Forget your growth models and primary politics. Scott Elliott goes where the real action is this week with his post Spears prompts national sex talk.
The Education PR blog goes with another slice of contemporania: Dear admissions officer: Please click here. Clean up those MySpace profiles before submitting college apps, folks.
How can a school be dangerous and successful, asks Joanne Jacobs: Dangerous ‘A’ school. Not even NCLB has been able to pull that one off, far as I know.
Low performing schools are all staying in a new performance pay program in NYC, notes InsideSchools.org: Moving into phase two. What's with that? Maybe they think they're likely to get paid better at those schools.
Should there be more, or less, standardized testing, questions TQATE:The Testing Quandary.
You don't have to give a hoot about the DC public school system to find today's Washington Post education story (A $2.9 Million Payout, With a Few Shortcuts) worthwhile reading.
Full of juicy details, it describes how a former DC principal started and grew a professional development program that, for all its potential effectiveness, seems to have lacked any real oversight or structure.
The district gave out big money without a contract, the approved program didn't mesh with other district efforts, the program founders fought internally and one ended up dropping a dime on the founder, and -- my favorite part -- current and former district officials are denying that approval signatures found on various documents are actually theirs.
Final 2008 budget a mixed bag for schools
eSchool News The budget contains $59.4 billion in
funding for the U.S. Department of Education (ED), though an
across-the-board recision of 1.75 percent will leave actual ED spending
at $58.4 billion.
In Many Districts, the Gifted Are Left Behind Maryland Online Statistically, 20 percent of U.S. school dropouts test in the gifted
range, said Jill Adrian, director of family services at the Davidson
Institute for Talent Development, a nonprofit founded by
philanthropists Bob and Jan Davidson out of a concern that the nation's
most gifted and talented children largely are neglected and underserved.
Five Ways Out of the Homework Trap Washington Post Tom
Loveless, senior fellow and director of the Brown Center on Education
Policy at the Brookings Institution, has been making trouble again.
Looking for a way to reach a kid who's really struggling, or needing some inspiration yourself? Maybe this new book from The Wire's little assassin, Felicia "Snoop" Pearson, will do the trick. Discovered at a Baltimore nightclub by the actor who plays Omar Little on the show (read a long Washington Post profile from 2006 here), Snoop plays a menacing but affable killer whose deadpan demeanor and mumbled lines have made her a fan favorite. In real life, Pearson was a crack baby who was raised in the foster care system and had already gone to jail by the time she was 15 (for second-degree murder). Now she's been on The Wire for two years and has this new memoir out.
Yesterday's story in the Washington Post (A Reading Program's Powerful Patron) isn't just about the DC Public Schools or Voyager Expanded Learning or the Senator from Louisiana who helped win 14 earmarks worth over $8 million for the program over the past five years.
It's about how education politics really work, for better or worse. Specifically, how lawmakers and administrators help make decisions that affect what materials and curricula are used in classrooms outside of program channels. Once confined to higher ed, earmarking like this happens more and more in K12. And not just in DC.
In this case, as the Post story outlines, those involved include a Republican businessman (Randy Best), a former House approps chairman (Bob Livinston), and a Democratic senator on the right committee (Mary Landrieu).
Everyone's got a holiday campaign ad this year, and Hillary Clinton's includes her wrapping Christmas gifts and putting labels on them. The gift cards read "bring the troops home, middle class tax cuts," and things of that nature:
The punchline comes when a momentarily-frustrated Clinton says, "Where did I put universal Pre-K?" Panic sets in at the thought of another year going on without UPK. But then, Senator Clinton remembers where that pesky gift has gone. "Oh, there it is."
In response to angry emails from Whitney Tilson and others, the Obama campaign announced today that Stanford professor Linda Darling Hammond was resigning from his advisory committee. Just joking. In the absence of such an announcement, Tilson remains upset about Obama's appointment of Linda Darling-Hammond as an education adviser, though it's slowly sinking in that Obama is probably doing what he needs to do to win the primary (More comments on Linda Darling-Hammond and Obama). And I still think this is an unwise over-reaction on his part -- both the extreme disappointment and going public about it. But at least he's slightly more focused on Obama's decision rather than publicly slamming someone professionally than he was last week.
BoardBuzz starts us off with the heart-warming school story of the year: Talk about giving a gift. The AFT Blog gives some much-deserved love to The Fritwire, which is an
invaluable way to track what's going on on the Hill and in DC: Get Wired -- Fritzwired, That Is.
Education groups in DC that fought for more funding for key programs have come away pretty disheartened after the long appropriations process leading to a disappointing omnibus.
From the NEA: "A few key programs have been cut further than what was listed in the table in the omnibus bill (see below). The differences appear to be related to the application of the across-the-board rescission (excluding Pell Grants). NCLB Act programs, in general, and ESEA Title I, specifically, are now below the President’s original budget request. Pending any other update from the Department, these are the numbers we should be using, such as they are." (See details below.)
From CEF: "Overall, the FY08 omnibus bill provides less than inflation level funding for IDEA, Impact Aid and Improving Teacher Quality State Grants. The bill substantially cuts vital programs such as Even Start, Teacher Quality Enhancement, and Comprehensive School Reform and eliminates Title V Innovative Education. Finally, the bill also cuts a majority of the student financial aid programs and most other education programs by 1.7% - a total of $501 million. Earlier in the week, Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee David Obey (D-WI) was quoted in CQ Today as saying the bill is wholly inadequate to meet the needs of the country here at home." (More details below.)
There's really not that much going on when it comes to mainstream news, besides the teaching scholarships (previous post):
Reading Program's Powerful PatronWashington Post Earmark guided into law by Sen. Mary Landrieu illustrates the unusual role that Congress has played in shaping the District's troubled school system.
NCLB in waiting Washington Times Yesterday, across the United States, more than 7,000 students dropped out of school. And the same number will drop out tomorrow, and the next day.
Guns N' Roses karaoke scares teacher MSNBC A school custodian's impromptu after-hours karaoke performance prompted a police response when a teacher thought she was being threatened over the loudspeaker.
The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation launched a $17 million effort yesterday to improve teacher education and steer highly qualified teachers to high-poverty and struggling schools.
Curious about why teenagers over-react to some things, and under-react to others? Wonder why they're always tired and seem to have to be told things over and over?
It's not that they're just the stereotypically lazy drama queens, according to a Frontline documentary that aired on PBS this week. (Check it out here.)
And schools, in particular, aren't particularly well set up to deal with teenagers' developing brains and needs for sleep (during which new memories and skills are apparently practiced and consolidated).
I never got a response from the normally-responsive Rick Hess about just what the newly-established "Future of American Education Project" at AEI (a right-leaning think tank) is supposed to do that isn't already being done.
This possibly means that the question was ridiculous, or embarassing, or that the email never got through.
What I do know is that the new initiative is supposed to "discover and promote original empirical work on K-12 school reform" and was kicked off last week with the first meeting of a working group consisting of "twenty leading reform-minded U.S. researchers and educators" many of whose work is already well known (see list below).
Teacher JM Holland has a list of Great Blogs Around the Country -- mostly teacher-written blogs, some of which were new to me.
Speaking of teacher blogs, Will Okun has another intimate look at his students and their lives (“Afternoons with Worsom”).
Back to politics, Gerry Bracey for one doesn't much like the fear-mongering and test-based hype coming from EDINO8 (The Inmates Who Want to Run the Asylum).
TQATE digs into last week's ETS report and finds that not ALL teachers are better academically than their predecessors (A More Selective Pool of Teachers).
In These Times has a post on the ASVAB test that some schoolkids still have to take (The Militarys Stealth Test).
A week or so ago, the Center On Education Policy issued a report about how restructuring efforts in Baltimore weren't doing much good, according to the Baltimore Sun: Fixing schools usually fails. This week, the Brookings Institute (or was it the Urban?) issues a report pointing to the relative success of some of these efforts, which is picked up in today's USA Today: Baltimore's 'innovation schools' yield higher test scores. What to think?
Whittle Aims to Open Private Schools EdWeek Edison
Schools Inc. founder Christopher Whittle hopes to convert a 35-acre
property in suburban Washington into a private school to help
jump-start his latest venture: a globe-spanning network of private
schools.
You gotta give credit to these education reporters from the Columbus Post-Dispatch for putting their names and faces out there for everyone to see (The E-Team). This is their group blog, one of what is still just a handful of newspaper-published education blogs. Other papers are thinking of it, though right now it seems like many of the reporters who want to blog are being told not to and the folks who don't want to blog are being told to get on with it. By which I'm not saying that the reporters here didn't want to blog.
Here's the video of the new ad that EDINO8 just released, which features normal-looking teenagers individually speaking directly to the camera about the bad things that will happen to them (and, as a result, to the rest of us):
What do you think? Powerful? Compelling enough to create some real action?
Yesterday's NPR segment on Locke High School has lots of nice touches (an "Earth Wind and Fire" opening) and insightful observations about the big money ($20 million) involved in the handover and the fact that many Locke teachers aren't going to be hired or stay around to see what the new school is going to look like (Parents Force Charter Takeover of L.A. High School). Ditto for the related segment focusing on Steve Barr, founder of Green Dot (Private Takeover of L.A. Schools Gets Results - who knew he was an actor and author, too?
What both segments miss out saying, however, is just how quickly the Mayor and LAUSD have moved to woo other struggling schools and ensure that there aren't m/any more Locke High School rebellions in the near future costing them even more money and further embarrassment. So far, a handful of LAUSD schools have signed on, including Green Dot-candidate Santee High School. For more on this development: Victory for reform (LA Daily News).
UPDATE: The LA Times has all the details and in-fighting about this, including competition between the mayor's initiative and another plan put forth by the head of LAUSD.
Hard-hitting new ads from EDINO8 are the subject of Michele McNeil's latest post (I Will Steal Your Car). Reminds me of the ADHD "hostage" ads I posted about a couple of days ago that say "We have your son..."
Erin Dillon at TQATE has some questions about the high school reform strategy outlined on Larry Ambramson's NPR segment ("School Choice on Steroids"). My question is whose idea at NPR was it to send Ambramson out on this high school reform goose chase?
Not sick of NCLB news yet? The Hoff has a roundup (NCLB Debate Doesn't Take a Holiday). Some stuff you might not have seen. TeacherKen weighs in on the Rothstein piece in American Prospect over at Daily Kos.
What Republican education guru is advising the same campaign that her husband is working on? What communications guy announced his departure from an education advocacy group just over a month after arriving? Click here to see what's new on the Campaign 08 page for "Who's Who In Education?" Click here to see what's new on the Communications page. As always, feel free to update, correct, or add any information you want -- job departures, staff shakeups, power couples, etc.
While many of us mocked him for it at the time, Jonathan Kozol's partial fast in protest against NCLB got him and the issue a ton of press coverage -- smart like a fox! -- and may even have contributed to a turnaround of sorts by Sen. Ted Kennedy on NCLB. The two met about 10 days ago, and the PURE blog links to the letter Kozol wrote about the encounter. Of course, Kennedy like Miller has been long been girding himself for a politically necessary shift on NCLB, though not as publicly as Miller (who now practically flays the law he helped write). EdWeek's David Hoff reports that Kennedy met with the teachers unions about NCLB recently, and that Miller's folks have taken down the old discussion drafts from September.
According to a gossip blog that just happened to appear on my screen, Denise Martin from Survivor is not actually a lunch lady -- she's a custodian -- and she wasn't punished for appearing on the show like she said. Her sob story helped earn her $50K, but will it cost her her job ? The district released a press release and they sound pretty pissed (Survivor’s Denise Martin is a Liar). No, that's not the headline of the press release.
PS: Sorry to everyone who was mad at me for revealing the series finale results yesterday. I should have run a spoiler alert.
While no respectable journalist (or blogger) would admit to being manipulated by advocates into running a story, an eagle-eyed reader pointed out that yesterday both the NY Times and the Post just happened to run stories about Mike Huckabee and home schoolers (Huckabee Draws Support of Home-School Families, Home-School Ties Aided Huckabee's Iowa Rise). I wonder how that happened.
UPDATE: Even better, one of the reporters who wrote the Post story is Perry Bacon, Jr., the young reporter whose front-page article on rumors surrounding Barack Obama caused tremendous controversy last week.
Governors Cite Education Records EdWeek The
three current presidential hopefuls with experience as state governors
have records on education that offer voters an unusually detailed
preview of what the nation’s schools might expect if any of the three
should win the White House next year.
Democrats Trim Some Education Increases In Latest Budget Bill EdWeek Federal
education spending would increase by 3.2 percent in fiscal 2008 under a
bill that Democrats in Congress hope to pass by the end of the week,
favoring Democratic priorities over President Bush’s.
Here's some video that's being passed around of Edwards blasting standardized (fill in the bubble) tests, exclusion of teachers from the reform process, and punishing low-performing schools:
This is from December 1 in IA, if YouTube is to be believed. In it, Edwards also says that NCLB is a Bush effort to privatize public schools.
I'll leave it to others to comment on this recent article on IQ and race, written by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker (None of the Above).
It's not that long, by New Yorker standards. The focus seems to be on what's learned from mixed-race and adopted children. Writes Gladwell:
"If I.Q. is innate, it shouldn’t make a difference whether it’s
a mixed-race child’s mother or father who is black. But it does... The lesson to be drawn from black and white
differences was the same as the lesson from the Netherlands years ago:
I.Q. measures not just the quality of a person’s mind but the quality
of the world that person lives in."
On Wednesday, former Teachers College president Arthur Levine is going to announce some sort of new fellowship program to promote better teaching, long a concern of his. Levine is now at the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and has issued a series of reports critical of ed school programs in recent years. The state effort will start off in Indiana, and the national program will include four nationally known ed schools.
They're revamping the site, as you may be able to tell -- going to a two-column format and inserting ads along the top and down the side. There's the same squinty picture that many of you seem to like much more than the old EdWeek one. If you're looking to email me, get the RSS feed, etc., that stuff is all in the right margin down towards the bottom -- just scroll down to find it:
The posts are now black, not pale gray, which is I think better. Still to come: a search box, a larger default font size. Let me know if you have any problems or want to see any changes. I'll do what I can do.
Wow. A Napa, California school district has just settled a suit filed against its school uniform policy that was initiated by a student who wore Tigger socks to middle school as an act of protest. The district settled for over $90,000 instead of going to trial. Could other school uniform policies --popular since Bill Clinton fell in love with them in the mid 1990s -- come under legal attack as a result of this decision? I have no idea. It surprises me that this hasn't happened before. You know, the whole Free Speech vs. Minors and Schools thing. Thanks to my ghost contributor for the link.
The most interesting aspects of this story on the Giuliani education team (Champions of Choice) from Friday's New York Sun are first that it signals Giuliani's effort to move to the right on education -- much like he's done on immigration and other issues since becoming a candidate. (Now he's for vouchers among other things, and at least one education guru has left his camp in response.)
At the same time, the piece shows how Giuliani is trying to counter claims that he didn't do much on education as mayor. (It's not for lack of trying. I remember from my brief days as an aide to NYC schools chancellor Ramon Cortines how hard Giuliani was criticizing the school system and pushing for direct control. He was only slightly better behaved when Rudy Crew came in.)
People keep asking me what's happened to Eduwonk, and of course I have no real idea. But it seems clear that Andywonk doesn't want to comment much on the chances of the various Democratic presidential candidates. (You won't find much of anything about Clinton, Obama, or Edwards during the past month, for example.)
Of course, this makes total sense. For all of the "inside" scoop it's provided, Eduwonk has always been careful to avoid offending funders and allies. Now, the blog is avoiding ruffled feathers among the
Democratic candidates to whom Andy likely wants to have access and/or employment in the future. It must be killing him.
What we really need now is an anonymous education blogger or commenter from inside one of the campaigns or the DNC. Wouldn't that be fun?
Schools are finally figuring out how to make schedules fit kids, not adults, according to Joanne Jacobs (Flex-time high schools). She's also got a post about these ADHD ads (see picture) that are
freaking everyone out.
Speaking of freaking out, Insideschools tells us about how fun it's going to be when New York
releases its new growth model rating system to go along with NYC's new
grading system (Not happy with one school grade? Have two!).
The Biz Of Knowledge tells us
How to Keep Teachers from Enjoying the Holidays. Steal their computers. D-Ed Reckoning has an interesting discussion going on about learning and research, complete with a response from one of his victims: Downes responds.
No one watches Survivor anymore -- I know. But how often does a self-described "lunch lady" from Revere, Massachusetts, make it to the finals? Not that often. A karate teacher on the side, Denise made it to the final four, which is more than most of us can say.
No Child Left Behind? Say It in Spanish NYT
With the influx of Hispanic stud
ents sharply rising, suburban schools are challenged to provide them with the tools to succeed.
Mainstreaming to Cut Costs Wall St. Journal
While studies show that mainstreaming can be beneficial for many
students, critics say cash-hungry school districts are pushing the
practice too hard, forcing many children into classes that can't meet
their needs.
Calls Grow for a Broader Yardstick for School Washington Post For
nearly six years, the federal government has defined school success
mainly by how many students pass state reading and math tests. But a
growing number of educators and lawmakers are pushing to give more
weight to graduation rates, achievement in science and history and even
physical education.
I'm a week late in posting this mean but perhaps funny column about Senator Clinton's overly wonky and smartypants speech to the New Hampshire NEA, which had just endorsed.
Comparing laundry list of a speech and show-off speaking style to that of failed Democratic wonks of the past -- Al Gore, John Kerry, and Michael Dukakis, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank mocks Clinton's attempts at sounding all educational (Teaching the Teachers).
His take angered several commenters (see at the bottom) who felt Milbank was being a jerk. Milbank's critics may be right, but still it IS pretty funny when politicians try to talk about thinks like auditory and kinesthetic learning styles, cohorts and homogenized learning.
Over at Edweek.org, The Hoff notes that Bush Sees Bipartisan Commitment to NCLB.
