Two Trends

Two trends worth watching, both helpfully reported by the NY Times. In Colorado, the TABOR movement took a big hit. With a lot of states running structural deficits (pdf) of varying degrees of severity, this is politically and substantively important for schools.

A little more below the radar, The Times’ Michael Janofsky reports on SMU’s new Ed School and the not so hidden hand of the Bushies in it. Keep an eye on this issue…there are various proposals to greenfield new ed schools or take existing ones and infuse more rigor and traditional content (for instance Core Knowledge) floating around and some serious money interested in seeing some changes in preparation. It’s an essential issue to address though not an easy one as it involves all of the greatest hits of why educational change is hard: serious regulatory capture, vested interests, inertia, and ideology…