Five Best Blogs: Help Stamp Out Charter Attrition Blindness

Chicago union president on reform ads, robocalls: “There are billionaires funding them. We can’t compete...” ow.ly/bx49Y 

Promise of ‘flipped classroom’ may elude poorer school districts | McClatchy ow.ly/bxgwW 

Horace Mann Sexual Abuse History Coming Under Alumni, Prosecutor Scrutiny - The Atlantic Wire http://ow.ly/bx0Zw

Eight out of 60 kids who started together in K graduated from a Stockton Aspire school last weekend, acc to a press release sent to me. http://ow.ly/bxhN2

Are these Gates-funded "galvanic" bracelets like those magnetized necklaces pro baseball players all seem to wear? http://ow.ly/bx1aY

Fordham's @michaelpetrilli gets a shout out from our fave news source, the Atlantic Wire, re gentrification http://ow.ly/bx129 

Will Congress compound its error on ‘highly qualified’ teachers? ow.ly/bwZv4

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Comments

[Bruce]

TFA has morphed from an organization that once served to relieve genuine shortages in the inner city and the countryside into one that is now trying to permanently legislate a lowering of teacher preparation standards across the country and in other countries as well, and in particular targets schools where students are most in need of high quality teaching. While the organization is wonderful at recruiting talented young people, and is to be supported when the alternative (as it usually was at Locke) is a long-term sub, it is harmful when it is displacing student teachers who have paid for two-year training programmes from their own pockets, as it has been trying to do in the state of Washington. These young teachers are by no stretch of the imagination "highly qualified".

[Sarah]

Congress’s definition of “highly-qualified” is both non-existent and intensely amusing. Part of the problem with education in general and the management of it is that we as a nation attempt to assign a numerical rating to teaching ability, when it’s a rather variable thing. What works for one student won’t for another, but the government seems preoccupied with test scores more than anything else.