Middle Management For America?

Education Pioneers is an outstanding organization attracting talent into education, growing promising professionals, and helping them get established in the field. I’m on the board for the DC-area program but EP operates in multiple sites around the country including New York, Houston, Chicago, Boston, LA, and the Bay Area and places people in operational as well as policy roles.

On December 6th Education Pioneers is hosting an event in Washington featuring Katherine Bradley, Victor Reinoso, Raj Vinnakota, and Charlie Barone to discuss the issue of recruiting, training, and supporting a new generation of education leaders.    I’ll moderate the discussion, which will be held at the Advisory Board Company and followed by a reception.

RSVP is required, you can do so via this link. Also, as the year wraps-up if you’re thinking about charitable contributions please consider EP, especially the D.C. program! This is the kind of low-flash but high-impact work that will ultimately turn the ship and as with all social change work, funding is a key element.

2 Replies to “Middle Management For America?”

  1. Education Reform in Indiana

    Indiana spent $8.5 billion on elementary and secondary education last year. That’s more than half the state’s annual budget.

    Daniels and Bennett don’t think students and parents got enough for their money.

    At a recent speech in front of the Indiana Fiscal Policy Institute, Bennett put up a PowerPoint presentation with a slide headlined “Indiana’s Education Mess.”

    The “mess,” as detailed on the slide, was a litany of failures. Among them: 23,000 third-graders who can’t read at grade level; 25,000 drop-outs every year; and half the state’s schools that failed to meet federal improvement standards in English or math.

    Also on his “mess” list was the de-ghoster, along with a system that bases teacher pay and tenure on seniority rather than performance.

    To clean up the “mess” — which he compared to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico — there needs to be, he said, “a structural change in the way we fund education.”

    “We do not need any more money in this system. We need courage to change it,” Bennett said. “Money is cheap. Courage is scarce.”…Now, Daniels and Bennett want lawmakers to provide state-funded grants to students who are attending schools deemed to be failing, for use at the school of their choice, including private and parochial schools. As Bennett describes it: “For years, we’ve been funding school corporations. Now, it’s time to fund the education of students.”…
    How the proposed reforms play out in the next legislative session, which begins in January, remains to be seen. Even with the legislature controlled by Republicans, it doesn’t mean Daniels will get his way.

    “Republicans aren’t in lockstep with the governor,” said political analyst Ed Feigenbaum, editor of Indiana Legislative Insight.

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