Three Reform Takes On Trump….Plus O’Keefe On Turnover, Aldeman On Pension Coasters, Anderson’s Open Letter, Plus Kanye And Trump Talked Edu, Warren V. Tilson, PPI Goes Back To Indy, Edu Spending, More….

Bonnie O’Keefe on leadership turnover. Pennsylvania has a lot of roller coasters, Chad Aldeman on the one you don’t want to ride. Cami Anderson with an open edu letter to the Trump team.

The education reform sector seems to be breaking into three factions over Donald Trump’s presidency:

1) Don’t do anything with Trump’s administration. No matter how good any policy idea is in isolation, it’s tainted because of its association with Trump. Besides, your friends will never speak to you again.

2) Let’s see what Trump does. Legitimizing him as president is not the same as normalizing everything his campaign was about. If some proposals are reasonable ideas that might improve outcomes for kids, then that’s good and people have to work together even across disagreement. Besides, you can’t just put the freeze on things that might help kids for four years, or longer.

3) Yeehah! Biggest opportunity for choice ever! Besides, Yeehah! Biggest opportunity for choice ever!

Related, ICYMI, my take on Trump’s possible paths on choice.

Sol Stern at war. Making colleges more economically diverse.

Primary document: Kanye West and Trump talked education issues in their Trump Tower meeting.

Progressive Policy Institute goes back to Indy (pdf).

Spending money on schools can make a difference. Key line,

Mr. Rothstein cautioned that the idea that states could erase the achievement gap between poor and middle class students by simply cutting a few checks was unrealistic. “There has been a tendency to expect magic from these reforms,” he said.

Perhaps naive, but you would like to think there is a politics to be built right there with the broad swath of people in the education world who believe money matters and how it’s spent matters, too?

Here’s Myles Mendoza, Marty West, Shavar Jefferies, and Karen Nussle talking education politics in the Trump era.  Great panelists make any moderator look good – couple of great audience questions, too. Who does Betsy DeVos listen to? Maybe not Cory Booker these days?

California and the feds are still arguing over testing like it matters. RAND and Wallace on school leadership, evidence, and ESSA.

Whitney Tilson versus Elizabeth Warren. Sorta. And Whitney got his apology. Peace in our time!

Schools wrestling with anti-racist works of art and fiction that aren’t anti-racist enough.

This article is a brutal and a frustrating reminder that we can’t come together to balance rights, responsibility, and common sense on the gun issue.

3 Replies to “Three Reform Takes On Trump….Plus O’Keefe On Turnover, Aldeman On Pension Coasters, Anderson’s Open Letter, Plus Kanye And Trump Talked Edu, Warren V. Tilson, PPI Goes Back To Indy, Edu Spending, More….”

  1. Re: the ed reform sector’s three factions regarding working with a Trump administration: I advocate faction 2, with school choice being something that might help the teens in America’s dysfunctional secondary schools (which means you can put me in faction 3). In particular, the availability of the choice of schools that are not subject to ESSA — which means the private schools willing to accept public funding via vouchers, along with other uses of education savings accounts — might well obviate the need for the opt-out movement, and put to rest my repeated calls for repealing and replacing that mistaken compromise extension of No Child Left Behind, which, after 15 years, has left America steadily further behind other nations, especially during the Obama administration, if the recent PISA scores still matter — and they do.

  2. I appreciate this blog’s ability to get me up to speed quickly on the policy discussions and decisions being made that will impact the students and families I serve.

    However your posts about the Trump presidency highlight one of the central faults of the ed reform coalition. Far too many people associated with the movement write their papers and make their decisions in airless conference rooms without considering students and families as anything but numbers at the end of research papers.

    The premise that those of us who believe that we can not do anything with the Trump administration because we don’t want to lose the approval of our “friends” is snarky and willfully ignorant of the impact of this election on our communities.

    We will not do anything with this administration because the students and families we serve know that this President, this Secretary of Ed, etc explicitly sought the support of those who hate them and wish them harm. Until that support is rejected by this administration, all narrow policy “wins” betray the trust of the students and families.

    We have worked incredibly hard alongside parent leaders to expand the charter school cap in MA and will continue to do so. However we recognize that our families have more than one issue and don’t seek to appease a destructive agenda against them just to create more school choice.

    I wish all the wonks would acknowledge that pragmatism about this administration is a privilege for those who will never worry about their immigration status or treatment by law enforcement. I wish you talked to students and families and that their voices found a way in the door.

  3. Don’t fully agree, you can argue the privilege runs the other way by not taking advantage of any chance for progress. But reasonable people can certainly disagree and great comment. Thanks!

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