Education Links

"The 1988 film "Stand and Deliver" portrayed Jaime Escalante's inspirational teaching of AP Calculus to his East Los Angeles students. Escalante instilled ganas, the desire to succeed, in high school students, many of whom had never before known academic success. Viewers witnessed Escalante and his students teaming up against the test; it was important to them to show the world what they had done together. "

"The Montgomery County Public Schools system here has a highly regarded program for evaluating teachers, providing them extra support if they are performing poorly and getting rid of those who do not improve. The program, Peer Assistance and Review - known as PAR - uses several hundred senior teachers to mentor both newcomers and struggling veterans. If the mentoring does not work, the PAR panel - made up of eight teachers and eight principals - can vote to fire the teacher. "

"This paper is the answer to a question: What would the education policies and practices of the United States be if they were based on the policies and practices of the countries that now lead the world in student performance? It is adapted from the last two chapters of a book to be published in September 2011 by Harvard Education Press. Other chapters in that book describe the specific strategies pursued by Canada (focusing on Ontario), China (focusing on Shanghai), Finland, Japan and Singapore, all of which are far ahead of the United States. The research on these countries was performed by a team assembled by the National Center on Education and the Economy, at the request of the OECD."

"Milwaukee's voucher system, which allows low-income students to attend private schools using tax dollars, discriminates based on disability, according to a complaint filed Tuesday by the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Wisconsin Foundation and Disability Rights Wisconsin."

"A new study finds family income plays a role in a child's cognitive development."

"Diane Ravitch's New York Times op-ed seems to have stuck in the craw of many a reformer, including Arne Duncan himself. What really burned people up was Ravitch's "straw man" arguments: that reformers say poverty doesn't matter, or only care about gains in student achievement. "No serious reformer says accountability should just be based on test scores. We all favor multiple measures," Jon Schnur* complained to Jonathan Alter last week."

""When a deal smells as bad as this one, you have to ask: Is the push to use standardized test scores to evaluate teachers really about improving teaching and student achievement? Or, is it about finding ways for Wall Street and big corporations to cash in on Race to the Top?" asked NYSUT President Richard C. Iannuzzi."

"We seem to be setting ourselves up for disaster education. Efforts are underway not only to adopt value-added models to rate the effectiveness of individual teachers, but to use these models to identify those at the very bottom who might later lose their positions and those at the very top who might then be eligible for merit pay. Yet in all the policy discussions and public commentary, there's been little focus on learners and on how, precisely, we define the qualities of a good teacher."

"Jonathan Alter and Diane Ravitch our special guests to debate education reform. In a Bloomberg column, Alter called out Diane as one of the obstructionists to education reform. Jonathan Alter is a journalist and author who was a columnist and senior editor for Newsweek magazine from 1983 until 2011. Alter is currently a lead columnist for Bloomberg Review. Diane Ravitch is a historian of education, an educational policy analyst, and a research professor at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Previously, she was a U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education."

"I'm going to D.C. tomorrow to talk with Rick Hess about Terry Moe's new anti-union book, Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America's Public Schools. I read it thinking: "Does this guy really believe what he's saying, or is he only trying to make points with some larger audience he hopes to reach?""

"The shift in E.D. Kain's thinking on education reform of late has been an interesting and, I think, beneficent one for reform discourse. Kain basically blanched when he began to perceive he was too strongly in the "anti-reform" camp (few are actually anti-reform, but that's the unfortunate appellation ascribed to opponents of Duncan, et al)."

"For the last year, Central Falls High School in Rhode Island has been under a microscope. Long considered one of the poorest-performing high schools in the state, administrators abandoned a proposal to fire all the teachers as long as they agreed to a so-called "transformation" plan. Now, as the school year winds down, that plan is in shambles. "

According to the new Recovery School District (RSD) superintendent, John White, "Five years ago, there were 62 percent of the youngsters attending failing schools. There are now only 18 percent of those youngsters who attend failing schools …so what exists, works."1 What a stupendous claim! If true, it would signify extraordinary student progress that the RSD has made since Katrina. Conversely, considering that the RSD and its proponents are so adept at manipulating data and misleading the public to support their cause, Research on Reforms (ROR) decided to investigate these claims more closely. The data for this commentary were all obtained from the 2009 and 2010 School Performance Scores (SPS) and student enrollment data from the website of the Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE).2"

"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. "

"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?"

"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."

"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."

"Among 27 member nations tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, U.S. teachers work the longest hours, the Wall Street Journal reports. This seems particularly impressive as the U.S. has long summer vacations, and primary-school teachers only spent 36 weeks a year in the classroom, among the lowest of the countries tracked. Yet the educators spent 1,097 hours a year teaching, in the most recent numbers from 2008. New Zealand, in second place at 985 hours, had schools open for 39 weeks a year. The OECD average is 786 hours."

"While politicians and the media misrepresent the achievement gap in order to demonize schools and teachers, we have ample evidence that addressing the whole life of the child is the only avenue to closing an achievement gap."