Five Best Blogs: What Obama Might Say About Education

But Will They Help Students? TIME:  Without a program to offer iPads at discounted rates to students, teachers and schools in reality most students will still be using the same old textbooks for years to come. 

Little Kids Are Homophobic Jerks, and Teachers Don't Know How to Stop Them Jezebel: A significant number of teachers know their school is a shitty environment for kids who don't conform to traditional notions of gender, but they're not doing anything about it. Some of them may not know how. 

Review of MAKING THE GRADES Mr Teachbad:  If I tweak my inter­pre­ta­tion of a rubric in the mid­dle of grad­ing a stack of papers, it’s with kids I talk to every day. As a teacher, if I cre­ate a hor­ri­ble rubric or make a hor­ri­ble deci­sion about a rubric, I could really only mar­gin­ally affect about 200 peo­ple at a time, at most.

Report: Miami district needs to improve teacher evaluations Miami Herald / Hechinger:  Walsh called it “indefensible” that only 10 teachers — 0.05 percent of the workforce — were fired... That compares to 10 out of 2,144 teachers in Springfield, Mass., and 280 out of about 29,000 in Los Angeles, which used to have a lower rate.

Obama Should Go Big and Bold for State of Union Jonathan Alter: He wants to fund early childhood education, hold schools and teachers accountable for performance, act to reduce dropout rates, and expand Pell Grants for college.