Politico looks at five issues that could defy gridlock in Washington this year.  Not on the list?  Education!

NYT slideshow on cross-border students, an interesting issue in the border areas of the country.  And if you enjoyed the 60 Minutes segment on Jake Barnett, the math prodigy, here is additional footage about him.

Michael Alison Chandler looks at the self-esteem debate in schools.

Here’s Martin Luther King on education from the Morehouse College student paper in the late 1940s.

On Twitter they’re discussing the TIME 12 for 12 list with the hashtag #edactivists.

Chuck Edwards looks at the earmark hustle. And Mickey Kaus looks at how a grand bargain on the Hill might play out. Elsewhere Matt Ladner looks at NAEP scores in DC and he goes there – broom pic.

If you’re in Boston, some interesting Askwith Forums this year. Keep an eye on New York, Bloomberg throwing eduhaymakers.

And some noise on charters in Washington State, a place that’s been a dead zone.  Meanwhile, in Virginia the Governor’s education plans have some good ideas included but remain light on two big issues facing Virginia – creating meaningful choices for parents and fixing the state’s anemic school accountability system.

And if you like to judge AEP has an opportunity for you.

This year’s TIME list of 12 education activists to watch in 2012 is out. Agree with them or not all of last year’s 11 for 11 made a difference in ways public and private and this year’s will, too, as 2012 unfolds.  A few more behind the scenes but influential players this year (but also some stars), but that’s the kind of year it may be.

You can check out the entire gallery via this link.

Over the past week we’ve heard a lot about what everyone thinks about No Child Left Behind except from the man who signed it – George W. Bush.  In his only interview about the law’s 10 year anniversary I talked with the former President about No Child’s legacy and the current debate about it.  That’s this week’s School of Thought column at TIME:

No Child Left Behind turned 10 this week, and former President George W. Bush, who led the effort to enact the landmark federal education law, marked the anniversary with an exclusive interview with Time education columnist Andrew J. Rotherham. Bush discussed the law and its legacy, criticized both parties for trying to walk away from its hard-nosed accountability efforts, and called on President Obama to resist “the temptation to take the easy path.”

Mr. President, 10 years in, what’s your take on No Child Left Behind?

First of all, I am extremely proud of the effects of No Child Left Behind. For the first time, the federal government basically demanded results in return for money. It started by saying, We expect you to measure [student performance]. As a result, there has been a noticeable change in achievement, particularly among minority groups…

What will it take to rebuild a consensus on accountability?

Well, I think it’s going to take presidential leadership. The President is going to have to be very firm in resisting the temptation to take the easy path…

In your view, how much of the criticism of the law is about the specifics, and how much is just partisan politics?

In some circles, punching No Child Left Behind is a way to basically say, I’m against Big Government. In fact, No Child Left Behind is a way to promote efficient government. In a lot of these debates, you don’t hear real detail or analysis about how to improve the law…

Read the entire interview at TIME via this link. And a version of the interview will be in next week’s magazine.

Go ask a teacher! One of the great non-responses in education debates. But, OK, does this one count?

Elsewhere, RiShawn Biddle previews the Medicaid/education funding debate.

Jay Greene argues for efficiency in teacher evaluations (and goes after Gates MET).  He’s right that the predictive leverage of value-added is more powerful than is generally acknowledged or many people take the time to understand but there are compelling arguments that to move the profession you need to create buy-in and that there is a role for professional judgement in evaluation as well.  And there is the thorny issue of valid measures for non-tested subjects and grades, the work environment of the majority of teachers and a place where MET can really make a contribution.

Kevin Carey makes an out of the box case for solving the higher ed cost problem.

Trend worth watching: New degree programs emerging at several ed schools.

Harvard Graduate School of Education or HGSE in the parlance just announced the second cohort of students in its new leadership degree program. The program works with the Kennedy School and the Business School to create a practice-based doctoral program for education leaders.  It’s highly competitive – but cost-free for students.  The first cohort is a remarkable bunch, so much so that it may have led some to believe that it was a one-off vanity program.  It’s not, it’s a sustained effort to help address the leadership challenge in education today.  The second cohort is just as strong and diverse educationally with talented educational leaders like Morgan Camu, Christine DeLeon, Andrew Fishman, Paola Peacock Friedrich, Justin May, and Sarah Johnson. When you’re mixing alums from The Big Picture Company, TFA, and overseas education work you’re onto something powerful.  I’m on the visiting committee – basically a board -  for HGSE and helped with the program’s development and have subsequently been able to spend time with the students and it’s the kind of thing that makes you optimistic about the energy and capacity for change in this sector.

At UVA, meanwhile, they just announced a new M.B.A./M.Ed. degree program. I’m on the board of the ed school there as well. These programs have been in and out of fashion and are of mixed quality but the new generation seems to be more serious about actually building the capacity of future education leaders to drive change.  And at UVA there are some genuine collaborations already underway between the university’s b-school and the ed school, most notably the school turnaround initiative.  Given the sorry state of education reform in Virginia the outstanding question there, however, is whether the new UVA program will be fueling efforts within the commonwealth or exporting talent elsewhere.

Later this month what promises to be a good event on literacy at AEI*, some thorny issues and should be fun conversation.

And from ES a new report by Craig Jerald on how the school inspection process in the UK works and possible strategies to make it work here.  I find the US parallels – eg accreditation – less than convincing but it’s a smart look at a method that does have some implications for accountability here in the United States.

*By which I mean a discussion about literacy issues being held at AEI.

Some interesting charter action in Oregon.

At The Times’ campaign blog Charles Blow takes a look at some over-the-top Rick Santorum rhetoric about college and the Obama Administration. If Santorum is serious about social mobility he should be talking college and ideas to help more low-income students complete college up not down.

And, speaking of virtual schools and costs…a useful look at the costs of online learning from Fordham. Important as states start to think about changing their policies to better account for online schools.

New York is now on double-secret Race to the Top probation, too!  The Times has more including the wonderful allegation that the state commissioner there, John King, is a “bully.” Anyone who knows John will appreciate the absurdity of that.

You can read about how all the RTT states – not only the Delta House of Hawaii, New York and Florida -are doing in these new Department of Education status reports.

Last year’s CMO report is now updated to include data on high school and post-secondary. TIME column on original report here.

Hewlett Foundation sponsoring a $100K prize for online assessment scoring.

New report last week from the Gates MET project, check it out here.

Marketing/comms role at Mass Insight.

Whiteboard Advisors has a cheat sheet of state legislative action for you.

As the orgy of attacking government continues in New Hampshire and South Carolina here’s a fun brief from CAP about some national investments that turned out OK. Also, here’s a new report from the Commerce Department and NEC on the competitiveness issue and strategy.

Give credit where it’s due: New study on MN’s dual-credit initiative for high school students.  MPR here. Dual credit has a few solid benefits for students overall – but some complicated turf issues!

Following the latest TFA silliness – Wendy Kopp’s response is worth reading. The NEA puts out an olive branch and gets whacked by the clown parade, pathetic.

Grant strategy opportunity at Knowledge Universe – based in Portland or in DC.

This new paper on teacher effects that’s been making the rounds, it’s kind of a big deal.  New York Times writes it up. Two cautions on how far this is ready to go here and here.

My take on what the law did and didn’t do is this week’s School of Thought at TIME:

Bashing the No Child Left Behind Act has become so politically popular that it’s easy to forget how overwhelmingly bipartisan it was — the legislation passed the House with 384 votes and the Senate with 91. As the law marks its 10-year anniversary on Jan. 8, it’s important to look at both its successes and its failures. Did NCLB solve all of our public education problems? No. But it set a lot of good things in motion and was specifically designed to be revised after five or six years (in a reauthorization that has yet to happen and is unlikely to before this year’s election.) The No Child law didn’t get everything right the first time, but that’s the wrong yardstick. If we held other policy areas — think food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security — to the same standard No Child is held to these days, i.e., flawlessness, then we would have jettisoned those and many other worthy programs long ago.

You don’t need to make it to a diamond anniversary to read the entire column at TIME by clicking here.

Just when you think it can’t get any more ridiculous…

Wash Post writes up the Virginia Education Report.

Reminder – today is the last day (deadline EOD today) to apply for the BW blogging workshop on February 3.  Loads of great applications already in and a terrific line-up of writing coaches and social media experts so it’s going to be a fun and productive day.

In November NYT columnist Joe Nocera wrote a column about the Steve Brill book that took the trite party line on charter schools – they can’t scale etc…and the trite union line – it’s all about collaboration.  Some truth to both claims but both issues are also, of course, much more complicated.  Today he’s back with a column going hard the other way – touting a charter school in Rhode Island and a reading initiative launched in tandem with the local school district (none other than Central Falls, btw).  I  haven’t visited this school but when I look at the data it looks to be trailing state averages in math and reading? Today’s column touts dramatic gains in reading in grades k-2 as a result of this initiative, and the state only reports the data in grades 3 onward so perhaps…but what measures are being used her to cite “dramatic” gains? Anyone know what’s up?  Update: Here’s some data (pdf).

To Be Heard will be on PBS channels this month. Powerful film.  Background here.

Sam Dillon with a solid look at pay-for-performance state of play.

And a lot of chatter about the recent competition for regional education lab contracts.  In that vein a reader sends along this 1969 paper about the state of education research (pdf).

As 2011 draws to a close, this blog’s 7th(!) year, thank you for reading, taking time to comment on posts, using social media to share them, and all best wishes for 2012 – and perhaps a year that is slightly more productive for our national conversation about education.

The Times reports that New York education officials are dropping more than one ball on New Year’s eve this year. The state* wants school districts to get serious about honoring their commitments under Race to the Top or forfeit some funds.

What’s most surprising about the back and forth in New York over the evaluation question is that because of the structure of Race to the Top there is a clear record of key stakeholders agreeing to do this, it’s not just the application and proposals -  we can go to the videotape! I’m surprised the NY media hasn’t been on this more because asking for changes to make the evaluation better is one thing but this is plainly just an effort to backslide on commitments made during the competition.

Update: No deal.  Here’s a statement from the commissioner.

*BW has done work for NY but not on this evaluation issue.

The new evaluation of Boston Teacher Residency* ($) is worth checking out, Sawchuk has a solid write-up here. The Boston Teacher Residency, a flagship teacher preparation program, is a residency-based teacher preparation program where teachers learn in a job-embedded setting. Punchline on the results: The program’s candidates struggle the first couple of years and then start to outpace other teachers, on average.  It’s pretty small n stuff but nonetheless interesting.  The study raises a host of questions and issues, here are a few.

First, and I’m reading between the lines just a bit here because I’ve seen more data on this,  it seems like diversity is a sleeper issue here.  BTR seeks to improve diversity in the teaching force – a worthy goal to be sure – yet the performance-trends indicate that efforts to do so must be coupled with intensive support.  Looking holistically at teacher preparation it may well be that selectivity and intensity of training can be inversely related, at least to a point, across various programs.  That idea would obviously be at odds with the common notion that we need task forces, commissions, etc…to divine the one best way or system for training teachers.

Second, on the performance issue, the Ed Week headline is interesting, “Teacher Residents Seen Outpacing Peers in Later Years.”  That’s quite right but it’s not how Teach For America research – which clearly shows that TFA teachers outpace in the early years – is generally presented. Perhaps editors just don’t dig into the data but I actually think it’s something else.  And I don’t mean to pit the two programs against one another but I think this illustrates a prevalent bias in our field – rooting against the upstarts.  There is a deeply seeded desire to believe that things from within the system can work – and sometimes they do, of course, and sometimes ideas from outside the system don’t. But this sentiment and concern about the more disruptive things going on can cloud how we look at various pieces of information in a pretty basic glass half-full/glass half-empty sort of way.  Put more plainly, if this study was about Teach For America teachers I suspect the headline in many papers would have been – “Teach For America teachers struggle in their first two years.”

There is also a more substantive issue here. I think Teach For America works because – despite all the crazy rhetoric about the program – the evidence (to be clear by which I mean actual studies with actual quantitative research methods) makes it pretty plain that on average TFA teachers do no harm in the classroom and are a good choice relative to other options. I think the secondary impacts of TFA are tremendous but classroom impact has to be paramount.  The other day in a meeting someone noted that Wendy Kopp was sitting atop the most powerful human capital pipeline of the last quarter-century.  It’s not an overstatement, it’s 20K alums are all over the place and in cities around the country you see them playing instrumental roles in all sorts of high-velocity education projects (Bellwether is crawling with them). Complaints that TFA devalues the teaching profession, could be made better with various changes, and other long term impact questions etc…are all legitimate points to argue, even if you don’t agree – I don’t, but TFA is not harming students.  In this case BTR, however, raises the exact same question.  In the first two years its teachers struggle relative to other teachers.  To its credit BTR is seeking to address this but while I may have missed it I didn’t see a lot of concern about this issue in the wake of the evaluation.  Double standard?  Sure.  But that’s the easy part.  The harder issue is the question of just how much adverse impact are we willing to tolerate in the service of other goals? Right now the answer is situational although ironically TFA doesn’t put that on the table, BTR does, at least based on the data available now. No one is picking it up though.  At least thus far.

Finally, enormous cost-benefit questions embedded in all this.  The preparation/training conversation can’t happen in a fiscal vacuum.  I favor a variety of routes into the field with common high bars, and am comfortable with investing more to achieve other goals, for instance diversity, because education is not a purely utilitarian or economic undertaking.  But that doesn’t mean cost-benefit considerations should not enter into the public policy conversation – and today they generally don’t when it comes to teacher preparation.  Hard to look around and conclude that’s not going to have to change.

*Disc - BW worked with BTR earlier this year.

Solid overview of what’s happening in California around the state charter school association’s call to shutter some low-performing charter schools there. Big takeaways: (1) In education quality is still in the eye of the beholder. (2) When is the last time you saw a traditional education association forthrightly call for this kind of consequential accountability? (3) Despite that, it’s still hard as hell to do.

Background from California Charter Schools Association here.

Here’s an Eduwonk flashback.  Last year’s holiday-themed School of Thought column:

It’s a holiday ritual as predictable as Santa showing up at your local mall: overheated rhetoric about the “War on Christmas.” A lowlight this year was a feature on The O’Reilly Factor about a letter from the Tennessee chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union urging school districts to make holiday celebrations inclusive. Through O’Reilly’s prism, the letter — quoted selectively — was an attempt to squelch Christmas. In reality, the letter just asked school districts to avoid celebrations focusing exclusively on a single religion. It was more common sense than state-coerced atheism.

Unfortunately, once you cut through the blather on cable news, there is a real, if much less discussed, problem in that public schools are skittish about teaching much about religion. Although there is little hard data, the consensus among those who study the issue is that to the extent world religions are taught, they are treated superficially, usually with the help of just a few textbook pages that have been heavily sanitized to avoid even the hint of controversy. And that’s not good news if you believe a working knowledge of the world’s religions and their history is an important aspect of a well-rounded education…

Devout?  Agnostic?  Atheist? No matter, you can read the entire column by clicking here.

Arne Duncan has put Hawaii on double secret probation over concerns about state’s Race to the Top antics and lack of progress.

This week’s TIME School of Thought column checks in with the iconic SAT test. The SAT is loathed but useful and it soldiers on despite that as well as the cheating scandals and efforts to marginalize it.

There is little love for the SAT. How little, you ask? When a massive cheating scandal erupted this fall, fewer people rushed to defend the test than rose to defend Penn State officials for allegedly covering up the sexual abuse of children. But as unpopular as the iconic SAT may be – among students and many educational activists alike – it’s actually pretty good at what it’s designed to do, which is to serve as a common measure across the hodgepodge of academic standards, grading systems and norms being used by America’s sprawling 25,000 high schools.

You don’t have to get the right answer, a 2400, or even fill in a bubble to read the entire column.  Just click here.

Alyson Klein tells you what the budget deal means for education. And CER takes a look at charter school closures. Remember though, when an authorizer says they closed a school for financial reasons, it’s often the Al Capone approach – get ‘em on their taxes.  Those schools are often low-performing, too, but the fiscal case is the easiest one for authorizers to make because in this field you can argue about performance all day.

Politico Influence highlights one item from the most recent “Education Insider.” We asked respondents an open-ended question about who they saw as the most effective education lobbyists lobbying federal policy right now. Not surprisingly the NEA captured the top spot. They were followed by The Education Trust and the Council of Great City Schools.  Penn Hill came in fourth. Couple of interesting takeaways from this ranking.  First, it’s organizations not hired guns who are still seen to have the most influence.  Second, while the Council of Great City Schools hitting the board might surprise people who don’t follow D.C. closely it’s actually a reflection of all the wheeling and dealing they’ve done and not so surprising.  Finally, if you’re wondering why not much gets done on education besides spending bills consider the divergence in the agendas of those three groups.