Saturday, April 02, 2005
Very Cool Edujob
The SEED Foundation is looking for a director of major gifts. SEED established the outstanding SEED School in Washington, DC, the nation's only public boarding middle and high school. Resumes and inquiries here.
In today's Washington Post. The piece has a high school title but is really more of a spirited defense and good explanation of the k-8 part of the law...still not convinced this isn't a head fake since states are moving on h.s. reform anyway. Also, why didn't she mention the teacher incentive fund? That's probably their most sellable proposal right now because it's aimed at a real issue and the money has to flow for the reform to work so it largely sidesteps the debate about NCLB funding levels.
See also this related op-ed on the same page from Charles Stewart Mott's Kevin Walker.
OH Vouchers
Big voucher debate coming in Ohio. Democrat Dixie Allen has a bill, so does the Republican governor. What’s interesting, however, is that word is a lot of the charter school community is nervous about a potential loss of students under a plan larger than what is in place in Cleveland now. Who says charters aren’t like traditional public schools anyway?
BTW, Republicans want 18,000 new vouchers. Leaving aside the larger issues, are there even that many open seats statewide?
This is unsettling and makes the debate about NCLB seem sort of trivial...
Someone comes along and blames the public schools for having a hand in Terry Shiavo’s death...
Shark Hunt
This is mostly very funny stuff, and the Hunter Thompson parody is priceless. But does (did!) Fordham get Wallace money and is Eli Broad laughing?
NSBA's Legal Clips has a good write up of this week's Title IX case.
Lots of folks talking about schoolmatters.com, the new S & P data site with data on every public school in the country. Reader R sent this one along that has data on private schools around the country.
Minority advocates worried on the accountability front, complicates the states' rights storyline. Via School News Monitor.
Per this, the Citizens Commission on Civil Rights is also a founding member of the Achievement Alliance. That's a sign of the times, no?
NBCT's And Equity
It is time for states to step up and address the maldistribution of National Board Certified teachers.
Yikes! Vandy professor James Guthrie dresses down Nell Noddings in Ed Week. He doesn’t accuse her of being a well-fed technocrat but does raise some serious objections to her recent commentary piece.
Two Exclusives From Two Jays
Jay Mathews gets an exclusive and writes-up a new report on charter schools and KIPP for the Washington Post. More later.
And, Jay Greene praises the Cleveland Public Schools.
Important Noam Scheiber op-ed in today’s NYT. Scheiber flirts with education where the dynamic is also arguably the same.
If you only check one thing out today, visit schoolmatters.com, the new data site from Standard and Poor's just launched this morning. More on this later, but if information is indeed power, parents, teachers, and other public education stakeholders just became a lot more empowered. Search for a state, school, or school district you're interested in and you'll see why.
Interesting article from the LAT about high school completion. Interesting NYT look at charter schools in Dayton, OH. And, in today's Washington Post, Valerie Strauss takes a look at the 4th-grade as part of an ongoing series.
Achievement Bonanza!
New data (pdf) from the Council of Great City Schools on urban schools. A lot of data in here, particularly performance and finance.
The Achievement Alliance, a pro-NCLB organization founded by the Ed Trust, National Council of La Raza, Just for the Kids/NCEA, and the Business Roundtable has a new newsletter you can sign up for. First one here, some interesting stuff, good unpacking of "adequate yearly progress".
California school bans the Declaration of Independence! Those were the inflammatory headlines that sent the self-appointed defenders of America's values and culture into high gear. Allegedly a teacher at Stevens Creek Elementary School had been restricted from teaching about the Declaration of Independence because of its religious content. As it turns out, and as Naomi Schaefer Riley relays in a must-read WSJ op-ed, the story is actually a lot more complicated. For starters the teacher in question apparently does have some problems with the boundaries of personal faith and the classroom and more importantly, no one was banned from teaching about the Declaration in the first place.
Parents at the school have set up a website to try to counter the feeding frenzy.
Thanks to reader MT.