Teacher quality in Texas is "inequitable" (poorly??constructed headline, Houston Chronicle).??Mike says: Who cares?
While the Washington Post's editorial page is spot-on about education reform issues, some of its reporters can't help but beat the "pity the poor little hard-working suburban over-achieving children" line. I suppose it's possible that American kids could be pressed to work too hard, but it strikes me that we're a long, long way from that being a widespread epidemic. Just ask our Education Olympics competitors.
Photo by Flickr user onurkafali.
Kevin Carey's latest post is about affirmative action, and most of it is sensible. I'm unsure if what you'll read here are positions that Carey has previously espoused on this topic, and I'm not going to traipse off on some fishing expedition to find out. Suffice it to say that Carey, who is a good sport for joining our podcast last week (and who has, a little Gadfly told me, even befriended ["friended," as the kids say] Thomas B. Fordham through facebook), is at least this morning on the blog-related up-and-up. But wee problems remain. He writes:
I'm in favor of racial preferences in college admissions as long as the goal is to help minority students who come from substandard K-12 schools and have to live with legacy of historical racism along with discrimination that still exists today. But somehow affirmative action has gotten turned around so that the primary justification is now that it's good for white people. [emphasis mine]
Now, look. Affirmative action hasn't just somehow changed, somehow morphed, into a policy by which privileged whites can expiate past wrongs and rid themselves of guilt. Nor has affirmative action been somehow warped such that now??its justification is to produce on campuses a perceived racial diversity that allows privileged whites to feel, you know, better about things. These are what affirmative action has, in fact, always been about. Carey supports racial preferences "as long as the goal is to help minority students who come from substandard K-12 schools" and who live day-to-day with discrimination--and that's a fine, if arguable, position to take. It is not fine, though, to survey the country's obsession with race in education and be shocked, shocked that the policies we have do little for the station of poor blacks and lots for the esteem of rich whites.
Andrew Ferguson reviews in today's Wall Street Journal a book that goes behind the scenes at Harvard Business School--and seemingly reveals what one might expect to find behind the scenes at Harvard Business School. And USA Today's peerless education reporter, Greg Toppo, talks with journalist Donna Foote about her new book, Relentless Pursuit,??which follows??four members of Teach For America who worked at Los Angeles's Locke High School.
Vouchers will stay on??Florida's November 4th ballot... for now.
From time to time, while digging up material for forthcoming Fordham reports, op-eds, or blog posts, I stumble upon an unrelated article that catches my interest and causes me to pause and read. Here's one such, written by Checker, entitled "An Open Letter to Lawrence H. Summers." It was published six years ago. Checker writes:
It's up to you. If you want to, you can lead Harvard out of its moral quagmire and clarify its murky standards, while demonstrating serious leadership for a nationwide higher education community that hasn't had any in years.
Alas, it wasn't to be.
Doesn't appear that student performance is a part of this new proposed pay structure by the teachers' union in Australia. A hundred indicators and not a one on how the students are performing?
This would-be second-career teacher in California says that proving "highly-qualified" status is a hoop-jumping endeavor: "The standards to which I'm being held here are not high standards; they are just a high pile of standards." Ms. Herman, unfortunately, isn't telling us anything new.
Quite the fight going on right now in Miami, as the Miami-Dade school board weighs the fate of superintendent Rudy Crew.?? Some board members are trying to oust him with accusations of gross negligence, incompetence, and the like.?? The school board's attorney says the charges are baseless, but that's not stopping this afternoon's hearing, which includes 250 people signed up to speak on the matter.
Stay tuned.?? In fact, you could join the 19,000 viewers already watching live telecasts of the school board's meetings during any given hour.