Forget about developing ways to keep great
teachers in the classroom; recruit and develop more of them
instead. Read More.
And check out more
Dropout
Nation reports and commentary today.
The NEA and the AFT have spent the past two decades actively
opposing the expansion of the charter school movement.
However, the publicly-funded but privately organized schools are
growing in number and popularity, and teachers unions can no
longer bully their supporters. So the unions have devised an
alternate strategy: Strike a deal-oppose the schools but
unionize their teachers. Will the teachers unions succeed in
unionizing charter school teachers? Or will reform-minded
charter school teachers, angry taxpayers, and internal union
dissent force significant changes on the teacher unions?
Read It Today
These days, the AFT and the National
Education Association find themselves becoming school operators
-- and even embracing the charter school movement in their
rather schizophrenic way -- in order to prove that traditional
teachers union principles, including seniority and degree-based
pay scales, and work rules that allow the average teacher to
work just 35 hours during a work week, won't get in the way of
high-quality academic instruction and innovation. Whether or not
the unions can pull it off is an open question.Read More
The poor black and Latino children
attending Sacred Heart School in the Columbia Heights section of
Washington, D.C., probably don't know that Century Foundation
Senior Fellow Richard Kahlenberg
thinks their participation in the D.C. Opportunity
Scholarship and other voucher plans merely helps to make
""separate-but-equal" work."
Read More
But by year's
end, New Jersey may end up as reputed for spending cuts,
clampdowns on lavish public pensions and staring down affiliates
of the mighty National Education Association, as for Miss
America, its famed turnpike, and the Jersey Shore.
Most-surprisingly, it is happening in a most-bipartisan manner.
Read More
When the National
Education Association had to take one of its affiliates, the
Indiana State Teachers Association after the collapse of its
insurance trust fund, it was more than just a colossal
embarrassment of alleged financial mismanagement – and a loss of
coverage for its 50,000 rank-and-file members. The insolvency
also offers a glimpse into the increasingly expensive
compensation packages that have made teaching the
best-compensated field in the public sector -- and why taxpayers
can no longer afford the cost.
Read more today. And listen to the
Dropout Nation Podcaston why the high cost
of traditional teachers compensation will lead to teacher
quality reforms.
The
danger of demonstrating such an absence of strong, thoughtful
political positions should be kept in mind by Republicans and
Democrats alike. It is often better to be principled (and even a
tad ideological) to a fault than to be milquetoast by a mile.
Read More
All of this points to
the reality that the NEA and AFT find themselves increasingly on
the defensive as taxpayers, actuaries, school reformers and even
legislators agree that traditional teachers' compensation
packages are neither fiscally tenable nor effective in improving
student learning.
Read More
For President Barack Obama, Scott Brown's
victory over Martha Coakley in the U.S. Senate special election
could at the very least lead to a drastically scaled-down
version of his healthcare reform plan. But for the National
Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers and
suburban school districts, it may mean at least $27 billion and
perhaps, even more.
Read more.
As U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne
Duncan is garnering much praise for rallying states to increase
the number of charter schools and overhaul how teachers are
trained and paid. But a string of stories about Chicago Public
Schools, where Duncan served as its chief executive, are
reminders that no one, not even Duncan, is a miracle worker when
it comes to overhauling America's traditional public school
districts. (Read
more)
Two years after moving to convert some of its inner-city D.C.
schools into charters, the Archdiocese of Washington cobbles
together plans to sustain Catholic school education for the long
haul -- and still educate some of America's poorest children.
(Read
more)
...according to education activists such as
Century Foundation senior fellow Richard Kahlenberg and Gary
Orfield of the Civil Rights Project at
UCLA, charters represent “racial isolation” and
“minority segregation,” and their presence “enforces unequal
educational opportunities.” Why? Because few white children,
especially those from middle-class households, attend them. (Read
more)
By the time Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm
announced Monday that she was looking to place full control of
Detroit Public Schools into the hands of her duly-appointed
financial czar, Robert Bobb, its reputation as America's
most-abysmal traditional public school district had already
become as much a national joke as the Motor City itself. (Read
more)
But Flight 253 also proves that
muscle-bound superheroes found in The Iliadand the Terminatorseries are little
more than mythology. As psychologist Philip Zimbardo declares,
anyone can be a hero when the time calls for it...
But these days, the nation's other teachers
union is getting some qualified praise for supporting a handful
of initiatives that tip-toe toward the prescription....
advocated by the school reformers the union has long opposed...
...Six million
American children are wallowing in the nation's special
education programs. Boys make up two of every three students
diagnosed with learning disabilities, an oddity given that
learning disabilities should occur natually among both genders.
Contrary to general perceptions, most are capable of the
kind of academic performance expected of students in regular
classrooms...
Even among the nation’s notoriously woeful
urban public-school systems, the Los Angeles Unified School
District (LAUSD) has long stood out for its pervasive academic
failure and bureaucratic intransigence...
Check out the
special picture gallery accompanying this report. Click on
the photos to read the narration.
The Latino teens graduating from the Animo Leadership High
School just outside Los Angeles probably aren't familiar with
the arguments for expanding Head Start and pre-kindergarten
programs offered by advocates such as Nobel Laureate James
Heckman. And the Latino middle-schoolers being prepared for high
school and college success by the KIPP Summit Academy in the
working class San Francisco suburb of San Lorenzo aren't up to
speed on attempt to link academic achievement and immigration
trends offered the Manhattan Institute's Heather Mac Donald and
other immigration restrictionists.
But the concerns of parents have never simply been focused on
just academic rigor. Social climbing, boosting careers, seeking
values- or religious-based instruction, even exposing their
children to diverse culture, is as much a concern, if not more
so... And yet school reformers, like those in the public
education establishment, fail to take the needs or desires of
parents to heart.
The Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation has
found that being the prime funder of the nation's school reform movement isn't easy. But
has it learned its lesson? Read my
profile.
Political
Roadblocks to Quality Data: The Case of California
For education reformers and officials in other states – many of
which are facing similar problems – California offers lessons on
how not to improve school data.
I detail more about this in Political
Roadblocks to Quality Data: The Case of California, which
is part of A Byte at the Apple, the Thomas B. Fordham
Institute's book on improving school data. Check out the chapter
here. You can also get the full book -- which features
chapters on important aspects of making education better for
America's children -- at Fordham's
Web site.
MEDIA APPEARANCES
EDUCATION
AND LABOR Reforming
Schools A Labor Watch recap of a conference panel featuring
myself, Cato's Neil McCluskey and Tim Carney of the
Examiner.
WHEN FOUNDERS GET ANGRY Storming the Gates of Kinko's An
intervew on Marketplace about the feud between Kinko's (now
Fedex Office) founder Paul Orfalea and buyout firm Clayton,
Dubilier & Rice.
MULTIMEDIA
Rebecca Camissa's Documentary Journey A documentarian discusses
how the Fulbright Scholar Program helped her get her critically-acclaimed documentary,
Which Way Home,ooff
the ground. Produced by RiShawn Biddle and directed by Jerry
Murphy for the Fulbright Scholar Program.
