At the HuffPo he writes on why NCLB maters.  Plus, at his blog, 10 industry predictions for 201o. 

Staying in the martial vein, great Michael Winerip look at ROTC on campus from The Times.

It’s the holiday season again — and again this year please consider participating in Holiday Mail For Heroes via the Red Cross to support the men and women in our armed forces.

Interesting ConnCan paper on ed finance in Connecticut, implications and ideas that resonate beyond that state.

Title I Monitor has a roundtable with a lot of useful perspective (pdf) on what’s happening out there.

Social entrepreneur Alan Khazei is gaining momentum in the MA Senate race.

Update:  Boston Globe endorses Khazei.

Today’s speech and announcement by New York Mayor Bloomberg is important on a couple of levels.  You can watch live.  Matters to the future of reform in the city, Race to the Top and New York, and also education politics more generally.

In D.C. the age discrimination suit relative to the recent layoffs in D.C. was dismissed.   The data didn’t bear out the charge.  Maybe a contract now?

Well, probably not in these edujobs at Tennessee Score, the EAO there:   Director of Statewide Leadership, Director of Teacher Effectiveness, and Project Manager for Teacher Effectiveness.

New CER data showing that the total number of charter schools now operating is north of 5,000.   So change those talking points!  Meanwhile, New York’s data firewall gets the Race to the Top attention but turns out their charter school policy isn’t so hot either (pdf).

NGA needs a senior policy analyst.   And, if you like peaches, SEC football, and charter schools then this job in Georgia might be for you.

New Data Quality Campaign report on where the states are on data (pdf).  Good news is some progress but still some glaring holes (for instance linking student and teacher data).  And as the report points out, gathering data and using it are two different things.

Ted Sizer passed away last month.    Bruce Smith, an LA teacher, sent this guest post about Sizer’s influence on what happened at Locke High School.

I’m not sure Ted Sizer ever even heard of Locke High School, or of what transpired there; and he probably never realized the influence he had in inspiring one of the nation’s most watched teacher revolts, which led to the secession of a traditionally managed public high school out of the nation’s second-largest school system and into the hands of a prominent, radical charter management operator, Green Dot Public Schools.

I was a prime instigator of that revolt. In 2001 I joined the English faculty at Locke, and in that same year the Los Angeles Unified School District hired Dr. Sylvia Rousseau, a reform-minded educator (and critic of chartered schools), as the local district superintendent overseeing Locke. Dr. Rousseau brought in a flood of reforms, one of which was hiring a consultant from the Coalition of Essential Schools, which Ted founded, to facilitate faculty meetings that were intended to make us see the need for change and to begin exploring together the ways to make these changes happen. Those meetings did get some of us thinking, and they did lead to long, meaningful conversations among colleagues, who found like-minded proto-reformers and formed lasting friendships. This is in keeping with the principles of the Coalition, which advocate “substantial time for collective planning by teachers” and “a sense of commitment to the entire school” (Theodore R. Sizer, Horace’s Hope, p.155).

I think Ted’s best-known works were his Horace Trilogy, the 3rd volume of which I’ve just quoted from. By sheer coincidence, the fictional hero of his trilogy and I share a common last name as well as a common academic specialization. The meetings with the Coalition’s facilitator led me to do some research on Theodore R. Sizer, and I eventually read 3 of his books. As a mid-career English teacher who had graduated from a very average, middle class LAUSD high school some 25 years earlier and who was now teaching in a truly desperate school in a long-neglected neighborhood, I found it easy to identify with Horace Smith, and to feel the urgent need for change. In addition, while I think it not so privileged a domain as Phillips Andover or Harvard University, I was living in (and am now writing this from) Irvine, in Orange County, California; so waking up in the morning, looking out my bedroom window at the peaceful sandbox, the available swimming pool, and the spacious park, and then driving to the scenes of dereliction and neglect in Watts every morning made me feel very acutely the inequality in American society and our very unequal educational provision, which Ted no doubt also discovered in the research for his study of the American high school; and like Ted and like Horace Smith, it made me want to do something about it.

Ted’s books are filled with useful ideas. One that especially appealed to me as an English teacher was his belief that, in order to make sure that students learned to write well, English teachers should have a maximum student load of 50 students—in their entire schedule, not in a single class. I mentioned this idea to the Coalition’s facilitator and to Dr. Rousseau, and the best they could come up with was investigating the machine scoring of student essays. This immediately suggested not the worthlessness of Ted’s ideas but rather the infeasibility of implementing them under the auspices of the incumbent contract between LAUSD and the United Teachers of Los Angeles, which was supposed to protect and support our teachers but was obviously failing to do so.

Ted was also a fan of chartered schools: he and his wife Nancy helped found one, Parker Charter High School, and they succeeded in staffing it with 40 teachers for its 300 students on the same per-pupil funding as is typical in Massachusetts. My friend and colleague, Chad Soleo, who at that time was also teaching with me in Locke’s English department (he is now a cluster director for Green Dot), knew of an interesting charter organization, Green Dot Public Schools, because he had heard its founder, Steve Barr, speak at his graduation from Loyola Marymount. The traffic in L.A. is notorious, so sometimes, when we were working late, we would hang out at Starbucks, wait for the traffic to die down, and fantasize about what it would be like to bring Green Dot in to help us reorganize Locke High School. Making a long story short, it wasn’t easy, but we eventually succeeded in doing so, and the families in Watts are today enjoying the benefits of having available the choice of sending their children to a professionally managed charter high school—the kind of choice they were long denied, but which Ted advocated and inspired.

When a stone is thrown into a still pond, the ripples extend outward, maybe forever; or at least they can extend into unsuspected back-bogs and stagnant pools, perhaps unseen by the initial thrower. Ted may not have known of Locke High School, but sometimes a portion of a rich legacy may be found to have been inherited even in distant, unlikely lots.

Bruce Smith is in the process of founding One World School, a chartered secondary school. He led the teachers’ revolt that led to the conversion of Locke High School from traditional public management to its partnership with Green Dot Public Schools.

It’s down to 2. Final voting today so this is your last chance to vote Huffman as America’s next great pundit! Vote now, polls close tonight.

This CA withholding ruling (pdf) is potentially a big deal.   Title I Monitor writes-it up.

David Whitman writes speeches for Arne Duncan at the Department of Education.  He’s written for numerous publications on a range of issues and he examined the ”new paternalism” idea and looked at the issue in his recent book. 

But maybe he should be at the Department of the Interior?  As you can see, he knows the way around the working end of some 6x.

Sawchuk writes-up the Gates “deep dive” sites.   Stay tuned: This is important work with a lot of implications.

In the WaPo Michael Alison Chandler takes a look a portfolio assessments in VA.  The model is a good one for some students but as Chandler notes the dramatic rise in usage — particuarly among at-risk populations — should raise some eyebrows.

Some big education names on the move to President Bush’s new policy center.

This Wall Street Journal editorial is off-base.  It understates what a missed opportunity this rethinking learning initiative represents.

He’s smarter than Einstein, better looking than Brad Pitt, writes like a Bronte, and cares more about kids than Angelina Jolie.  Plus, he can juggle knives and pilot small aircraft.  So go vote for Kevin Huffman in the next to final round of the WaPo’s next American pundit contest.  Voting is today only.

Seriously, this role was made for Kevin, please take a minute and vote.

If you’re into teacher residency programs, this job is hard to beat.

Is the most interesting thing about the Gates “deep dive” initiative who won or who didn’t?  I kinda think the latter.

The proposed allocation amounts in the Race to the Top regulations seem to have deflated some of the enthusiasm for the RTT in some of the smaller – and even mid-size - states.  The willingness to take on the brutal politics is proportional to the payout…The potential loser states are making themselves heard, why aren’t the potential winner states making more noise about keeping this a real race and not the kind where everyone gets a medal at the end?

Will Marshall is crushing on Michelle Rhee…

In The Richmond Times I take a look at some of the educational issues facing Governor-elect McDonnell.

Someone lost Meeks.  That’s pastor and state senator James T. Meeks in Illinois.  His own (powerful) words here and the Chicago Trib ed board’s here.

Progressive Fix, the relaunched PPI website, agrees that the readers are now the ballgame on Race to the Top.   Hanushek offers ideas for the next ESEA.  And a New York teacher goes after Steven Brill for the now famous New Yorker piece – because it wasn’t rough enough!

Here’s a competition for business plans for education ventures being sponsored by the Graduate School of Education at Penn.   And I tweet just for leisure but you can tweet for cash:  Here’s a competition, via Twitter, to give a teacher $1K.   Tweet your favorite teacher’s name, school, subject, city, and state plus #MyTeacherMyHero.  Teacher with the most tweets gets a grand for classroom needs.  More 411 here.

Education Trust needs a director of teacher quality.  College Board wants state GR people.

Whoa, linking credentialing to performance? That’s crazy talk!  And creating a market-based approach to teacher training?   That could put our great and results-producing credentialing systems at risk!

A pundit is almost born. TFA’er Kevin Huffman is still in the running in the WaPo contest as we get to the final round.

He’s a renaissance man:  A dedicated TFA’er, an education reformer, a great father, a world-class chef, a winter sports expert, his writing is better than the Bible, Declaration of Independence, and Harry Potter combined, he can fix small engines and enormous social problems, recite poetry from memory, throw a 90 mile-an-hour fastball, and he’s kind to small animals!  

This is the person you want as your next great pundit.   So vote now and help Kevin win this contest.

Why does Stephen Sawchuk keep asking hard questions about peer review?  What a jerk!