RssGeni

Since January ‘09 Leafy Mike has been the go-to guy for sky-is-falling takes on the Obama – Duncan education policies. Yet so far the sky hasn’t fallen? Update: Chicken Little defends himself, ‘Aaah! Now they’re coming for the private schools!’

You should read the new “opportunity to learn” report and not just dismiss it as a rerun of ideas debated 15 years ago. If, as looks increasingly likely, there are fewer moderates in Congress after the midterm elections, these ideas will have more traction and resonance among national elected Democrats. But, this agenda is organized and [...]

Department of Ed shifting its stance on ARRA funding and jobs says Title I Monitor. From today’s NPC event and speech: Here’s text of Duncan’s remarks, and here is video.

As rumored, behemoth AIR is taking on Learning Point Associates.  Interesting signal about their continued ambitions to impact policy more.  Gina Burkhardt to AIR.  Look for more activity like this in the next 12 – 24 mos. If you want to work at one of the mom and pops that are still standing, Education Northwest needs [...]

Only a few surprises in the RTT finalists announcement, here they all are:  AZ, CA, CO, DC, FL, GA, HI, IL, KY, LA, MD, MA, NJ, NY, NC, OH, PA, RI, & SC. Takeaways:  Tough math, money won’t go so far with this group, you can see some patterns around Round 1 scores, and some open [...]

Ed Week’s McNeil digs down deeper into the NYT turnaround story from last week. Punchline:  It’s worse than you thought!

Sara Mead with a succinct and pretty spot-on take on the scarcity of gifted slots in New York City. Also tied up in this are the inequities in gifted education and the under-identification of minority students (the flip side of the over-identification of minority students for special ed).

In our space one of the big obstacles to low-priced tech for every student has been durability.   Edison’s laptop initiative resulted in a lot of destroyed machines, so have others.  Kids are hard on the boxes, use them as folders and crack screens, etc…it’s one reason there is skepticism about whether Kindles are up to [...]

I mentioned some sloppiness around the the recent report about Teach for America (TFA) that Michael Winerip featured in his column from a few weeks ago in an effort to make the point that the research on TFA is mixed.   Since we seem to be repeating history now seems a good time to revisit that [...]

What happened in DC this week is significant both for the city and nationally, but three aspects of the DC teacher firings that don’t seem to be getting a lot of attention are: (a) Look behind the numbers.  About a third of the 241 teachers let go were dismissed for credentialing/license problems, not performance; (b) If it [...]