In Business Week William Symonds discusses the trend of public universities seeking to operate like private ones.
Catalyst Chicago points out that the new requirements for teacher quality don’t do much to actually improve teacher quality…key graf:
[CPS Official] Botana says the revamped requirements won’t necessarily dilute teacher quality. But, he concedes, “If you equate having a degree in the content area with being higher quality, then the new requirements probably don’t help the quality pool.”
In other words, unless you think that knowing something about the content you’re teaching matters, this is no biggie…
From NYC Samuel Freedman looks at small schools and growing pains related to that initiative. The Gothamist says, forget the big picture, the even the bathrooms are a dump. One solution here, used by some schools, is have the adults and the kids all use the same bathrooms. Empowers and respects the kids and you can bet the toilet paper and soap get refilled…
The Washington Post reports on high-achieving students using transfer provisions under No Child Left Behind that were ostensibly designed to help struggling students. This is a tough dilemma; the obvious answer is to restrict transfers to students who are below grade level or in subgroups that are not making Adequate Yearly Progress. However, NCLB’s architects (unfortunately they don’t make the story) were concerned that limiting the transfer rights to such students would lead to a “push-out” problem as schools sought to send struggling students elsewhere rather than focus on them. On a more basic level, wouldn’t allowing parents to chose from among various public schools as a matter of course make more sense and increase buy-in anyway? When you stop and think about it, it seems amazing that we’re still having a huge debate about whether all parents should be able to choose among public providers of a public service. Not a way to ensure constituency loyalty over time, that’s for sure…
Update: D.C. Education Blog offers a take on this, more blunt, but he probably speaks for a lot of parents…