AM News: Insert Headline Here

Romney: Students Should 'Go to the School of Their Choice' EducationNation: In an exclusive interview with NBC's Brian Williams, Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney called his education plan revolutionary and said funds should follow the student. NBC's Rehema Ellis reports.

Obama and Romney: Where they stand on the issues The Associated Press: A look at where Democratic President Barack Obama and Republican presidential rival Mitt Romney stand on a selection of issues:

Shooting for state ed commission, teens launch Student Voice GothamSchools: A handful of New York State high school students have banded together to create Student Voice, an organization devoted to empowering students. Their first project is to get representation on Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s education reform commission, where they say students are imperative to conversations about teacher evaluations and technology policy.

Marines aim to counter teachers' opposition to recruiting students EdWeek: While some areas of the state embrace the military, the Los Angeles Unified School District, second largest in the country, has been more reticent. It gives recruiters no more access to students or their information than is granted to any other potential employer. 

Great Schools Compact asks Gates Foundation for $2.5 million to train teachers, principals Philadelphia Notebook: Seeking to create a “pipeline” of principals and teachers who are better equipped to deal with the real-world challenges found in Philadelphia’s toughest schools, city education leaders submitted this week a three-year, $2.5 million grant proposal to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

98 D.C. teachers fired for poor performance Wasington Post: D.C. school officials said Wednesday that 98 teachers were fired this week for poor performance, a large-scale dismissal that has become almost routine in the city but remains rare among school systems nationwide.

Math and science fields battle persistent gender gap USA Today:  Some colleges that specialize in math- and science-related fields have taken steps to increase female enrollment and are seeing results.

Comments

[Bruce]

Putting together the Obama and Romney positions on education, charter schools preparing students to succeed on independent upper school entrance exams should be very viable in the current American education political marketplace of ideas. Given the instability of educational assessment in America, I am devoting much of my time to collecting and synthesizing world-class assessments, particularly for English language arts and mathematics at the end of ninth grade, which is the point where many countries divide compulsory from elective secondary education. America's choice, as I understand it (via one of our school's trustees), was a movement in the 1990s dedicated to ending general comprehensive education earlier than the 12 years we currently devote to it so that students would be forced to make a choice between collegiate and vocational preparation: if we had made that choice, our youth unemployment would likely be lower today.

[Sarah]

Well, I think a lot of the current problems spring from the fact that as an extension to that choice, we stopped pushing vocational education as a viable thing. Schools, for all their rhetoric nowadays about how important it is that we have apprenticeships and vocational education, do not hold vocational fairs, but college ones. We let capitalism determine the fate of education, and while I like the idea of a free market, I don’t feel it best served our country in this case.

[Sarah]

And the problem with Romney’s and Obama’s campaigns, as far as education goes, is that they’re simply not addressing the hard truth that nobody is 100% sure how any of this can be fixed. That it’s going to take work. That sacrifices are going to have to be made if we, as a country, are going to still be THE superpower 20 years down the road. We are indeed being eclipsed by our fellow man elsewhere, socially, politically, and economically.

[Bruce]

Your comments are well taken, Sarah. I saw all of the empty shop space, for example, long disused at Locke High School, where I used to work, and the sky high youth unemployment that left too many of our young people with no alternative to a life of crime. The local district leadership was devoted to the college-for-everyone mantra, even when the collegiate competitiveness of many of the students rendered that idea patently absurd. Some of those educators are still much honoured, as civil rights heroes; but they primarily peddled the right to a lifetime of unemployment, after educational choices had been removed. Not that the old shop classes had been all that great; but what many of those youth needed was modern vocational education, involving apprenticeships and tailored (rather than general) academics.