Got a creative idea to improve STEM education?  Well here’s a contest where you can win big bucks for your idea. Geography (IN) and grade-span based awards, too.

This issue of charter schools and military facilities has been kicking around for more than a decade. Quality of schools is a big issue for career military and makes certain postings unattractive for families.  Now some action worth watching.

A few from the past few days:

In The Times a look at the complicated issue of when kids should (and can) start kindergarten. And a poignant Michael Winerip column about a winner of the Scholastic Art and Writing Award.

In The Washington Post Kris Amundson takes on Virginia’s tiered diploma system – and highlights some new data on higher standards for diplomas and equity.  A lot of states have these issues so the general themes apply more broadly.

And in the WaPo Jay Mathews looks at honors courses. Again broader implications than just the local issue he’s discussing.  At a minimum, a good policy would be requiring informed consent from parents, after making them aware of the data on outcomes, before kids are placed in the lower-track classes.  In other words make the college-prep curriculum the default one and require an opt-out.

Dog whistle politics? Not surprised that SC is opting out of the Race to the Top re-compete but the language the state chief chose to make the case is interesting:

“The Race to the Top program expands the federal role in education by offering pieces of silver in exchange for strings attached to Washington.

Michelle Rhee and Michael Lomax on LIFO reform in Michigan. And the NGA isn’t all that happy with the new Race to the Top idea.

From the California Collaborative on District Reform a look at turnarounds and some interesting recommendations for federal policy (pdf). New ES report on growth models has federal policy implications, too.  Fordham takes an important look at special education data. And from NCEE a look at their global vision (pdf).

Are we shutting the barn door after the scientists are gone in terms of how we’re trying to address the STEM issue as a country?  In this week’s School of Thought at TIME I revisit an issue I mentioned a few weeks ago in terms of the demographic changes facing schools with Hispanic Americans:  Where will we find all these new STEM majors?

The word “stem” is tossed around so much at education meetings these days, you’d think you were at a gardening seminar. STEM is shorthand for “science, technology, engineering, and mathematics” — all fields that are growing, providing lucrative jobs, and key to future American competitiveness. That’s why everyone from President Obama to the United States Chamber of Commerce is worried about whether we’re producing enough STEM graduates from our colleges and universities. That this is a problem is one of the few things that everyone in education seems to agree upon…

…This is where the STEM rhetoric meets our educational reality: A lot of students are not going into STEM careers today not because they’re unaware of the choice, but rather because they cannot make that choice because of the quality of education they are receiving…

You don’t need a background in STEM to read the entire column via this link.

Sara Mead tells you what you need to know about the new pre-K part of the new Race to the Top competition (which is the lion’s share).

Important look at economic diversity at elite colleges from David Leonhardt:

For all of the other ways that top colleges had become diverse, their student bodies remained shockingly affluent. At the University of Michigan, more entering freshmen in 2003 came from families earning at least $200,000 a year than came from the entire bottom half of the income distribution. At some private colleges, the numbers were even more extreme.

Checker Finn points out the obvious: The claims that the Department of Education is violating federal law or tacitly trying to subvert it via Race to the Top and the Common Core work lack merit as well as historical precedent. Finn makes a key point, however, when talking about past curriculur forays he says, “Some of these turned out to be big wastes of money, even damaging, but that speaks to judgment rather than law.”

That’s the distinction here: Accusing federal officials of bad judgment when you believe they’re exercising it is certainly fair game – in fact it’s vital in a democracy. Accusing them of breaking the law or trying to subvert it crosses a line that people should be more cautious about crossing just as a rhetorical exercise or absent some real evidence.  The same thing happened, by the way, on Race To The Top – questions about judgment conflated with implications of illegality and on Reading First before that.  Would it kill anyone to take a deep breath before lobbing the illegal accusation around?

Quick round-up of some online resources: Bellwether now has a Twitter feed @bellwethered

I am also on Twitter @arotherham and there is an automated feed of Eduwonk posts @eduwonk.  In addition there are applications to your left for iphones, droids, and a daily email delivery of Eduwonk content.  There is also an Eduwonk Facebook page where you can post content and interact.

Other Bellwether team members on Twitter are: @saramead and @rachaelbrown.  And Sara blogs at Education Week on Sara Mead’s Policy Notebook.

Two new reports worth checking out: Tony Carnevale looks at earnings across college majors – and also breaks out by race and gender. And a new ACT analysis looks at how career and college ready stacks up internationally (pdf).

Forced placements/mutual consent emerging as a flash point in Colorado under the new teacher quality law there. When you read a story like this you quickly jump to the various policy options to resolve the impasse.  But when you step back and look at the bigger picture you can’t help but think, what a crazy way to run an endeavor that is supposed to be about quality.

Good to see this Boston Globe write-up of Harvard ed school Dean (and BW board member) Kathleen McCartney as a top innovator in her state.

Paul Farhi turns in a “5 myths” piece about education for The Washington Post. It’s a mixed bag and a lot of strawmen that miss some opportunities to actually look at complicated questions.  But a few of the “myths” deserve more discussion.

In particular Farhi cites the modestly rising high school graduation rates and SAT/ACT scores as evidence that the idea that are schools are failing is a myth.  He also cites international comparisons, and I tend to agree with that point. But the status dropout numbers Farhi uses understate the problem because they don’t count some populations.  Besides, we have better numbers because states are finally starting to count actual students.  The good news?  High School graduation rates are up.  The bad news? Only to 75 percent overall and less for minorities (64 percent for Hispanics and 62 percent for African-Americans). More stunning, the college completion rate for low-income students is 8 percent by age 24.  8 percent.  Farhi’s of course free to argue, as he implicitly does, that such an outcome is OK.  I’d like to think he doesn’t have too much company.  He also points out that low-income and English-language learners struggle but fails to note that minority kids lag behind (on NAEP for example) regardless of whether they’re in urban or suburban (or rural) school districts.  More textured take on that myth:  Depends how you define “failure” but there are a lot of kids – in all types of American communities – facing some long odds.

Farhi also takes on the myth that “billionaires know best.”  I don’t know anyone who agrees with that but the discussion does open the door to a important issue.  He writes, “There’s no doubt that these schools can use every dime that rich guys give. But attaching strings for pet projects is elitist and wasteful.”  Really?  What exactly is a string?  Does Farhi just give money to charities blind with no concern about what they use it for?  I don’t. If you care about hunger, for instance, you give to charitable organizations working on that issue. Likewise if you care about clean water, bike lanes, or the arts you do the same.  And Farhi doesn’t have to go far to learn about this.  He might want to check with the Washington Post’s publisher, who is an active philanthropist, to see if he targets his money or just sends it out shotgun style.  Or he could just check out the scholarships the Post offers to students, they have strings, too.  The point is that all charitable giving has strings attached, no one writes a blank check.  The closest thing to a blank check is arguably the annual MacArthur grants but even there the recipients have gone through a rigorous selection and diligence process prior to the award – call that a front-end string.  Today’s grantmakers don’t have it all figured out, to be sure, but the idea that you should just give money without any direction for or attention to what it’s going to be used for is disproven by a lot of experience in this sector.

The other “myths” such as “charter schools are the answer” and “more effective teachers are the answer” would be more accurate statements if “one” were substituted for “the.”  Otherwise these are myths looking for myth makers.

Update: Luke Kohlmoos has more.

I don’t share the STEM obsession of some of my colleagues, but it’s an issue.  I do think, however, that if we’re serious about producing more STEM graduates we’re looking in the wrong place via NJ’s education blog.

Really interesting forthcoming book chapter from Sean Reardon about income/achievement gaps (pdf).

Smart take on the ed tech bubble from Blue Engine’s Nick Ehrmann.  There is some great stuff happening out there but also a big bubble and a lot of stuff with serious underlying instructional problems.

Teacher/blogger Elliot Haspel has launched a new venture: They’re reading best practices literature so you don’t have to…all summarized weekly so you can dig deeper where you want, and for free….

Over at AIR they have rolled-up what’s happening with the federal School Improvement Grants or SIG money, where it’s being spent, what the applications look like, etc…

A lot of banter this week about this Politco article about Margaret Spellings and NCLB. Two reax:  First, I didn’t see it as nearly as damming as some did.  Russ Whitehurst and the NEA are down on Spellings?  OK.  Did you also hear that the economy is a little slow?  Second, in general the Spellings position is still holding the high ground here.  You may have noticed that the law hasn’t been “repealed” or reauthorized or really radically changed yet.  And underneath all the chattering there is a quiet consensus among some key players that current law – with all its problems – is preferable to a law that only focuses on 5 percent of the schools or otherwise throws disadvantaged kids in suburban schools under the bus.  That could all change, this is political after all, but right now to assume that the Spellings position is completely out of alignment is to misread the landscape.

A little more micro on one piece of this: Kristina Rizga takes a look at testing in California in Mojo.

Newark is shaping up as a hotbed of change, Cory Booker, a $100 million philanthropic investment, and now Cami Anderson coming to town.  For the past three months, Bellwether’s Talent Services team has been partnering with On Ramps to help build a pipeline of strong ed reform talent into Newark.  There are likely to be numerous job opportunities across a number of key organizations in Newark – including but not limited to Newark Public Schools – at several levels and in different functional areas.  If you or someone you know might be interested in heading to Newark to be part of the change there, please reach out to either my Partner, Monisha Lozier or Michelle Kedem, Partner at On Ramps to learn more.

Elsewhere:

Teach For America is looking for a Vice President of Community, Learning and Engagement.

And if you want to work in an urban district, Baltimore City Public Schools (City Schools) is seeking a special group of leaders to help Chief Executive Officer Andres Alonso. Highly-qualified individuals are sought for supervisory roles in SPED, parent & community engagement, human capital, data management, student support, and facilities management, as well as leadership positions overseeing principal support & accountability and overall support services to networks of schools. Interested candidates should send a resume here.

In this week’s School of Thought at TIME I take a look at the “is college worth it” question that has some people so worked up. Short answer:  For most of us it is and the push to talk kids out of it is somewhat irresponsible absent more nuance.

Lately it’s become fashionable — especially among the highly credentialed — to question whether it’s really “worth it” to go to college. A recent report from the Harvard Graduate School of Education proposed deemphasizing college as the primary goal of our education system in favor of “multiple pathways” for students. Earlier this month, New York Magazine devoted almost 4,000 words to profiling venture capitalists (and college graduates) James Altucher and Peter Thiel and their efforts convince Americans that they’d be better off skipping college. Thiel is even creating a $100,000 fellowship for young people who agree to delay going to college in favor of an internship.

Make no mistake, there is widespread dissatisfaction with higher education. According to a new survey released by the Pew Research Center, only 40 percent of Americans felt that colleges provided an “excellent” or “good” value for the money. At the same time, 86 percent of college graduates still felt the investment was a good one for them.

To understand these competing views, you have to juggle a few different ideas at once. First, there are plenty of problems with higher education — poor quality, even at brand-name schools, and out-of-control costs are two of the biggest. College presidents themselves shared some of these concerns and others with the Pew researchers. Second, it’s true: College isn’t for everyone. There are plenty of rewarding and important jobs and careers that do not require college. And due to the sluggish economy, there may in fact be more graduates than the current job market needs, or a temporary “college bubble.” But in spite of all of this, the data make clear that getting a college education is still a good idea — college graduates earn more, and are more likely to have a job in the first place — and is especially important for some Americans…

Read the entire column here.

Journalist Steven Brill made the list of 11 education activists for 2011 because his unsparing new book will shake things up when it comes out later this year.  I just noticed that the book now has a Facebook page so you can keep up as it rolls out.

News out of Georgia about a court ruling there to  overturn the authority of the state to create charter schools.  Again, this is not a good harbinger for the public schools; an industry that has to go to court to protect its market share is generally an industry in trouble.

In DC there is a quiet skirmish going on about how the military treats students who attended online* schools. Currently, the Defense Department limits all branches of the service to no more than 10 percent of recruits coming in with what it calls alternate high school credentials.  As implemented this rule adversely affects students who attend online schools even though states do not consider credentials from those schools to be alternative.  There is a bipartisan effort to change this rule in the House and Senate as part of next year’s Department of Defense appropriations bill.  Worth nothing: The service academies will take students from online schools.

Couple of issues here.  First, the military should, in my view, receive a lot of deference in terms of their personnel needs – especially where they have data to make decisions and apparently non-tradition students are less successful in the service.  However, this seems to be an instance where the policy has not kept pace with the times both because of how states treat online schools and also because of their – rapid – evolution. Lumping all online students in this category seems to overgeneralize. Best outcome would be a change in the policy but also some training so the military can become a more savvy consumer in the online space.  That’s because this issue again speaks to the need for supporters of online schools to get serious about quality and for states to ensure that accountability and oversight is strong.  Quality is mixed right now and while that impacts students in low-quality schools most directly it also adversely affects all online students if their credential is devalued.

By the way, there is also a little irony here in that the military offers a great benefit for its families – free tutoring via Tutor.com – that provides anytime tutoring for all students of active duty service members. Double irony?  The Defense Department is looking at creating virtual options for its own K-12 schools around the world.

*Bellwether works with several online or hybrid providers of education.

This NYT story captures some of what makes John King such a remarkable person – and a great choice for New York.

Don’t miss this new Bellwether paper from Kim Smith and Julie Peterson about education capital markets and innovation. It covers a lot of ground but is an important look at what’s working, what’s not, and ways to think about this issue going forward.

There’s a lively debate over Common Core these days but Jay Greene’s latest salvo at The Department of Education is pretty ridiculous. Leave aside that there is actually a big difference between incentives and mandates, what’s the evidence federal dollars are being spent on curriculum in violation of the law? In fact, like FERPA, it’s common knowledge that the letter of the law here is less constraining than the perception.  As we saw on Race to the Top and the sorry debate there, just because you don’t like what the Department is doing does not make it illegal or even bad faith.

On the other hand, while you expect a lot of misinformation in this business it might inspire more confidence if the Department’s own top people understood how their policies actually work.  Just because people keep saying NCLB creates accountability systems based on a single test doesn’t mean that’s what the law actually requires…

Also click over here: Some smart stuff up on the TitleIderland blog worth checking out.

Update: Justin Hamilton adds this:

Thanks for giving me the opportunity to clarify any misinterpretation of my statement.  During an online exchange with with teachers and others on twitter, a participant in the discussion said, “end high stakes testing! Should your worth be measured based on one day’s performance?”, which I interpreted as an incorrect assumption of what the Department’s policy proposals call for. I sought to clarify the issue by making clear that “we want to measure growth.”

Sara Mead and I take a look at lessons to date from the U.S. experience with charter schools for the South African magazine “Business of Teaching.”

Update: Here’s more on this issue from Michael Duffy.

More big news out of Tennessee this week.  First Kevin Huffman becomes state commissioner and now YES Prep founder Chris Barbic is going to run the state’s Achievement School District (Discs – Bellwether did the search for the job and has done strategy work for YES).  It’s a big win for the state.  But bigger winner? Education Secretary Arne Duncan. Only a handful of Race to the Top winners seem really poised to deliver out-sized results – Tennessee is one of them – and this team ups the odds of a good story out of Tennessee that much more.

Also in the coming and goings department, Paul Pastorek is going to be missed, he did a great job in LA.

Houston has a new teacher evaluation system that – while obviously not perfect none of these are and that’s not a reasonable standard – basically meets all the benchmarks laid down by various national leaders, advocates, etc…for evaluation and yet that’s still not good enough.  It’s like nailing jello to a wall…

Related, the NEA is trying to make a small, but significant, move in the eval direction. It seems likely to run into the same issue though.

New Jersey needs a Chief Innovation Officer, a Chief Academic Officer, and a Director of Communications and Strategic Partnerships.

Houston, we have an edujob: They’re recruiting teacher development specialists for HISD.

Civic Enterprises needs a policy analyst. And NWEA needs a research specialist – in lovely Portland, Oregon.

The Educational Administration program at the Graduate School of Education and Human Development at The George Washington University is looking for a Program Support Coordinator (job is in Alexandria, VA). Through this link and search for position #: 0602661.