Category Archives: Edublogging

A Friday quickie for readers to chew on. Back in late November, the U.S. Department of Education released the first-ever data where we could truly compare the rates at which students in different states are graduating high school on time. Unfortunately, Colorado’s 74 percent graduation rate put us in the bottom third. But now that we can finally look at all states based on a common measure of how well students are completing their secondary education (more than 43 years after we put a man on the moon), someone has to ask: Just how accurate is the comparison? In an insightful new EdFly blog post, Florida’s Mike Thomas reminds us that different graduation standards can seriously cloud the picture. After highlighting some different headlines that take to task certain states’ graduation output, he notes:

I love lists, I love education, and I love to tell people about things. So it should be no surprise that my attention was caught by yesterday’s news release from Stanford: “Hoover Institution Education Experts Identify News Media Hits and Misses in 2012 Education Coverage.” The Koret Task Force on Education named five stories that were well-covered and five that were neglected. First, the hits: Charter schools Teachers’ unions Special education Pre-Kindergarten education No Child Left Behind Next, the misses:

Stop nagging me! Yes, it’s true I haven’t added much to the blog this week. Too much time making my Christmas list for Santa… up to 30 pages so far. Now it’s Friday and I’m tired. But I couldn’t retire into the weekend without at least a nod to something education-related here. National Public Radio did a cool little feature interviewing kids my age about a new proposal that would give needy students in Cleveland, Ohio, the token of college-bound hope: Every Cuyahoga County kindergartner would receive a $100 college savings account under a plan county Executive Ed FitzGerald says will create a “culture of college attendance” for children and their parents.

Call me lazy. Call me a copycat. Call me whatever you want (“sticks and stones,” and all that…). Just read this insightful piece by Mike Antonucci that unpacks the answers of Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis in a post-strike retrospective interview. His piece reminds us that democracy applies more broadly than to union actions, that not only the “experts” get a voice and a vote, and that the powerful trends of education reform persist even after this fall’s labor showdown in the Windy City. The conclusion?

A quick Friday hit, thanks to Ed News Colorado, as the local Douglas County paper highlights the reform-minded school board’s progress in implementing performance pay and related upgrades to teacher policies: While pay for performance isn’t new in Douglas County, the program still under development pushes aside the traditional pay system based on years of experience and higher education coursework and degrees. “We’ve pretty much replaced the old step-and-lane structure (of) experience on the left, education on top,” said the district’s chief human resources officer, Brian Cesare. “We’re saying now it’s going to be performance on the top and market value on the left.”

It’s not uncommon for me to tell you about the great need for public schools to spend dollars more productively. A recent brief, colorful paper written by my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow makes the point with some great local significance for school districts asking voters for tax increases this fall. But, you may ask, why is this a problem in the first place? Why does the productivity of school spending tend to deteriorate over time? The answer, as Matt Ladner ably points out in a couple new posts, is Baumol’s disease. Wait a minute, I see some of you ready to run and hide. No, it doesn’t mean you’re going to break out with red blotches on your skin, develop a high fever, or experience bouts of memory loss. It’s not that kind of disease! Ladner points to a lecture by the brilliant education policy scholars Paul Hill and Marguerite Roza to explain the phenomenon: “the tendency of labor-intensive organizations to become more expensive over time but not any more productive.”

Some of you out there probably think I’m starting to get lazy. Just pick out an education-themed article and point you two it, then head along on my way. But this one I couldn’t resist. A new piece in The Atlantic magazine by Peg Tyre gets at the nitty-gritty of learning and knowledge through telling one school’s story at trying something that used to be common in American education and largely proved successful. What is the secret for New Dorp High School in Staten Island, New York? An intense focus on actually teaching students how to write, rather than just hoping they’ll “catch” it by doing some creative assignments. Maybe it is a “revolution,” seeing as how everything old happens to become new again: …Fifty years ago, elementary-school teachers taught the general rules of spelling and the structure of sentences. Later instruction focused on building solid paragraphs into full-blown essays. Some kids mastered it, but many did not. About 25 years ago, in an effort to enliven instruction and get more kids writing, schools of education began promoting a different approach. The popular thinking was that writing should be “caught, not taught,” explains Steven Graham, a professor of education instruction […]

I’m getting too excited to wait much longer. Tonight is the special Colorado screening of Won’t Back Down, the new feature movie about empowering parents to improve failing schools. Put simply, it brings the “Parent Trigger” reform concept to the big screen. So as you look forward to catching the movie, either tonight or when it premieres this weekend for general audiences, you might appreciate some thoughts from a couple of prominent education reform voices to chew on first. It started yesterday with New Schools for New Orleans’ Neerav Kingsland, who argues that “maybe we shouldn’t support Parent Trigger laws at all” and “the best parent trigger is parent choice between non-governmental school operators.”

From the files of “Did she really say that?” comes a post written a few days ago by Diane Ravitch, under the heading: “Do parents always know what is best?” Ravitch extensively quotes a Louisiana teacher, who hardly wins friends and influences people with this opener: I am tired of this attitude about parents knowing what is best for their children. Parents are easily swayed by politicians, talk show hosts and preachers. They rarely understand how schools work unless they are teachers themselves or have relatives who are teachers…. Yes, that is patronizing. Even worse, it can lead to a lot of dangerous and misguided policy conclusions. It’s hard to put it much better than has Victor Skinner of EAG News:

Edublogger extraordinaire Joanne Jacobs brought my attention to Opportunity Culture, a new website project of the group Public Impact. The idea? How to extend the reach of excellent teachers with innovative uses of time, space, technology and professional roles. Opportunity Culture has a smart group of people advising the project, and of course Public Impact itself is co-directed by the Hassel team, who recently wrote a relatively concise Education Next piece on how the reach of excellent teachers can be enhanced.