The State Of The Blogosphere According To Me

So I'm headed down to this newfangled bloggers summit thing in DC and pondering the state of the blogosphere, by which I mean the education blogs that I know about and/or read. 

Mostly, I think that things are going well. There are more education blogs out there all the time (DISD Blog, Will Okun for example), which makes things like doing a daily roundup fun and easy and means I'm learning and hearing new things all the time.  And there are more "grownups" blogging now (Sherman and Debbie and Diane and Roy Romer and others), which makes me feel less than I used to like I'm an overgrown 10th grader. More folks to beat up on the annoying and/or ridiculous, too.

Of course, it's great getting paid (not that much) to blog after years of doing it for fun (thanks, Scholastic and Catalyst!).  It's a nice bit of recognition.  I still haven't launched that third blog I keep talking about, the beginnings of my blogging empire, but it will happen someday soon, I still think.

I'm incredibly grateful that it's gotten a ton easier to blog than it used to be, what with RSS feeds and web-based blogging software and all the rest.  (Easier for readers, too -- you can get daily or weekly emails of this blog now, or get it on your cell phone.)  My latest toy is a wireless broadband card for my laptop, which means I don't have to search for open WiFi all the time anymore. If only there was a gizmo that would make me smarter, or nicer.

Most of all, I'd say that blogging has created a nice sense of collegiality for me even though I'm not in DC anymore (and even though sometimes the collegiality comes in the form of being called an asshole by one or another of the Klonsky brothers).  I've gotten to know a bunch of new people who care about education like I do, and have shared my ideas and read lots of interesting responses over the years.

Things I wish for from my own blogs and others':  More real news and investigative journalism from education blogs -- even if it's just a copy of a juicy letter the superintendent sent to her board.  Let's give the papers a real run for their (advertisers') money.  More candor and vividness, discussing first-hand experiences and doubts and changes of mind. Talk about your own educational experiences, or late-night wonderings about vouchers, or whatever.  I'll try and do the same. 

Blog Posts That Meet Today's Arbitrarily Early Deadline

I'm headed out to the train, but here are some tasty blog posts to tide you over:

Pelosi: Ironwoman/Magnificent Destructor
Joe Williams has a scary dream.

The Education Sector's Biased Survey
What teachers think, vs. what people want them to think, according to Ed Notes.

Another One Bites the Dust
TMAO has resigned, folks -- but he'll be at the Bloggers Summit in DC I think.

McCain, the NEA, and his Education Bench
What if teachers vote for McCain, asks Michele?

The May 12 Communique' Is Up!
"Let's Face It: Most People Don't Care About Education Policy."

Student hand cuffed over skimpy prom dress
If a school, teacher, or student do something dumb, Detention Slip will post about it.
In this case, we have two out of three.

The Layman's Guide to Reading First
Kevin DeRosa explains RF to us.  Can he make us care, too? Prolly not.

Charters More Popular Than NCLB, Says Pro-Charter Anti-NCLB Group

It'd be a lot more credible if it wasn't the folks at Fordham making the claim that NCLB is a lot less popular among big-city newspaper editorial pages than charter schools.  Fordham is notoriously pro-charter and anti-NCLB (well, since Mike turned in his NCLB pin). 

But it's still interesting to look at Fordham's handy-dandy chart of where the editorial pages fall out on the NCLB-charter school matrix, and of course to be reminded that public opinion against NCLB is only 43 percent.  (Take that, NCLB-haters.)

Link: Opinion Leaders or Laggards?.

 

Few Schools & Districts In NCLB Restructuring

Amazing to realize that so few schools and districts are in restructuring, given all the hullabaloo you hear and read:

School districts start to face sanctions under landmark law Associated Press
Nationwide, 411 school districts in 27 states now face intervention. California has 97 school districts that failed to meet their goals under the law for four years, more than twice as many failing districts as any other state so far. Kentucky has the next highest number facing sanctions, with 47.

No Child Left Behind Lacks Bite Wall Street Journal
About 1,300 schools out of 99,000 public schools were in restructuring during the 2006-2007 school year, the most recent tally. More than 400 schools have emerged from restructuring by demonstrating progress.

State eyes No Child compromise Florida Times-Union
Georgia education officials are hoping to win a spot in a pilot program that would allow the state to treat less harshly than others some school districts that fall short of federal standards.

Tuesday Morning Roundup

Immigration Raids Shake California Schools NPR
Raids by federal authorities on undocumented immigrants in Northern California panic parents and school officials as fears spread that students might be targeted. Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums and other big-city mayors are denouncing the raids.

ESOL Student Exodus Won't Yield Windfall, School Officials Say Washington Post
Prince William County's top elected official asserted last month that an exodus of immigrant families after the county's crackdown on illegal immigration is saving the school system millions of dollars because it has to educate fewer students who are learning English as a second language.

Locke High sends a message: No more disturbances LA Times
Conflict-resolution teams and tight security helped ease jitters at Locke High School on Monday, the first school day following the roving, half-hour-long melee last week that involved 600 students and required more than 100 police officers to defuse.

3 students suspended for sitting out Pledge of Allegiance Seattle Times
Three small-town eighth-graders in Minnesota were suspended by their principal for not standing Thursday morning for the Pledge of Allegiance...

Are College Degrees a Waste of Money? NPR
Author and career coach Marty Nemko argues that when kids are not adequately prepared for college, they are simply wasting their time and money on four years of college-level course work. He calls the bachelor's degree "America's most overrated product."

Stonesifer Out, Raikes In At Top Of Gates Foundation

More changes at the Gates Foundation:  Patty Stonesifer is out as foundation CEO, and Jeff Raikes -- another Microsoft Co. alum -- is in (Microsoft exec Jeff Raikes to run Gates Foundation, Gates Foundation Names New Chief).  More tidbits:  The foundation is up to 500 employees and has a $37B endowment.  Under the current org chart, education is under US programs.

Best Blog Posts Of The Day (So Far)

Education Spending and the Candidates Campaign K12
One of my beats here at Education Week is the federal budget. And this year, Congress has been unusually sluggish (even for Congress) at getting going on education spending bills.

McCain’s education team Shoofly
Were you wondering who’s advising the presumptive GOP presidential candidate on education? We were. Now we know. And a pretty distinguished, if slightly predictable, group it is.

What Will the Tough Liberals in the UFT Do? Ed Notes Online
With a UFT Delegate Assembly coming up this week, it will be interesting to watch how Randi plays the Obama/Clinton issue, if she does so at all - we don't see how she can ignore it.

Corporate Vouchers Victorious in Florida Education Policy Blog
Nevertheless, a growing number of legislators in Florida have seen the light at the bottom of their vortex. They have convinced themselves that they are not voting for vouchers--they are voting for scholarships.

Soft bigotry further hardens Liam Julian
We know that the best schools “sweat the small stuff”; they do not overlook untucked shirts, they do not permit poor posture, they do not deign to hold different students to different standards ... PLUS:  Social promotion exposed.

Virtual Morality Web Watch
Teacher-in-training Stacy Snyder brought suit against Millersville University, alleging that she was denied her teaching credential because of a picture of herself as a “drunken pirate” on her MySpace page.

An Unlikely Pair Finds Common Ground on NCLB The Hoff
You wouldn't expect Charles Murray and Richard Rothstein to agree on anything.

Meet Jake Teaching In The 408
Let's hope like hell, cuz Jake or someone like him will be in room D2 next year, teaching my kids. I resign on Monday.

The Ultimate Pragmatist -- Not Just On Education

                                 Barack Obama campaigning for the Illinois State Senate in 1996, a race he easily won.

Others will read it differently, but my take is that this weekend's long NYT piece on Barack Obama's political evolution (The Long Run: Pragmatic Politics, Forged on the South Side) echoes and deepens what I was trying to say in my little article about Obama's belated support for local school councils  in 1999 (Obama's lackluster record on education). The most vivid example is this quote, among several describing Obama's cautious, pragmatic, and centrist-moving political evolution:

“He has a pattern of forming relationships with various communities and as he takes his next step up, kind of distancing himself from them and then positioning himself as the bridge,” said Ali Abunimah, a Palestinian-American author and co-founder of the online publication Electronic Intifada, who became acquainted with Mr. Obama in Chicago.  

I'm not against Obama, or against political pragmatism.  I'm just against people thinking that Obama (or any politician) is something that he's not.  He's not the ultra-liberal reform-oriented community organizer that he once was.  And he's not particularly bold or pure in his legislative efforts. 

A Website Dedicated To Shuttered Schools

When I was a kid, I remember when Cooley High the movie came out and probably went and saw it.  (It was a comedy about a large Chicago high school located in Cabrini Green.)

Of course, as many of you know, there was a real Cooley High, and it and hundreds of other shuttered Illinois schools are detailed on a website.  You can read about it here:  Site ensures closed schools more than just memories Chicago Tribune.

I wonder if anyone else is out there tracking the fate of shuttered high schools?

[Cross-posted from D299.]

Monday Morning News

Hiring war in North Texas school districts Dallas Morning News
How does $50,000 a year for a newly minted teacher sound? A lack of qualified instructors in some critical subject areas has set off a hiring war in North Texas.

 School districts start to face sanctions MSNBC.com
At Las Palmitas Elementary School, nestled between rundown homes and fields of grapes, peppers and dates in Southern California, 99 percent of students live in poverty and fewer than 20 percent speak English fluently.

Police break up 600-student brawl AP
A fight that broke out at a troubled South Los Angeles high school escalated into a campus-wide brawl involving as many as 600 students before it was quelled by police in riot gear.

To Curb Truancy, Dallas Tries Electronic Monitoring Dallas Morning News
Instead of sending truant students to juvenile detention, school officials in East Dallas have begun an electronic monitoring program to improve attendance rates.

PBS Revives a Show That Shines a Light on Reading NYT
The 2009 version of “The Electric Company” is a weekly, more danceable version of its former daily self.

Week In Review (May 5-9)

Best Of The Week
RTI -- The Next "Reading First"?
Charter School Weak 2008: Still Separatist After All These Years
Frustrated By Teachers And Testing

Campaign 2008
Paige Vs. Spellings: A Different Black Man, A Different White Woman
Pandering To Voters: Gas Tax Vs. Ending NCLB

School Life
NYC Schools Ban Work-Related Blog Address
To Do Before Teaching: Announce Desire To Pose Nude

Teachers & Teaching
Middle School Students Eviscerate City Council Member Over Her Behavior
"A Complex And Peculiar Task" (Reading)

Foundation Follies
"Hurricane" Phillips Takes Gates Foundation By Storm
USC Creates Faculty Spot With Princeton Review $$

Media Watch
Another NYT Education Reporter To Leave
How Education Blogs "Outsource" Newspapers' Roles
Staff Changes At The PEN Newsblast

Best Of The Day

Charter Schools are Great -- But Not Why You Think Kevin Carey
Charter school laws opened a conduit for talent, energy, and philanthropic money directed toward public education, resources that previously had no way to break into a bureaucratized monopoly state school system. Even if that's all they did, that's way more than enough.

Great teachers on screen Joanne Jacobs
Who are the five greatest teachers in the movies? Ellen Kim makes her choices for Teacher Appreciation Week.

The New Teacher Project Ed Notes
Imagine if all ATR's were placed in jobs, jobs that would otherwise go to Teaching Fellows. Will that lead to TNTP having their own ATR's?

Chrter schools in The Economist Flypaper
Two articles about charter schools in this week’s Economist are online here (Chicago) and here (New York).

 

Staff Changes At The PEN Newsblast

Albert Lang, who has of late been putting out the PEN NewsBlast, is moving on from that post as of today.  Formerly of CommunicationWorks, where his clients included the Center on Education Policy, Lang is apparently going to the e-Luminate Group, where he's going to work on the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. Congrats, condolences to Lang and to PEN. 

One of the longest-running online education outlets, the NewsBlast has penetrated deeply into schools and classrooms.  Organizations and PR outfits fight hard to get into the Blast and are elated when they get in there.  No permanent replacement for Lang has been announced.

Here's Lang's last NewBlast, which I'm sure will soon be going for big bucks on eBay. Here's the post that announced his arrival (Lang In For Schaffer At PEN).  Here's a post from last June about the departure of Lang's predecessor (PEN NewsBlast Guru Rides Off Into The Sunset).

USC Creates Faculty Spot With Princeton Review $$

It's one thing for a big foundation or long-retired individual to endow a university chair, but it feels like another thing to have someone who's currently in the mix -- in this case Princeton review founder John Katzman -- to do the same at the USC school of education.  Or maybe this happens all the time (Gates, etc.) and I should just focus on the money and the leadership that comes with the new effort, which sounds sort of interesting if you're into that stuff.

More On Charter School Isolationism

Erin Dillon at The Quick and the Ed surprised me with her response to my screed against charter school separatists by agreeing -- in part -- with the notion that charter school folks often isolate themselves.  But it doesn't have to be that way, she says -- describing a recent conference in Chicago that  included district, charter, business, and  philanthropic stakeholders. 

That's progress, no doubt, but still doesn't include teachers or community leaders and is still  more of an outlier than a clear direction that the charter school movement is heading.

Previous Post:  Charter School Weak 2008: Still Separatist After All These Years

Frustrated By Teachers And Testing

Check out John Merrow's oped in the Wall Street Journal today (Student Tests – and Teacher Grades), in which he describes how public education exists in "an upside-down universe where student outcomes are not allowed to be connected to teaching."

He's frustrated, and so am I, though by slightly different things. To me, one of the most sharply frustrating things about teachers' resistance to being evaluated or paid at least in part based on how their students do is that teachers have no such compunctions when it comes to evaluating their own students -- and little tolerance for kids' excuses.  No time to study for the vocab quiz?  Tough luck.  Didn't remember your books over the weekend?  You'll remember next time.

Every day, every week, every month, classroom teachers give their kids quizzes and tests that form the basis of determining students' grades and in some cases even whether they will pass to the next grade level or not.  I'd be more sympathetic to teachers' concerns about performance-based pay and evaluation if teachers weren't doing just what they don't want done to them every day in millions of classrooms.

Big Stories Of The Day

Principal of School That Rhee's Children Attend Is Dismissed
Washington Post
Guzman's departure has stunned many Oyster-Adams parents who wonder why, in a city filled with under-performing public schools, Rhee would sack a principal who has presided for the past five years over one of its few success stories.

Where Clinton, Obama, and McCain Stand on Education
U.S. News & World Report
Clinton supports schoolwide performance-based pay. Obama supports pay based on individual teacher performance. McCain supports merit pay for individual teachers.

Teachers Found to Be of Two Minds on Reforms EdWeek
Most public school teachers are unequivocally ambivalent about unions and education reform, a recent survey says.

Mother Says 11-Year-Old Daughter Assaulted In School Stairwell WMAQ (Chicago)
School officials said Thursday there was an investigation into allegations that a sixth grade girl was sexually attacked in a South Side charter school.

The Uneven Playing Field New York Times Magazine
Everyone wants girls to have as many opportunities in sports as boys. But can we live with the greater rate of injuries they suffer?

To Do Before Teaching: Announce Desire To Pose Nude

No need to look for naked pictures of 24 year old Kathleen Ehrling, a Long Island woman who says she's switching from the entertainment industry to being a NYC public school teacher.  She declares her interest in being photographed naked and published in a New York magazine that is holding a naked picture contest (Poll  women).  Too bad she's not already in the classroom, since I'm sure her students would all vote for her.  But I'm not sure she's ever going to get hired after this.

UPDATE:  Ehrling emailed to say that she has withdrawn from the poll and had the magazine remove her picture.

Middle School Students Eviscerate City Council Member Over Her Behavior

Video from Wonkette showing middle schoolers blocking and parrying every evasion attempted by city councilwoman Conyers.: If only real journalists were so persistent and verbally agile. The council member is John Conyers' wife, who recently called the city council president "Shrek."

A "Check Plus" For These Blog Posts

Blame the Building Core Knowledge Blog
Edutopia, a George Lucas-funded education newsletter with a tendency to wander off into cloud cuckoo land, has a piece on its site about “buildings that teach” which claims the way a building is designed and used has a “profound impact” on the way students learn.

Good news for charter schools (and school reform in general) Mike Petrilli
No, I’m not referring to this survey from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, though there are some promising tidbits.

Klein Blames Idle Teachers for $4 Gas, Subprime Crisis eduwonkette
"Schools Chancellor Joel Klein said the teachers union - and policies that keep instructors from their classrooms - bear some of the blame for next school year's budget cuts."

Confusion over "universal" prekindergarten Early Stories
Ezra Klein, who blogs for the American Prospect, chides liberals for not getting behind universal prekindergarten.

Potential Growth Method Undergoes Scrutiny The Hoff
Statisticians and education researchers are starting to question the value-added model's accuracy and utility

How Education Blogs "Outsource" Newspapers' Roles

Here's a chart that the Dallas Morning News' Kent Fischer showed recently to describe how the content from a traditional newspaper article matches up to the content of a blog post and the comments from readers that accompany many posts. 

Essentially, Fischer is arguing that blogs replace news articles by "outsourcing" the anecdotes, opinions, and analysis that make up most of a newspaper story.  The result is just messier to read, unverified (to the extent that newspaper stories are verified these days), and in some cases uninformed (not that experts are always all that informed).

Fischer's blog is called the Dallas ISD Blog. 

Charter School Weak 2008: Still Separatist After All These Years

Perhaps the best news for charter school advocates this week isn't all the coverage they're getting, most of it positive, or the big conference they've been holding in DC.  It's Barack Obama's continued march towards the Democratic nomination.  He is staunchly pro-charter, despite pushback from teachers and voters who aren't so sure.

But all is not well in charter-land.  Research on charters' benefits continues to be weak or mixed (see a RAND report on Chicago charters here).  Charter advocates have been frustratingly slow to get involved in turnaround efforts, which are a big focus for district leaders and an increasingly big part of NCLB, and equally slow to focus on charter accountability (ie, closing the bad ones).  And, while complaining loudly about the need for a level financial playing field with district schools, charters in many places continue to ignore pre- and post-lottery admissions procedures that seem to give them advantages when it comes to students' academic, economic, and social backgrounds.

Most important, all but a small section of the charter community seems locked into a narrow-minded "let's open some new schools!" mentality, ignoring the larger K12 education world where the vast majority of children are -- and will be -- educated for the foreseeable future.   I'm not against charters, and districts that ignore and create hostile conditions for charters share a portion of the blaem, but it makes me sad -- and mad -- to see so much effort and money going into something that seems to remain so insular and separatist.

NYC Schools Ban Work-Related Blog Address

The NYC Department of Education has told Lisa Nielsen, the PD manager for ed tech, to stop putting her blog URL in her email address, even though her blog is about her work (Professional Blog URLs in NYC DOE Signature). As you'll see, Neilsen is pissed. It seems like every district has at least one idiotic-sounding mandate or ban, and now New York City has a new one.  (The cell phone ban is another.)

Big Stories Of The Day

Edge Found for Chicago's Charter High Schools EdWeek
A new first-of-its-kind analysis suggests that in Chicago, at least, charter school students are more likely to graduate from high school and enroll in college than similar students in regular public high schools. PLUS:   Study: College More Likely for Charter Students New York Sun

Experts Discuss Myths about Latino Kids NPR
Pedro Noguera, professor of education at New York University; and Jeffrey Passel, from the Pew Hispanic Center, discuss the rising number of Latino children and what it means for America.

Study Reveals What Kids Are Reading for School THE Journal
The less than great news is that their volume of reading peaks in second grade, and the level and volume of books that they're reading stagnates from about sixth grade onward, even dropping off in high school.

Why Day Care Kids Dont Play Outside NYT
Day care workers keep children inside if they show up in flip-flops rather than sneakers or if they don’t have a coat on a chilly day. Sometimes, the entire class is kept indoors if one child doesn’t have appropriate clothes for outdoor play.

Back In The Heartland

Here's what's going on in Chicago school reform circles lately:

More Charters For CPS -- Why Not? (58 comments)

Perfect Attendance Creeps Me Out (13) Comments

Obama Calls Principals On Inside Phone Lines (12) Comments

Real World, CTU -- An Update(41) Comments

How Long Should "Excessed" Teachers Have?  (3) Comments

Renaissance Schools Fund Meeting (Today)

Today's Best Blog Posts

North Carolina Election Footnote EIA
Lost in the national importance of the North Carolina Democratic primaries was the defeat of North Carolina Association of Educators President Eddie Davis in his bid to win the party's nomination for state superintendent of public instruction.

How Obama can move to the center Mike Petrilli
...He could go one step further and also talk about high-performing students who are being forgotten by our current education system and the need to help them achieve their potential too. What suburban independent doesn’t think that his or her own child is gifted?

Carnival of Education Joanne Jacobs
Will it be on the test? Yes! Bellringers has organized this week’s Carnival of Education as a standardized test.

Reading First Interim Report Doesn’t Pass the “So What? Test” edbizzbuzz
I can safely say that the study provides no support for Reading First as a federal funding program, but it doesn’t tell us anything about the efficacy of any one of the privately-developed educational programs purchased by schools with Reading First funds.

Girl Suspended for Bringing Rocks to School Detention Slip
After making the decision to suspend her, the principal called in an expert team of SWAT officials and geologists to clear the area of any other rocks that may have found their way onto school grounds. They then decided to cancel all science classes from the curriculum.

"Hurricane" Phillips Takes Gates Foundation By Storm

Not many figures in the world of education have colorful nicknames, but Gates Foundation's new education guru Vicki Phillips does.  Back in her former Portland school district, they called her "Hurricane" Phillips. 

No word yet whether she likes to be addressed that way in her current post, but in a new Q and A Phillips debunks the notion that the foundation is trying to take over the world and says she thinks she might be able to take EdSec Spellings in a powerful-women-of-education showdown on "Jeopardy." 

Check it out:  Meet the Gates Foundation’s Education Honcho.

Big Stories Of The Day

Poll Finds Public Still Unclear on Nature of Charter Schools EdWeek
What’s a charter school? A majority of adults still have little or no clue, a new poll suggests.

Teachers agree: Bad teachers with tenure too tough to fire AP
Think it's hard for schools to get bad teachers out of the classroom? Turns out teachers agree.

Failings of One Brooklyn High School May Threaten a Neighbor’s Success NYT (Sam Freedman)
Two Brooklyn high schools spent the past decade careering toward opposite destinies. The question now is whether the failure of one will destroy the success of the other.

Rhee's Need to Hurry Runs Into Parents' Fear of Change Washington Post
The colored letters on the classroom bulletin board at Stevens Elementary spelled out "Welcome Chancellor Rhee." On this humid evening late last month, however, she was beginning to wear it out.

Making Teacher Hiring Less Comfortable Wash. Post (Jay Mathews)
For those who still think helping children learn is everybody's top priority in our schools, let me cite a disturbing dispute over where to send several hundred teachers at 23 D.C. schools that are about to be closed for inadequate enrollment.

Make The Tough Decisions First

"It’s a terrible mistake to try to pick off the low-hanging fruit and have some successes right away and try to boost your popularity and then three-quarters of the way through your term you find that you’ve really got to face the tough issues and make the tough decisions."

New York City Mike Bloomberg, as reported in the NYT CityRoom blog.

Another NYT Education Reporter To Leave

K12 education reporter Diana Jean Schemo says she's taking the buyout and leaving the NYT.  She says her plans are to finish a book on the U.S. Air Force Academy and work on some magazine pieces. Schemo joins recent education departures including Karen Arenson (buyout) last week.  Based in DC, Schemo has covered education for the paper since 2000.  Here is a list of Schemo's clips.

UPDATE:  Schemo covered early childhood and higher ed as well as K12, and plans to do more writing for the Times and other outlets in the future, on a freelance basis.