Education News, Analysis, and Commentary
Last September Sara Mead, Rachael Brown, and I published – via an AEI human capital project – a paper on what we saw as problems with the push to reform broken teacher evaluation systems (pdf). The paper, “The Hangover” sparked a healthy discussion in policy circles about what was working, not working, and where there …
Continue reading “The Hangover & Charters (And All Schools)”
First big thanks to the team at Bellwether for their great blogging at the top of the month and to the Obama and Romney campaigns for debating ed policy here last week. You can read all that below. Going forward you can find Bellwether’s Andy Smarick over at Fordham’s Flypaper blog and BW’s Chad Aldeman …
Longtime readers will recall the controversy over whether the United Federation of Teachers in New York should be allowed to have a few of New York’s coveted charters to run schools. I thought they should and still think that having teachers’ unions run charter schools is a good idea. Skeptics pointed to the poor record …
More on the rough sailing at the UFT’s charter school in New York City. Some recent background here. Quick takes: A lot of attention on this school, but it’s important to disentangle problems that wouldn’t ever see the light of day in a newspaper at any other school from genuinely newsworthy items. I think reporter …
Opinions here are my own and not necessarily those of the United Federation of Teachers, where I serve as President. In 1988, Al Shanker, the late president of the American Federation of Teachers, launched the country’s charter school movement. While there were many founding contributors to this school reform that now educates over 1 million …
Continue reading “Chartering Educational Excellence: Why Teachers Matter Most”
In NYC Klein announces an ambitious new charter school initiative reports the NYT’s Herseznhorn. Interesting (lame?) comment from the UFT in the last graf, can’t Klein deal with the test issue and open new schools? Hopefully, just an editing glitch, there must be more context than that, no? Wait! These guys don’t think so…Anyway key …
Continue reading “Department Of Walking And Chewing Gum…And Department of Charters…”
New York Post columnist and libertarian blogger Ryan Sager has an interesting take on one way to pick away at the United Federation of Teachers contract. See here. The idea, which has been bandied about somewhat in Gotham, involves using the precedent set in the city’s Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit to initiate a similar …
NY Post still fired-up…Eduwonk thought the last time was do or die…hard to keep track of all these do or die moments in charter authorizing in New York…Update: SOB lays on the silent treatment! Update II: NYT reports forward movement.
NY Post ed board weighs in on the plight of the UFT Two saying no soup schools for you! They make the point on the cap issue, which is very important, and also raise the conversion issue. The UFT could convert schools to charter status but then you don’t get control over staff as with …
SUNY’s Board of Trustees has announced a meeting on Thursday, 6/9. Only agenda item…the proposed UFT charter school. Smart money says approval coming.