Edu Commentary

Haven’t had enough of the NYT-AFT-Charter World dust-up? The blogger MO, who is real life is a NYC journo, has apparently uncovered an internal NYT email on the whole affair and unpacks it. Though not mentioned in the item, the AFT also gave $50K to help overturn the charter school law in Washington State, in what parallel universe doesn’t that count as hostility toward charter schools?

Looks that way at Stanford.

Here’s something counterintuitive. One of the two reading programs with the most substantial research and evidence base supporting it, Success For All, is hurting big time in the wake of the bipartisan Reading First initiative.

Though Reading First is explicitly designed to ensure that states and school districts employ programs that are grounded in research, in practice SFA is getting marginalized…

New national task force with Education Commission of the States, Learning Point Associates, and ETS. Kick-off report here (pdf). More information here (pdf) and here (pdf).

The EdWonks have put one together for edublogs.

Interesting and thoughtful take on the Ward Churchill controversy. Thanks to reader LC for the heads up.

And, while we’re touring the Academy, Dan Drezner asks an interesting question, too.

UFT may have a tough act to follow…The Times takes a look at CT’s successful Amistad Academy. NYC’s Klein has invited them to the city.

On his blog Rep. Peter Sullivan of NH writes-up the new school finance proposal on the table in New Hampshire.

Up The Down Staircase, an entertaining edublog written by a teacher with a charming Shakespeare fetish, is now on the blogroll at left.

Today, the United Federation of Teachers in New York is poised to vote to apply for charters to open two charter schools. You’ll hear plenty of carping on the dissonance between this move and the apparent guerilla war the national AFT (and NEA for that matter) is waging on charter schools.

But that’s not the real story, which is really two-fold. First, the UFT should be commended for this move. At a bare minimum it’s a good way to create a few more decent public options in New York City. If universities, community groups, non-profits, and others are playing in the charter sector, it seems self-evident that a powerful actor like the teachers’ union in the city should be, too.

Second, at the same time, everyone must beware the Potemkin Village trap. Obviously, part of the UFT’s goal here is to show that high quality, effective schools, can be created within the existing master contract for teachers. But that’s not really a serious point of debate is it? Such schools exist now. The analytic question is whether overall the master contract helps or hinders efforts to improve educational quality in New York, and obviously elsewhere. And, worth noting that in larger systems, isolated islands of success often displace problems to other schools.

So, while everyone should hope the UFT effort succeeds and a couple more good public schools come of it, like many things in education it’s ultimately going to be anecdotal in terms of larger lessons. That doesn’t mean it’s devoid of value as a policy lesson, but must be viewed in context. Also, speaking of anecdotal, this is not the first time a local teachers’ union has gone down this road and the record is mixed…

Afterthought: This move obviously also gets at the issue of whether charter school teachers should be unionized which has big implications considering the trends on the horizon (declining teachers’ union membership in right-to-work (often high growth) states, more and more charters, etc…). It’s a point of debate considering the ideologically diverse coalition supporting charter schools. For what it’s worth, Edu Commentary thinks that teachers should be if they want to be. Some charters are organized and that’s great, some are discussing whether to organize – one in PA just did the other day – and some do not want to. Shouldn’t teachers at individual charter schools be able to decide for themselves? Arguing it the other way calls into question all this rhetoric about professionalism and autonomy doesn’t it?

People For The American Way has released a report (pdf) critical of the Washington, D.C. private school voucher program. Pretty predictable stuff and it’s too soon for serious analysis of what’s happening with this program anyway (though Edu Commentary’s not optimistic about its prospects to really change much in DC’s beleaguered public education system). For sober background about how the program came to be, this piece by The Post’s Spencer Hsu is excellent.

But, buried in the report and today’s Washington Post story about it, are some wild email exchanges. Particularly this one from Department of Education Office Of Innovation honcho Nina Rees. From The Post:

Rees, in an e-mail to Sachar about the need to keep Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) and other members of Congress in the loop about the program, wrote in May that Specter “(ugh) wants it and while I hate the guy, we need to be nice to him I’m told.”



In an interview yesterday, Rees said, “I regret having made the comment and have the utmost respect for the chairman of the Appropriations Committee.”

Oops!