Five Best Blogs: School Reform's Inner-City Problem

Arthur Levine: The Suburban Education Gap - WSJ.com ow.ly/fjDfX via @Wonkbook 

Joel Klein: We Need a Bar Exam for Educators ow.ly/1Pzhur 

How online ed is going to do to the music industry what Napster did to music Clay Shirky ow.ly/fkrJh 

Cato Unbound » Blog Archive » Why Online Education Works ow.ly/fkrI3 

New twist on cyberbullying: Anonymous vigilantes defend depressed teen, expose tormentors via Jezebel ow.ly/fjBPQ @emilybazelon

Tech Groups Offer Lame-Duck Wish Lists -NJournal ow.ly/fkrFo There's an ed reform version of this out there, somewhere

Book about poverty wins National Book Award CJRow.ly/fjBra 

Comments

[Bruce]

Arthur Levine raises an important point that is too often overlooked in the United States: our complacent, self-satisfied, innovation-allergic suburban school districts, used to thinking of themselves as Blue Ribbon winners, are barely above average on the international stage, and hardly deserving of any awards. Irvine Unified, where I still have one child attending after two have graduated, has been rated among the top three of the nation's roughly 15,000 school districts; and yet when the Bush Institute put online a means of comparing our PISA scores internationally, our readers were only in the 71st percentile, and we were in the 60th in mathematics. When I raised this issue with the district and proposed a new school dedicated to having students achieve higher standards (in spite of the fact that an Education Sector report today lists California with New Mexico as the only two states to have high proficiency standards in these two subjects for both fourth- and eighth-graders), it demurred, being focused on raising the achievement of newly arriving struggling students, and on protecting current district employees from competition.

[Art]

Alexander ... The link for Joel Klein goes to a "fiscal cliff" article.