Check out some edujobs down the page, some good ones. From BW: Julie Squire with more about D.C. charter school boards and their impact. Max Marchitello on why teachers should grab their wallets before trusting Wallet Hub’s data on teacher pensions.
The Department of Education released its long awaited teacher preparation regulations.
“It is, quite simply, ludicrous to propose evaluating teacher preparation programs based on the performance of the students taught by a program’s graduates.” – American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten on the teacher preparation regulations in a press release.
OK, that about covers the culture here and what you can expect…next battleground, the Higher Education Act.
Chad Aldeman still isn’t buying your scaremongering about a teacher shortage. Seems kind of obvious there is a political agenda behind the constant hysteria about teacher shortages (makes various accountability ideas, Vergara-style reforms, etc…a harder sell) but funders and the media seem to take the bait every time. So here we are.
Wallace is making a big bet on principal training. TNTP has a new batch of essays from Fishman winners. Fantastic examples what the profession has to offer.
The Washington Post editorial board didn’t have much that was nice to say about the NAACP’s proposed charter school policy:
…Instead of calling for limits, the NAACP should be pushing for new possibilities for students with unmet needs.
Cheering the call for a moratorium — and a similar resolution approved by the Movement for Black Lives — are the teachers unions that have waged a fierce battle against charters — and that have provided financial support for NAACP activities. It will be interesting to see if the NAACP acts in those interests or in the interests of the nearly 700,000 black families who send their children to public charter schools, and the tens of thousands more who are on waiting lists.
For many parents and students, a charter school is the only route to a superior education. In advocating a blanket moratorium on charters, the N.A.A.C.P. would fail to acknowledge what’s happening to children who need and deserve a way out of the broken schools to which they have been relegated.
New performance reports out from Washington D.C.’s charter school board. Important in a few ways including as an accountability model but also because there is a pronounced shift in the number of students severed by the top performing schools – that speaks to parent choices, information, and also accountability and improvement efforts.
New CEP report on teacher focus groups about Common Core. But Common Core is a sin. Well, this report doesn’t actually say that but argues the standards are at odds with Catholic values about life.
Human capital aspects of personalized learning in this webinar. RAND on coherent instructional support. Here’s a joint Aspen – CCSSO paper about how to drive equity in ESSA implementation (pdf).
Great story: Unsung heroes.
This election season is awful but here are some kids reflecting on it that might cheer you up.
Re: the new teacher preparation regulations: reading the legislation and regulations coming out of Washington, DC continually reinforces to me the desirability of simply ending the federal department of education, a position I did not hold five years ago; and if the next administration does not veer significantly from the direction taken by this one, I will really be calling for that department’s elimination, along with the vast majority of its staff paid to enforce such mind-numbing government, by 2019. ESSA (incidentally, the above link to the Aspen-CCSSO paper may be damaged, since I can’t open it) is already 449 pages long, forbidding almost anyone other than a paid staffer from reading the law; but that’s not enough, ED has to further exceed its authority over education, which is not among its enumerated powers and is therefore presumably covered by the Tenth Amendment, by dictating to states how academic performance is to be defined and used against teachers willing to take the risk of teaching some of the nation’s most at-risk, neglected children, so that the non-dischargeable debt they run up in graduate school teacher training has its likelihood of driving them into early bankruptcy (due to the inevitability that the random fluctuations to be statistically expected among a sample size as small as that of an elementary school classroom will result in bad results for a year or two, at least for some of them) further increased, thanks to the wisdom derived from the years of teaching experience of Barack Obama, Arne Duncan, and John King, which amounts to a grand total of three years, of which zero was spent teaching in a traditional American public school!