard student learning.
Myrrha P. Satow, CEO and superintendent of EdVantages Inc., took issue with an April 1 Ohio Gadfly editorial concerning Gov. Strickland's proposals for funding charter schools.
Former DC mayor Anthony Williams and former DC councilman Kevin Chavous channel Malcolm X in a Post op-ed on the DC voucher programs.
With all of the attention directed toward the DC voucher program, we could be misled into believing that this represents the current and future of the private school choice debate. Not so.
So there was this report written to help a major US city improve its public schools. Local leaders had gone to Boston to learn about a number of????groundbreaking reforms that had generated????some pretty impressive results. They came back particularly impressed by Boston's new types of schools, well-trained teachers, and well-respected administrators.
Mike points out that the Obama administration isn't in full control of the fate of the D.C. voucher program, as the appropriations bill funded only current students--and, we are to assume, the program's opponents on the Hill could have cut that funding too were Duncan or Obama to fight them.
Ok, so last week we saw a story or two out of New York describing how the teachers union gave city council members cue cards telling them what questions to ask during a hearing on charter schools. Yes, that definitely makes for an interesting discussion.
The Washington Post reports??that Loudoun County, Virginia, is using the federal stimulus funds intended for schools to prop up its county budget:
So concluded the Washington Post's editorial page on Saturday with a piece aptly subtitled,
Nope, no new Department picks to withstand some reform-o-meter treatment, but a dog. A Portuguese water dog, in fact, which will shortly take up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
As Eric just reported, Loudoun County is playing games with its stimulus dollars. Specifically, it's asking schools to return county dollars and replacing them with federal dollars, presumably to help plug holes in other areas of the county's budget.
Russ Whitehurst, the former head of IES (the body responsible for the DC voucher study), gives a thorough and authoritative explanation of the final report's release. It parallels the argument I made here.
Diane Ravitch is not as enamored with mayoral control as Arne Duncan is. Read her new New York Times op-ed to see why.
At least when you can watch Fordham's event, "Can Budget Cuts Catalyze Education Reform?" on C-SPAN right now! (And for the next 90 minutes.)
