- The long-awaited National Research Council framework for K-12 science education (which Achieve and others will now transmute into potential common science standards) has been released—all 320 pages of it. So far, Gadfly has chewed through about twenty-three. Expect more comment once he’s digested the remaining 297.
- Big ups to Douglas County, CO (just outside Denver)! Not only does the district win Gadfly’s “king of choice” award, it now earns “king of creativity.” The district is using a charter school to administer its new district-wide voucher program.
- Education reforms are blooming in the Garden State thanks (in part) to Chris Cerf’s green thumb. Six months after becoming acting education commissioner, Cerf has imaginatively rearranged the state education department’s basic structure. Think we’ve got a convert to governance reform?
- Sure there are incentives to cheat. But there are also deterrents: Atlanta teachers implicated in the cheating scandal have been asked to quit—or risk getting fired.
- As programs like Rocketship Education show us, virtual and blended learning hold immense promise for raising student achievement and lessening the achievement gap. But not all cyber schools are making the grade. Tune in next week: We’re releasing a paper on how to ensure quality in the digital learning sphere.
- Over half of Texas’s youth are expelled or suspended between their seventh- and twelfth-grade years. Shocking, but not anomalous. Florida and California, among others, have even higher rates of expulsion and out-of-school suspension.
- Data collection is only as useful as it is transparent and accessible. Enter a new free online tool, Ed-Fi, from the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, to facilitate secure data exchange among disparate collectors in the K-12 sector. Great work, guys.
- If Gadfly were the public-education system, he’d probably have Vanilla Ice lyrics looping in his head: “If you’ve got a problem, yo, I’ll solve it…” From mandating the teaching of gay history to compulsory environmentalism in the classroom, our old habit of ascribing to schools all manner of “issues” (over and above the hard task of teaching the basics) is alive and well.
