Edu Commentary

There may come a day when New York Times education columnist Samuel Freedman starts writing boring and repetitive stuff, but today is not that day.

Per this post, a reader writes that:

“Agree with your “don’t paint unions with a broadbrush” comments, but I would like to offer some additional precision. My experience is that any union with a role in education is opposed to charters or wants the law changed to be like their “deal” in the traditional schools. Just to be safe, I tend to use the term “education unions.”



As we have seen in XXXXX, the administrators’ union is just as bad as the teachers’ union. I don’t get any sense that any of the other 7 unions (9 total) like charters either. More than anything, they are opposed to the concept of giving employees a choice of whether or not to choose to be in the union. They know that when you have membership locked up, it’s only a matter of time before you get everything else. They may hate the loss of money to the district, but it’s not the fundamental driver.



So your comment is correct as long as the union has nothing to do with education. That still leaves A BUNCH of unions that do not need to be needlessly antagonized.”

The illogical decrying of No Child Left Behind while simultaneously arguing that it’s under-funded continues…

It sucks, but it’s not funded enough! Makes perfect sense…

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If you think you might want to be an urban school leader, then check out one of these information sessions about the Broad Residency program, a project of the Broad Foundation. The program is developing and placing urban school leaders around the country.

Good Jay Mathews column…

It’s no secret that there are some divisions within organized labor about the direction things should go. SEIU head Andrew Stern has been a vocal critic and voice for change but Edu Commentary missed this provocative statement he made over the summer:

“I think we [Democrats] are a stale party of ideas. We can’t talk about education. We can’t discuss when it is failing our members’ (children) in public schools in urban areas. You know, we’re the experiment. Maybe vouchers aren’t the only answer, but then what is? I’m tired of hearing if we just pay teachers more, you know, life will be terrific. It’s a huge problem.”

It was dug up by the NY Daily News’ Joe Williams who is finishing a fantastic book about education politics. It will be out toward the end of the year and is an important book because Williams unpacks the curious politics of education and how the debates defy facile left-right or liberal-conservative labels and frameworks.

Stern’s comments may be merely the macro-version of some micro-politics that have played out in a few cities. A handful of savvy urban school superintendents have either tacitly or explicitly cut deals with various local labor leaders to essentially isolate recalcitrant local teachers’ unions and deny them a broad base of organized support for various issues.

In these cases the labor leaders realize that outrageous demands by the teachers’ unions give labor a black eye and they also realize that it’s their members’ children who are impacted by archaic pay schemes, the lack of high quality public options in some communities, and all the rest.

What’s unfortunate, however, is that some in the charter school “movement” have yet to realize that unions are not a monolith and employ similar political nimbleness. Instead of, rightly, criticizing teachers’ unions that fight tooth and nail against charter schools they paint the opposition with the broad brush of “unions”. Yet outside of teachers’ unions, there is no reason why union members should be any more naturally predisposed to support or oppose charter schools (or any other education reform) than the general public. So antagonizing them from the get-go isn’t very politically smart. In fact, on the contrary, a lot of union members make likely allies in various educational improvement efforts because it’s their kids bearing the brunt of some of these problems, too.

A trend and an issue worth watching? Edu Commentary reports, you decide.

There is a lot of complaining about the interstate variation in standards and the corresponding variation in what it means for a student to be proficient or for a school to make “adequate yearly progress”. Yet defined standards are not going away. The only other plausible alternative on the table is to have nationally defined ones. But that’s not a palatable alternative for most of the same folks grumbling about the interstate differences either. And it’s surely not going to fly with most conservatives. These compromises don’t happen by accident.

David Broder looks at Virginia Governor Mark Warner’s emphasis on high school reform and the upcoming high school summit. Right now, Warner is chair of ECS, using his National Governors Association chairmanship to promote high school reform, and tackling education reform in Virginia. Along with Ted Kennedy and George Miller, he’s probably one of the three most influential Democrats on education policy today.

Hechinger Institute’s (and former Edu Commentary pinch hitter) Richard Colvin discusses a genuine crisis in higher education in The Los Angeles Times:

…why do U.S. media, policymakers and university administrators continue to worry more about who gets into elite colleges and how much they pay for that privilege? Why don’t they focus on how few students make it through this nation’s higher education system with the tools to help keep the society we all share on track?



Probably because most reporters, policymakers and influential educators wouldn’t be in the positions they’re in if they had to recover from the setback that some public schools inflict. If they had faced that struggle, they might better understand why many of those foundering students find it too difficult to work and go to school at the same time. Why some, especially Latinos and those who live at home, will succumb to the tug of family obligations. Why loneliness will overcome many. Why plenty of motivated, hardworking students will simply be unable to overcome the despair of stepping onto campus and feeling as if they’ve entered a black-tie ball wearing a thrift-store T-shirt. These are the students who met every high school requirement, scoring higher grades than most of their classmates in courses the academic establishment said would prepare them for the future.



That was a lie.



Yes, these students have the required credentials. But they don’t have the skills. They won’t comprehend what they read in college well enough to jump into classroom discussions. They can’t write analytically. They’ll find college-level math over their heads.



Read the entire thing…

New study (pdf) from Achieve on high school course-taking. Even if you don’t agree this this statement…

To be prepared for the challenges they will face after graduation, every high school student should take four years of rigorous math, including Algebra I, Geometry and Algebra II, as well as data analysis and statistics. Every student also should take four years of grade-level English, with courses that include literature, writing, reasoning, logic and communication skills.



…there is still plenty of useful information about where states are on this front.

Per the item below, for a more serious consideration of markets and education check out Revolution at the Margins by Rick Hess. Review here.