When all the people who signed this open-letter about The Partnership for 21st Century Skills agree on something two things should happen.  First, people should pay attention.    Second, as I tried to argue last week on the NJ blog the partnership ought to pay attention, too.  Ed Week looks at the gap between where the NEA and AFT are on this question.  Keep an eye on that.

Ed Week’s Sawchuk continues to separate fact from fiction on the teacher beat.

So Aldine Texas won the Broad Prize* today (pdf).   They’ve been a finalist before so have earned a lot of scholarship money over the past few years and received $1 million more today.  Since Aldine isn’t huge, it raises an interesting question:  What percentage of college costs for college going youth from Aldine is the foundation (and by extension Eli and Edythe Broad) financing overall right now?  I suspect it’s significant.  And that’s good, people sometimes forget that the money these districts win is for scholarships for their students.  *I’m on the prize’s Review Board.

CA State Board of Ed Chair and New Schools CEO Ted Mitchell weighs-in on the data issue and Race to the Top in the LAT.

And he asks:

Should the professional evaluation of a teacher be based, at least in part, on measurements of how much students are learning?

Whoa, whoa…whoa…that’s crazy talk!

John King, who is a great educator, great person, and as hardcore an education reformer as you’re going to find is going to be the Deputy Education Commissioner in New York State…here’s a bit on him…and here’s more from Gotham Schools on the announcement and John.

As you may know, especially if you’re based in Washington, Bill Cahir was killed in action in Afghanistan last month.   Bill was one of those people with a restless sensibility about making the world better than it is.  He wrote for Ed Daily and Newhouse among other publications and worked for the education committee in the Senate.  That was before he enlisted in the Marines in the wake of the 2001 attacks and completed two tours of duty in Iraq prior to his deployment in Afghanistan.    Bill also ran for Congress.   And he did all those things for selfless reasons.

Bill’s wife is expecting their twins at the end of this year and a memorial fund has been established to assist them.  Please visit and consider making a contribution online  or via mail at the Bill Cahir Memorial Fund c/o Burke and Herbert Bank, P.O. Box 268, Alexandria, VA 22313.

A lot of behind the scenes chatter and concern and I’d say even worry that it’s going to be hard to get “Race to the Top” proposal peer reviewers who know a lot about school reform – and proposals like this are complicated.  There are a lot of conflicts among the usual suspects.  After all, teachers’ unions have to sign on off the applications and can benefit from them so they’re self-interested, most wonks outside of government are helping various states get together ideas and applications, and states themselves are pretty self-interested, obviously.  Add on to that the generally meager rewards of peer reviewing in the first place and this issue has a lot of folks chattering about exactly who can do this work in a high-quality way…

City Year and Be The Change founder Alan Khazei is looking at the open Massachusetts Senate seat vacated by Ted Kennedy.

Alan Borsuk turns in a must-read:

On some level, everyone is in favor of education reform. Everyone wants things to get better.

But where does that lead?

The way Democrats wrestle with that question and who prevails in the next few months will show the destination, at least when it comes to Democrats.

Is it me or have the teacher contract talks in Washington, D.C. taken on all the trappings of a snipe hunt?

Ed Week’s Sawchuk writes-up some of Teach For America’s ongoing growth and feedback work and in the process profiles the great Lisa Stone ( née Guido) who holds the unique distinction of being the first Education Sector intern and the last 21st Century Schools Project intern among her various accomplishments.  

Teach For America, along with, for instance, KIPP, The New Teacher Project, and ventures like AUSL are in different ways at the leading edge of the sort of human resource practices American education will have to embrace to create a real profession for teachers and improve student outcomes.  For instance, no school district in the country has a career ladder as well developed as KIPP does and no one uses data as effectively to drive internal change as TFA.  Some ideas and more on all that here (pdf). 

Yet as Mark Twain reminds us, few things are as annoying as a good example and that’s as true in American public education as anywhere (and especially where TFA is concerned).  So right now established interests are more likely to respond with bad behavior like this than actually try to learn from any of this work – for the most part they’re generally unaware of it.  The point here is not that there are not good things happening within the traditional system as well — I’m on the boards of two nationally recognized colleges of education so I think there are – but there is little effort made to learn from these leading ventures, and a lot of effort expended to tear them down.

*Photo via Education Week.

Did you know that in a lot of U.S. school districts a teacher is more likely to die than lose their job for poor performance?  So does that mean that American school systems have the very best human resource selection methods of any field or industry or does it mean that TNTP was really on to something with The Widget Effect?

A lot of folks are now saying that it’s going to be Senator Harkin (IA), not Dodd, to replace Kennedy as chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee occasioning a shuffling of other committee chairs.   Rumor was/is announcement tomorrow.   Instant reax:  Good news for special education and pre-K.    Not such good news for structural education reform.  Harkin is not a big fan of the Teacher Incentive Fund, for instance, charter schools, or harder-edged accountability measures.    He’ll wield a lot of power as the chair of the authorizing committee and the big wheel on education appropriations and this seems likely to impact some of the Obama – Duncan plans.

Update:  Dodd makes it official – staying on Banking.

Over at the National Journal ed blog the debate this week is about “21st Century Skills.”   My take is here. Punchline:  Cause for concern.  Background:  Here’s Dan Willingham and I on the same in Ed Leadership and a USN column from a few months back.

The leader of the Huffies pens an op-ed that could have come straight from this.

Tuesday night (September 8th) there is a Young Education Professionals Happy Hour featuring some where are they now action.    Urban Teacher Residency United has a new leader (pdf):  Diane Robinson, who if you don’t know her is outstanding.  It’s a big catch for them.

John Merrow sits down and catches up with Margaret Spellings and the Sierra Club ranks eco-friendly colleges. 

The Education Equality Project lays down some benchmarks on school accountability (as we head into No Child season?).

Per last week’s controversy, the Obama back-to-school speech has now been pre-released and if there is a criticism to level it’s that this uproar may have made them gun shy.   Pretty tepid stuff…the only risk to the nation’s young people is boredom.   Meanwhile, it makes the study guide* look all the more innocuous now that the context is crystal clear — helping the president, any president by the way, achieve these goals should occasion no controversy.  

Wish they’d held the line even more now…Upside is that conservatives will look especially stupid railing against this.

*Is the media CW that ‘this was all ridiculous but the study guide was a small mistake and it’s good that the Admin fixed it’ simply a fig leaf for some semblance of ‘balance?’  Let’s hope so.

Update:  Frist and Riley on the same at Politico.

These data on violence out of Chicago are really depressing but hopefully will be a catalyst for some bold ideas.   I sleep well knowing that there are people working hard as we speak to keep these youngsters safe now — from the threat of having to listen to their president talk about doing well in school…

Smart Tom Vander Ark post on capital flows and public education.  This (avoidable) lack of investment is an enormous barrier to innovation and improved quality in the sector.

Unfortunately, this whole Obama back-to-school speech controversy of the past few days has taken on a life of its own and as is often the case with these things the story has become the story rather than the underlying issues.  In other words, it’s quickly becoming one of these perpetual motion machines you see in politics.

But pause to ask yourself, what sorry point have we reached where the President of the United States can’t give a speech to schoolkids without it turning into a political circus like this?  Is “helping the president” by staying in school really a partisan issue now?   This episode is especially unfortunate because the President is uniquely well-positioned to offer a message on the importance of staying in school so this controversy has real consequences.   In many ways, the conservatives on the attack over this are showing the same “burn the village to save it” mentality that  from the left led to the tearing down of Reading First and the loss of a billion dollars in federal reading funds.  That also had consequences.  Who is willing to say enough and call BS?

Update:  Some sense from the WSJ.  Meanwhile, has Rick Hess lost his mind?  The speech isn’t about Obama’s preferred policies it’s about doing well in school.

Here’s your big chance to be the 1000th Eduwonk Facebook fan…

This Atlanta teachers’ union website is just too good not to link again.   Sara Mead thinks it could cause seizures.

Interesting/important new paper on hot jobs and community colleges (pdf) from the DLC.

Wash Monthly’s college rankings are out  with loads of related content.

There are some must-read nuggets in this WSJ interview with Eli Broad.  Close reading rewarded, some interesting signals.

Politico has some speculation.

And here you thought that reformers were being unfair saying that some teachers’ unions blame kids for the country’s education problems:

“Duncan apparently thinks that you can just demand and command improvement,” says Metro Association of Classroom Educators chairman John Trotter. “He wants to replace everyone … except the ones who matter, the children.”

Trotter says the children in failing schools are the main problem.

“They are unmotivated and lazy. Yes, there are many incompetent and idiotic and mean administrators who need to go,” Trotter says. “There are even some bad teachers, but these are really rare. The problem starts with the students. What is Duncan going to do with some so-called students who act like miscreants each day?”

Nice.  And don’t forget that the primary argument against many education reforms is the noble work the public schools do serving all students.

Update:   A friend at the AFT writes asking for distance from these guys and points out that their website is, well, ridiculous.  See for yourself.

The new WaPo education homepage  is really good–and useful.  Check it out.  If they’d landed Jenna Bush it would be a ten-strike for big newsprint.

I worry on Twitter.  If those Rasmussen job approval numbers are even in the ballpark, it’s going to get harder on ed reform not easier.  Reformers should remember that an army of editorial writers is still not an army.

Old worry:   Vouchers for special education will lead to increased identification of special education students(pdf).   New worry?  Schools will resist identifying kids for special education when vouchers are in the equation. 

Target Corporation wants kids to take field trips despite the economy.  Sherman Dorn goes Third Way and wants a Bayesian model for combining outcome data and professional judgement in teacher evaluations.  Good thing, we need some new models since Sawchuk is busy busting the over-selling of the results of peer review!  And SIIA frets that Duncan et al are aiming too low with Race to the Top.

If you haven’t seen this Howard Fuller speech on charters, check it out.  Likewise, check out what California Charter School Association’s Jed Wallace is up to on charter school quality.

Two Edujobs:   Internships at D.C. Public Schools continue to be competitive and popular and the quality of interns is high.  So hurry up and apply if you’re interested.   Achieve needs a director of state policy and state development, that will be a hot job considering everything going down right now.