Education Links

"In a recent lecture before the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Harvard law professor Larry Lessig argued that the current infrastructure for scholarly communication is not consistent with the objectives of The Enlightenment (see video of lecture below). Rather, the system is more consistent with the reality of the "elite-nment." That is, for the most part, knowledge created by academics is placed mostly in outlets that can be accessed only by "the knowledge elite.""

"The Star-Ledger reported that Chris Christie was a registered lobbyist at the law firm of Dughi, Hewit and Palatucci that lobbied the New Jersey government on behalf of Edison Schools from 1999 to 2001. Chris Cerf, who Christie appointed as New Jersey's Commissioner of Education, was the general counsel of that law firm. That Star-Ledger article also points out that William Palatucci, a partner of the firm who lobbied alongside Christie, was "a longtime political ally of the governor" and still remains a close friend. Chris Cerf was also the President and Chief Operating Officer for Edison Learning for eight years. "

"Few people realize that the struggle for civil rights and racial integration had a northern component and many battles were fought in the New York metropolitan area. Palisades Amusement Park in Fort Lee, New Jersey would not permit African Americans in its famous saltwater swimming pool until 1961. Levittown on Long Island originally required homebuyers to sign a contract that they would not sell or rent to Blacks. Many local battles of the Civil Rights era took place in Hempstead, so Dawn Sumner and Claire LaMothe had students learn about these struggles. "

"Despite being used for several decades, test-based incentives have not consistently generated positive effects on student achievement, says a new report from the National Research Council."

"Much of what makes people pro- or anti-union is complex and not easily measured."

This paper notes how the theory of disruptive innovation, which arose at Harvard Business School in the late 1990s, and the Tools of Cooperation and Change, a supporting theory that arrived in 2006, together represent the epitome of neoliberal dispossession-based marketization paradigms. The language they bring to debates on policy reform is concise and revealing, the tools practical and effective. Yet in the dozen or so years since their arrival they too have become, to use their own vocabulary, an entrenched interest that serves to perpetuate the status quo of male-dominated capitalism. Education policy makers who understand that "public education is central to the construction of a cosmopolitan moral democracy" (Reid, 2007:292) can at the very least benefit from understanding the language and recognizing the tools. Perhaps they can even turn them to a socially responsible purpose, employing them to help "move the public/private debate past its current impasse" (ibid, 293).

"A new report from the Office of the Independent Monitor in the Los Angeles school district looks at whether charter schools ask parents up front-before they can enroll-if their children have disabilities."

"Throughout New York, educators and politicians have been increasing their focus on attendance in recent years, and their efforts appear to be paying off, at least in elementary schools: 1 in 15 elementary students were absent on a given day this year, compared to 1 in 13 four years ago and 1 in 9 in 1995. "

"If the mayor's proposed budget goes through and the promised 4,000 New York City teachers are laid off (costing the city 6,000 jobs, with attrition), P.S. 41, in the heart of Greenwich Village, will lose 12 teachers. That is more than the number of teachers now teaching the school's fourth and fifth grades. "

"Class Size: What Research Says and What It Means for State Policy argues that increasing average class size by one student will save about 2% of total education spending with negligible impact on academic achievement. It justifies this conclusion on the basis that Class-Size Reduction (CSR) is not particularly effective and is not as cost-effective as other reforms. However, this conclusion is based on a misleading review of the CSR research literature. The report puts too much emphasis on studies that are of poor quality or that do not focus on settings that are particularly relevant to the debate on class-size policy in the United States. It argues that class-size reduction is less cost-effective than other reform policies, but it bases this contention on an incomplete accounting of the benefits of smaller classes and an uncritical, unexamined list of alternative policies. The report's estimates of the potential cost savings are flawed as, in reality, schools cannot structurally reduce class size by only one student. Well-documented and long-term non-academic gains from CSR are not addressed. Likewise, the recommendation for releasing the ―least effective‖ teachers assumes a valid way of making such determinations is available. "

"In a bare-bones basement office in Buffalo, N.Y., Katie Campos, an education activist, is plotting a revolution. She and her minuscule staff of the advocacy group Buffalo ReformED are against incredible odds. In less than a week, they are trying to get a controversial law known as the "parent trigger" through the New York legislature. It's a powerful nickname for game-changing legislation that would enable parents who could gather a majority at any persistently failing school to either fire the principal, fire 50% of the teachers, close the school or turn it into a charter school."

"Department of Education Inspector General Kathleen Tighe could soon discover if officials reporting to Secretary Arne Duncan leaked market-sensitive material to short sellers--including a non-public audit from her own office. Did anyone trade on the confidential information?"

"Joel Klein is a hoot. Klein, who served as Chancellor of the New York City Public Schools from 2002 to 2010, recently took to the opinion pages of The Washington Post to crown his friends and cronies the champions of education reform. Several alumni from the New York City Department of Education who presumably learned how to promote reform under Klein's direction have assumed prominent leadership positions: John White is the superintendent in New Orleans, Cami Anderson in Newark, Jean-Claude Brizard in Chicago, Andres Alonso in Baltimore, and Marcia Lyles in Delaware's Christina School District; similarly, Chris Cerf is the state commissioner of education in New Jersey. These names join others around the country, many trained by the Broad Superintendents Academy. "

"Most teachers and principals will tell you that non-instructional school staff can make a big difference in school performance. Although we may all know this, it's always useful to have empirical research to confirm it, and to examine the size and nature of the effects. In this paper, economists Scott Carrell and Mark Hoekstra put forth one of the first rigorous tests of how one particular group of employees - school counselors - affect both discipline and achievement outcomes. The authors use a unique administrative dataset of third, fourth, and fifth graders in Alachua County, Florida, a diverse district that serves over 30,000 students. Their approach exploits year-to-year variation in the number of counselors in each school - i.e., whether the outcomes of a given school change from the previous year when a counselor is added to the staff."

"Beneath the political and corporate veneer espousing teaching as a profession lurks a simple fact: the corporate and political elite wants teaching to be a service industry. Worse yet, they have their wish, because teaching is now a service industry, ultimately devoted to perpetuating an economic system based on social inequity and a venal consumer culture."

"In the intensifying debate over the future of education, two camps seem to be emerging. On one side, there are people like New York University professor/former Deputy U.S. Education Secretary Diane Ravitch who argue that larger social ills such as poverty, joblessness, economic despair and lack of health coverage negatively affect educational achievement, and that until those problems are addressed, schools will never be able to produce the results we want. On the other side, there are so-called "reformers" who want to radically change (read: charterize and/or privatize) public education under the premise that the primary problems are bad/lazy teachers and "unaccountable" school administrators."