Education Links

"...This thinking relies on a set of fallacies that show a stunning ignorance of why people teach and how people learn. These fallacies are perpetuated by people who have never taught, but because they happen to have tons of money behind their opinions, have accumulated an inordinate amount of power over how schools are run."

"Nine months ago, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced a $100 million gift to improve public schools in Newark, N.J. The plan to spend the money is now taking shape, and a new superintendent is coming on board to lead the effort. But in New Jersey, initial jubilation over the gift has turned into protests, suspicion and a belief that students will never benefit from the money."

"There has been a lot of controversy in Ohio in recent weeks around House-proposed legislative changes to the state's charter law that would decimate an already weak charter school accountability system (see here, here, and here). Fordham has not been shy about commenting publicly on what's wrong with the House language, nor have we shied away from arguing for stronger charter accountability and transparency. Those who know us understand our advocacy for strong charter accountability provisions are not new."

"One of the big questions about the highly successful high-poverty KIPP charter schools is whether it's fair to draw broad policy lessons from them given differences in the student populations they educate compared with regular high-poverty public schools."

"Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott is blaming the Department of Education's $79 million overhaul of special education programs for costly delays in finding seats for disabled kindergartners. The agency missed its June 15 deadline for finding slots for about 2,500 kindergartners with special needs - and now the city could be liable for the kids' tuition in private schools."

"As high school seniors all across the country graduated this week, history was quietly being made in Washington, D.C. at the Department of Education for 23 D.C. public school students with developmental and intellectual disabilities. They, like their peers across the country, were graduating too. They all participated in a program called Project SEARCH. The 15-year-old program now operates in 39 states and four foreign countries, but this is the first year that the federal government has hosted the project in three agencies including the Departments of Education, Labor and Health and Human Services."

" David Brennan has cast a long shadow over this year's state budget. The Akron charter-school magnate who has given more than $5 million to Republican politicians dating back to the mid-'80s as he built a 31-school empire was the force behind a series of charter school amendments slipped into the GOP-controlled House's budget bill in late April, House Speaker William G. Batchelder has said. "

"Private voucher schools are failing Milwaukee children with disabilities. When these voucher schools ignore their obligations to educate and accommodate children with disabilities, they force Milwaukee Public Schools to pick up the slack - while giving MPS fewer resources to do so. Voucher schools' large-scale exclusion of children with disabilities has led to a segregated environment with a disproportionate share of children with disabilities attending MPS."

"In Cranston, people are fighting over whether to allow a new public charter school. Yet, 10 miles to the north in Central Falls, local educators are embracing charter schools to an extent unheard of in most school districts across the country. And the city's school superintendent, Frances Gallo, is leading the effort."

"A private foundation has donated $1 million to the city school district to help pay for several academic programs and new positions, officials said Friday. "

This quantitative study uses data from North Carolina to examine the extent to which survey based perceptions of working conditions are predictive of policy-relevant outcomes, independent of other school characteristics such as the demographic mix of the school's students. Working conditions emerge as highly predictive of teachers' stated intentions to remain in or leave their schools, with leadership emerging as the most salient dimension. Teachers' perceptions of their working conditions are also predictive of one-year actual departure rates and student achievement, but the predictive power is far lower. These weaker findings for actual outcome measures help to highlight both the strengths and weaknesses of using teacher survey data for understanding outcomes of policy interest.

"...But facts don't count when blaming feels so right politically. Teachers are easy targets of the envious who lost jobs, benefits and pensions and aren't rich enough for tax reductions. Urban schools are demonized because - surprise - they spend more than suburban schools where race and privilege are, as the credit card ad goes, the "priceless," but uncounted, costs of success..."

"The National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), is a Gates-funded organization dedicated to data-driven, market-oriented "reform." It sees itself as a part of a coalition for "a better orchestrated agenda" for accountability, choice, and using test scores to drive the evaluation of teachers. Its forte is publishing non-peer reviewed opinion pieces under the guise of "policy analysis." "

"Though New York City schools are being slammed with heavy budget cuts, a close look at the education budget reveals that close to $900 million will be spent on technology next fiscal year. NY1's Lindsey Christ filed the following report."

"States would be encouraged to set up more high-quality charter schools, under a measure just introduced by Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., who oversees the House subcommittee dealing with K-12 policy."

"SAVANNAH: At the summer conference of the Georgia School Boards Association this morning in this port city, noted education researcher Diane Ravitch lambasted most of the reforms du jour in education today, merit pay, value-added teacher evaluations, charter schools, vouchers and testing."

"Better Education for Kids (B4K), a new 501(c)(4), went on the air today with a $1 million Philly and NYC market TV ad campaign to counter the NJEA's air war against Gov. Chris Christie's reform agenda."

"Parent involvement in education is widely recognized as important, yet it remains weak in many communities. One important reason for this weakness is that urban schools have grown increasingly isolated from the families and communities they serve. Many of the same neighborhoods with families who are disconnected from public schools, however, often contain strong community-based organizations (CBOs) with deep roots in the lives of families. Many CBOs are beginning to collaborate with public schools, and these collaborations might potentially offer effective strategies to engage families more broadly and deeply in schools."

"Entrepreneurship in K-12 schooling has generally focused on efforts to boost the supply of familiar things: more good schools, more talented teachers, and more effective school leaders. Consequently, the best known and most celebrated endeavors have tended to be "whole school" solutions. Too often missing, however, has been careful analysis of how differentiated solutions or innovative tools might enable education providers to meet the demands for schooling in smarter ways. This piece discusses how allowing an array of providers to play a more robust role in responding to consumers can dramatically reconfigure K-12 schooling and drive fresh thinking as to how communities, states, and the nation go about schooling."