Inspired by the Sol Stern debate at City Journal, Andrew Coulson has turned poetical in praise of overseas education markets in the style of Gilbert & Sullivan:
They are the very models of a modern market school system.
It doesn’t matter how often the punditocracy’s dissed ‘em.
In the shanty towns of India, Kenya and Nigeria
Are schools known to the readers of Cato and Edutheria.
They are private, parent-funded, and they outperform the public schools,
After application of the best econometric tools.
You’ve got to admire a man who can get “econometric” into verse.
In a fiery Salon column, Garrison Keillor tells Democrats to stop bashing No Child Left Behind and Reading First. Teaching kids to read well is a lot more important than Bush bashing.
“Nice, caring, sharing people” — not “Republican oligarchs in top hats and spats” — are running the schools, Keillor writes. The failure to teach low-income students to read competently is their failure.
There is much evidence that teaching phonics really works, especially with kids with learning disabilities, a growing constituency. But because phonics is associated with behaviorism and with conservatives, and because the Current Occupant has spoken on the subject, my fellow liberals are opposed.
Liberal dogma says that each child is inherently gifted and will read if only he is read to. This was true of my grandson; it is demonstrably not true of many kids, including my sandy-haired, gap-toothed daughter. The No Child Left Behind initiative has plenty of flaws, but the Democrats who are trashing it should take another look at the Reading First program. It is morally disgusting if Democrats throw out Republican programs that are good for children.
True, though I don’t think NCLB, which was bipartisan from the start, should be seen as a Republican program. Phonics instruction is not inherently the property of the GOP or George W. Bush.
Via D-Ed Reckoning and This Week in Education.
Education Intelligence Agency lists $12 million in donations by the National Education Association. Not surprisingly, the big money went to state initiatives to increase state education spending and boost the minimum wage or to defeat a measure to limit state spending. The union also gave small donations to liberal groups such as People for the American Way and to gay, black, Hispanic and Asian-American groups. I can’t figure out why the East Meadow Jewish Center, a New York community center, got $5,000. Even more puzzling is the $10,000 for the Funniest Celebrity in Washington contest. I guess it must be an attempt to suck up to politicians and journalists.
I’ve got a mini-column up at Britannica Blog on teachers’ conservative values based on a study I wrote about here.
Mathew Needleman of Creating Lifelong Learners is hosting this week’s Carnival of Education. Check out Mr. Teacher’s post on his Lunch Bunch: Students who’ve done all their homework care more about eating lunch with their teacher than about getting ice cream.
Once a low-performing middle school, Denver’s Bruce Randolph School is improving, but its principal and teachers think they could do better with more freedom from district and union rules. The district agreed to grant autonomy, but the teachers’ union blocked the plan. From the Denver Post:
Teachers and administrators at Bruce Randolph School want control over the school’s budget, teacher time, incentives and hiring decisions and to be free from union and district red tape that they say is impeding student progress.
Denver’s school board last month agreed to the Bruce Randolph autonomy proposal, but the teachers union balked Tuesday at permitting much of the school’s request — which sought waivers from 18 articles of the union contract and parts of six other articles.
Randolph’s principal, Kristin Waters, said the union counter-proposal would have meant “more hoops” to jump through, not less.
Greg Ahrnsbrak, a union representative at the school, called the counterproposal half-hearted and said the waivers offered essentially insert the union into decisions about hiring and teacher time.
“They are doing everything they can to block a real reform effort,” Ahrnsbrak said. “Reform is happening. You’re either going to be on the bus or beneath it. I want to be driving it.”
If the school can’t get autonomy within the district, Randolph teachers may try to turn the school into a charter with help from private foundations.
Via EIA’s Intercepts.
For kids planning to enter a science fair, BooksforKids Blog recommends useful books with project ideas.
On the fiction front, I was once a fan of the Danny Dunn books. Invent anti-gravity paint for your next science project!
Teacher evaluation is a mess, write Thomas Toch and Robert Rothman in an Education Sector report.
A host of factors — a lack of accountability for school performance, staffing practices that strip school systems of incentives to take teacher evaluation seriously, union ambivalence, and public education’s practice of using teacher credentials as a proxy for teacher quality — have resulted in teacher evaluation systems throughout public education that are superficial, capricious, and often don’t even directly address the quality of instruction, much less measure students’ learning.
Recognizing great and terrible teachers isn’t all that hard, writes Eduwonk. The challenge is to evaluate “teachers in the vast middle” at a reasonable cost.
. . . what we need are different evaluation systems at different points in a teachers’ career and that is where the investment to benefit ratio becomes a lot clearer. A system that could really differentiate talent and help teachers grow in that vast middle would be a worthy investment
Teacher salaries and benefits cost $400 billion a year.
At Life on the Road, the Carnival of Homeschooling is rolling along. Tiffany, the host blogger, is eight months pregnant with her third child; the family runs a business from their RV home. And you think you’re busy.
Good charter schools are keeping families in Cleveland, reports the Plain Dealer.
If not for Old Brooklyn Community School, Kerrin Shafer would be an ex-Clevelander.
“It was a savior for us,” said Shafer, who has two children in the State Road charter school. “We were ready to leave the city because of the schools. We stayed because of this school.”
. . . Though some charters have been plagued by dismal test scores and fiscal chaos, the best have emerged as anchors in communities where parents had once given up on public schools.
Forty percent of Citizens’ Academy parents said the high-performing charter school “played an integral role in their decision to remain in Cleveland,” a survey found.
The 2007 Charter School Law Deskbook includes charter-school “laws and regulations for each state.”
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