Mike Antonucci at HotAir reports that at the same time that the $10 billion teacher jobs (Edujobs) bailout passed the Senate—and was expected to pass the House—lots of school districts were already hiring back the teachers they had pink-slipped last spring. You may recall that many folks have predicted that the fired teachers would be [...]
National Journal’s Education Experts Blog recently posed this question: Can Communities And Parents Help Turn Around Schools? This is a question that I’ve asked myself and my students. It’s one of the things that we talk about when we’re reading Jonathon Kozol’s Savage Inequalities. Kozol’s argument is that government should fix everything, but my students [...]
Nick Anderson at the Washington Post reports that the overhaul of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) seems to be stalled in Congress. Despite pleas from Duncan and Obama, it also appears increasingly unlikely that the Democratic-led Congress will provide a bailout for schools this summer to prevent teacher layoffs and program cuts related to local [...]
Sarah Butrymowicz at the Hechinger Report notes: From who the president is to how to tell time, what you’re expected to learn in school each year depends on where you live in the U.S. South Dakota’s second-graders are supposed to learn how to tell time to the minute. In Alaska, students might be forgiven for [...]
Dr. Helen asks: Have you noticed an uptick in studies that seem to say you have no or little free will? There does seem to be some evidence that there is. A July article in Time, for instance, featured the work of psychologists Ruud Custers of Utrecht University in the Netherlands and John Bargh of [...]
If you’re trying to keep track of which states have signed on to common standards, Catherine Gewertz at Curriculum Matters provides a nifty map for visual learners and those who find that one picture is worth a lot of blogging.
The Hill’s Walter Alarkon reports today on the fight within the Democrat Party on education funding. The Obama administration’s Department of Education– in the person of Secretary Arne Duncan–is counting on the competitive grant program Race to the Top (RttT) to reform education. But not all the Dems in Congress are on board. The intra-party [...]
The National Education Association (NEA) convention (July 2-11) is underway in New Orleans. There’s plenty of goings-on to interest political junkies- even those who don’t care all that much about education issues. Neither President Obama, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan—nor anyone from the current administration for that matter– is scheduled to speak to the delegates [...]
Kevin Carey’s post at The Quick and the Ed clarifies what’s going on in education reform right now and how’s it’s changed since the passage of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2001. We’re in what Carey calls the “post-NCLB era of education reform.” For one thing, today’s major players are different: When I began [...]
Reading the David Brooks op ed description of the oil clean-up fiasco in the Gulf, I couldn’t help thinking about education. Apply this quote about the clean up to the growing federal role in education, whether it’s Race to the Top, a national curriculum or No Child Left Behind (though I still think NCLB had [...]