Tag Archives: changed

In today’s Washington Post, education columnist Jay Mathews raises the question: If you had $100 billion to fix our schools, what would you do? Faithful readers know I was skeptical of the federal government’s “magical money tree” a few months ago. My sentiment hasn’t changed. Some ideas for spending 100 billion (that’s a 1 followed by 11 zeroes) new smackeroos in the education bureaucracy inevitably will be better than others, and some may end up yielding some positive results. In his column, Mathews grades five proposals for spending the money, realistically noting of those who submitted the proposals: Their goal is to get the biggest change by January 2012. I think they are dreaming. The federal stimulus is designed to save jobs, not raise student achievement. But some (not all) of the ideas are so good some states might (repeat, might) be tempted to try them. To rate the five proposals yourself, as well as five others Mathews invented, check out his blog post.

I have a busy day planned today. I was going to tell you all about the latest news from the Nation’s Report Card, specifically about what has changed (and what hasn’t) in student achievement since even before my parents were in school. Wow, that’s a long time ago! But instead of telling you myself, I decided that you should just read what my Education Policy Center friend Ben DeGrow has to say on the Schools for Tomorrow blog: “NAEP scores encourage, narrowly”. Have a great day!