Edu Commentary

Liberal icon Ted Sizer doesn’t like No Child Left Behind or bureaucracy and centralized control in general, and he likes vouchers. A lot of conservatives feel the same way. In addition to being an interesting read, Sizer’s new book The Red Pencil illustrates why simple left-right labels fail in education debates today.

In the same vein, Ryan Sager points out why NCLB opponents shouldn’t be rushing to use Frederick Hess and Chester Finn as exhibit A for their case.

Important Ed Week commentary by former Urban League president Hugh Price. Price calls for a “Gospel of Achievement”:

Skeptics may question the worth of rituals like induction ceremonies and parades, or dismiss them as one-shot events. Quite the contrary. Communities cling steadfastly to rituals and rites of passage because they are powerful vehicles for celebrating accomplishments and transmitting cherished values from one generation to the next.

Like Lisa Delpit, Price challenges some widely held assumptions, and like Delpit, important reading.

In the Gadfly, Chester Finn wonders if the NEA is softening its stance on No Child Left Behind. It’s an uncharacteristically meandering piece for the usually crisp Finn, his method seems to be closely reading one article in NEA Today, and he seems to conclude that nothing is doing anyway. Joanne Jacobs joins in the wondering.

This is more smoke than fire. For starters, NEA’s leadership can’t just change the organization’s positions, there is a process involving the membership. And, even if the leadership did desire a change (a debatable proposition), as the pay-for-performance debacle of a few years ago shows, the membership can and often will resist it.

It’s normal organizational behavior. Teachers are busy and the average one is not on local, state, or national NEA committees or active in NEA decision-making organs. Instead, the most vocal, active, and strident are. The result is that the NEA is often not a member of the reality-based community on key issues but rather indicative of the views of these members. Quasi-Straussian readings of specific articles in NEA Today won’t change that.

Teachers Voices is a cooperative blog put together by a group of teachers. Lively and thoughtful dialogue worth checking out.

Edu Commentary keeps hearing how increasingly standardized curriculum is taking all the creativity out of kids today, yet sees no evidence of this…

Important, longish, and Sunday NYT editorial on Creationism/Intelligent Design. Sure to spark debate. NYT’s bottom line:

…in districts where evolution is a burning issue, there ought to be some place in school where the religious and cultural criticisms of evolution can be discussed, perhaps in a comparative religion class or a history or current events course. But school boards need to recognize that neither creationism nor intelligent design is an alternative to Darwinism as a scientific explanation of the evolution of life.

Also in NYT, interesting James Traub take on the Larry Summers dust-up and Slate’s Saletan deviates from the party line, too.

Conservatives to Bush: You suck on school vouchers.

It’s true, he does, and good for him.

Update: More here from MO.

Haven’t yet had your fill of political shenanigans in California? Then keep an eye on San Diego where one of the nation’s longest serving urban superintendents is facing political trouble. National implications as this episode shows what can happen when push comes to shove on NCLB.

Superintendent Alan Bersin is poised to reorganize several of the city’s chronically underperforming schools. At two of the three schools a majority of teachers have voted to make the schools charter schools to help facilitate this and at all three 60-80 percent of parents voted to do the same. Remember, these are not schools that didn’t do well “on a single test” but schools that have not done right by students for years.

Yet the school board member who represents these schools has apparently decided to oppose this and in the process force a vote on buying out the remainder of Bersin’s contract because he won’t play ball. Possible reasons for her move? (A) It’s a great way for her to make a lifelong friend of the Bersin-loathing teachers’ union there. Or (B) concerns that if several schools in her district become semi-autonomous it will hurt her political clout and power on the board. There is no (C) because it’s generally agreed that changes are in the interest of the kids….600 parents showed up at a recent school board meeting to push for these changes.

So the pressure is on Bersin to ignore the chronic problems for children at these schools and go against the wishes of a majority of parents and in two cases teachers or see one more (possibly decisive) board vote slip into the union’s column.

Board meeting on Tuesday. Could be the second time in a month the establishment does in a Democratic education reformer in California.

Poor SpongeBob, he’s got clowns to the left of him, jokers to the right…Depending who you ask SpongeBob wants to make your kids fat corporate stooges…or he wants to make them gay…or maybe, in a Third Way twist, fat gay corporate stooges?

Outstanding CSM editorial about charter schools — comes out strongly in favor of lifting caps and implicitly against stunts like this. CSM, however, places a little too much faith in the market mechanism side of charters. Edu Commentary would like to see an equal emphasis on the public sector role balancing the public interest with parental choice.