A politically driven study, a politically driven response, and it doesn’t even involve charter schools! This time it’s reading scores. Jacobs has all your links here. This does sort of have the feel of a low-rent version of the late hit RAND flap in 2000. Ed Trust, over to you. Update: Expect an implicitly damning statement from PACE today disowning the study. Will Ed Week have second thoughts about giving it such prominence?
One thing you might not have known, and one thing you probably did: The latter, Alan Keyes is sort of nuts. The former, and more interesting, putative Illinois Senator Barak Obama is a big charter school supporter. More here.
In Philanthropy the remarkably prolific Rick Hess writes about K-12 giving. Don’t be put off by the lede about Annenberg, there is a lot of new information and analysis in here, worth reading.
New, important, (and trustworthy) AFT report on graduate students. Despite the NLRB ruling earlier this year this remains an important issue. And a key target for liberal union busting…
NYT editorializes about No Child Left Behind and the candidates (on the editorial page). Writing that the “No Child Left Behind Act is potentially the most important education reform since the nation embraced mandatory schooling” they urge both candidates to get it right. It’s important, but that characterization may overstate it a bit…
Also, NYT’s Andrew Ross Sorkin reports that Ted Forstmann is calling it quits in 2006. Implications beyond the financial world. Republicans loved Forstmann for his Children’s Scholarship Fund, which created privately funded voucher programs in many cities. Democrats loathed it (though some serve on the board…).
In the Wash Post BU’s Peter H. Gibbon writes about teacher Rafe Esquith. It’s a wonderful story, but the world is not entirely populated with Rafe Esquiths…