Education News, Analysis, and Commentary
by guestblogger Andy Smarick What’s crackin’, people. It’s been too long. I’m Smarick. I used to be an inveterate blogger and tweeter. I disappeared for a couple years, but now I’m back. Kind of like Bobby Ewing or Kristin Cavallari. To paraphrase Hitch, Rotherham is gone on a week’s vacation, and he left the keys …
Continue reading “A Triumphant Return and Ignominious Firing in 500 Words”
A reader emails: “I keep checking eduwonk to get your take on the LA dustup (that I think marks a real turning point in teacher accountability), but all I see is a dead fish!” Indeed. Just getting back. Big thanks to Jim Ryan, Sarah Usdin & Neerav Kingsland, Becca Bracey, Hae-Sin Thomas, Tim Daly, Victor …
I’m going to take a blogging break for the next two weeks. But some good things lined up in the interim. Next week a bunch of great folks are going to drop by to guestblog, including fly fishing pinup idol Paul Herdman, D.C. Deputy Mayor Victor Reinoso, the Piscalnator, Sarah Usdin from New Schools for …
Even leaving aside the sleazy innuendo about researcher Jane Hannaway* (stay classy NEA!) this National Education Association email (below), from the organization’s executive director, is startling in its tendentiousness (in case you were wondering why there is so much misunderstanding about the research on Teach For America, here’s why…). Other methodologically strong studies confirm what Hannaway found, for instance the Mathematica evaluation of …
Continue reading “When Acronyms Fight The Data Get Trampled: NEA V. TFA & TNTP”
United States Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has not surprisingly said that he’s open to renaming the “No Child Left Behind Act” something else. Before President Bush, for instance, the Clinton version of the law was called the “Improving America’s Schools Act.” The underlying law is the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, it’s not going …
Another effort to move past gotcha: Steve Clemons asks a serious question that someone should put to Alaska Governor Sara Palin. And I still want to know about Pebble Mine.
Thanks to Eduwonk for allowing us to kick-off the first week of his guestblogging extravaganza. I hope Andy catches lots of fish, rewrites the U.S. Constitution or whatever it is he does on vacation. I am happy to see that he has not, in recent times, referred to his SO as the eduwife—that always creeped …
USAT’s Richard Whitmire has a new blog on education issues affecting boys, check it out. He needs a better picture, but otherwise it’s great stuff.
NYT business columnist James Flanigan looks at some for-profit education efforts to create tech tools for teachers and schools. Maybe I’m not enough of a tech head, but I still think that technology offers more leverage as a tool for data and information management than it does directly in the classroom, but we’ll see… One …