Month: February 2010

Here’s a set of short documentaries about various people doing interesting things to help modernize the education space.

Good report on pensions (pdf)…well good in terms of quality, not so much the findings from Pew.

On Monday Achieve is releasing a new report on where the nation is on college and career ready standards…sort of a hot issue just now…

Wow, with Republicans putting forward this much detail and specificity on ESEA reauthorization all the naysayers are clearly wrong, it’s as good as done…

In Los Angeles the charter wave has hit a seemingly immovable  object:  Local teachers’ union driven politics.

Meanwhile, per the behind the scenes pushing and shoving on TFA funding, Congress seems to have wised-up to the timeline/logistics problem.  That’s going to be a potent argument given the number of states and cities where TFA operates now and that would be adversely affected if this shift is not made carefully.

I’m still working my way through Diane Ravitch’s new book but Kahlenberg is apparently already finished.   He likes it!  No specific word on what Shanker thought of it…

This op-ed by Joel Klein about expanding charters in New York City seems pretty straightforward and hard to argue with.  And he forthrightly notes that charters are not a silver bullet.   Still, I’m sure there must be some reason (not apparent to mere plebeians, of course) why this is all wrong.   That’s because if Joel wrote an op-ed saying today was Thursday I’d be getting emails about how wrong he is and how saying it’s Thursday is  just further evidence that he’s deranged and hates children…

This Rhode Island high school situation sure seems like a bogus trend story.   Turnarounds may be a trend but really dramatic moves like this seem pretty anomalous.  That whale in Florida killing people seems like a more common trend than schools firing all the teachers en masse.  

But in Florida we may be seeing a real trend around expanded choice.   In places like Florida (Milwaukee is another example) the lines are now so blurry between public and private as to make those distinctions sort of meaningless.   It doesn’t stop the advocates from slinging those terms around but to really understand what’s starting to happen in these places (and ultimately its effects and impact) we’re going to need some new verbiage.

Update:  Liam Goldrick sees a trend, too. We’ll see…perhaps the federal dollars will provide some cover here but traditionally this is one of those chasms in education we periodically gaze into and then back away.  So count me among the skeptical.  There is an enormous difference between a lot of teachers being laid off for cost reasons in a difficult fiscal climate and a lot of teachers being let go (meaning actually separated from the district, not moved into other roles, other schools, put into a paid absent reserve status, or any of the rest of the games here) for cause.

If you didn’t get enough of this morning’s three-ring circus about charter schools at the House Ed and Labor Commitee you can watch it all over again here.

CNN hosts a lively debate about this Rhode Island high school situation in Central Falls.  Backstory via this link.

Update:  NYT on the story.

Rick Hess makes an interesting point about influence and deference with regard to teachers.  But isn’t there a more basic problem with this common rhetorical argument that no one listens to teachers:  Their interest groups are the most powerful in the education space and among the most powerful in public affairs nationally as measured by a variety of indicators of involvement in partisan and governmental politics.   It’s easy to say but actually hard to argue with a straight face that teachers as an organized group don’t have influence on policy or policymakers or aren’t heard.

If there is a disconnect between what teachers think and the positions of their unions and associations, then that’s a different issue.