Head Start Lessons, Grade Level Debate, Discipline Debate, New Mexico Debate, Janus Fallout, More!

Ashley LiBetti on Elizabeth Warren and Head Start – and Head Start lessons. The lessons are drawn from this new Bellwether analysis of leading Head Start programs and the lessons they offer. Well worth your time.

Janus fallout.

At Bellwether we do some work with New Classrooms Teach to One and we also have a lot of concerns about the equity implications of walking back the emphasis on grade level standards but this is an important issue to discuss because it’s not straightforward and there are real tradeoffs. It’s possible they are canaries. Michael Horn on all that in Forbes. 

Just in time for the primaries! In case you were worried the discipline debate was going to quiet down, Max Eden has a book coming this summer with the father one of the students killed in Parkland. Will make a splash and presumably it’s going to advance this story and this debate, which is really the crux of the differing approaches:

[Broward School Sup’t] Runcie disputes that the discipline matrix is too soft on kids.

“In many ways, it’s tougher because it calls for mandatory types of interventions,” he said. For example, it used to be that a student suspended for vandalism would be sitting at home or wandering the streets, he said. Now they are assigned to an intense program through Promise to help correct their behavior

But Fitzgerald, the former Sunrise Middle school teacher, thinks discipline has become lax.

“A lot of principals are afraid,” she said. “You don’t report theft because reporting it makes your school look dangerous.

“There are a lot of things going on in the school that are being overlooked. Only when things are obvious and egregious will they arrest the child.”

ED v. New Mexico?

Keeping kids safe seems like a reasonable minimal standard for schools everyone should be able to agree on.

Safe bet you won’t see The Producers in Sioux Falls next year.

More girls playing ice hockey.

Just a Girl.