This Week In Education
Written by former Senate education staffer and journalist Alexander Russo, This Week in Education was an opinion blog that covered education news, policymakers, and trends with a distinctly political edge. (For archives prior to January 2007, please click here. For posts after November 2007, please click here.) This blog is no longer being updated.
Education
Opinion
Sylvan Sued
If you think it's just the free, government-paid tutoring that is sometimes problematic, check out this Law.com article (Law.com - Sylvan Center Told to Refund Tutoring Costs) about how a New York City mom says she borrowed $11k to get both her kids tutoring, but didn't see as much improvement as promised in Sylvan marketing materials. So she sued. And the preliminary findings went in her favor. Of course, most states promise kids an education, and not all of them get that, either.
Education
Opinion
PEN NewsBlast Guru Rides Off Into The Sunset
The news is at least a week old, but I would be remiss if I failed to notice that the infamous Howie Schaffer, who authored and popularized the PEN Weekly Newsblast e-newsletter and has been a great friend to this blog, is off to Diversity Best Practices, an organization dedicated to "improving cultural and racial sensitivity in the workplace." Longtime readers will recall that Schaffer was profiled as one of the HotSeat interviews early last year, in which he opined on all sorts of interesting things. "On the HotSeat, "SuperHowie" Schaffer slams empty school reform ideas and lame blogs, comes clean about his sketchy past as a spammer, crushes on his favorite education writers (platonically, of course), and claims that the Blast is an equal-opportunity critic. Right, Howie." Congrats and condolences. Stay in touch.
School Climate & Safety
Opinion
Parents, Kids, Librarians Get Ready
Parents and teachers (and Harry Potter fans) would do well to remember that the latest (last) Potter book is out at midnight Thursday, according to Chicagoist (Libraries Gear up for Potter mania). "Unless you’ve been living under a rock since February, you already know that the seventh and final chapter in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and The Deathly Hollows, will be released on July 21 at 12:01 a.m."
Federal
Opinion
What Do People Really Think About NCLB?
What do people really think about NCLB? ETS will attempt to answer that question a little later today with the release of their big survey on the public's attitudes towards the law. "This year’s survey titled, “Standards, Accountability and Flexibility: Americans Speak on No Child Left Behind Reauthorization,” examines the public's views on what direction the nation should take moving forward as Congress considers reauthorizing the law. The survey was conducted for ETS by the bipartisan opinion research team of Peter D. Hart Research Associates, Inc. and The Winston Group." If you hurry, you can make it over there on time: 11:30 a.m. -1:00 p.m.; Phoenix Park Hotel, Ballroom, 520 North Capitol Street, NW, Washington, D.C. Spellings, Miller, et al are supposed to be there. All bets point to a much more positive result than the one from a couple weeks ago.
School Climate & Safety
Opinion
The Worst Cheese Sandwich Ever
"An effective alternate meal has to do two things: meet federal nutritional standards and flunk child taste tests," according to this recent LA Times article on schools' effective -- but tough-minded -- efforts to get parents to pay up on their children's cafeteria bills. "The cheese sandwich, typically served on untoasted whole wheat bread, apparently qualifies as one perfectly healthy stinker of a meal."
School & District Management
Opinion
Vallas Ditches Own Going-Away Party
There's a great overview of the Vallas years in Philly by Susan Snyder from Sunday's Inquirer (Vallas in with roar, out with rancor) that details the tumultuous last days of Vallas in Philly, plus the deterioriation -- ignored nationally and in the press -- of Vallas' tenure there.
School & District Management
Opinion
High-Tech Paycheck & Report Card Problems In LA and Chicago
All teachers in LA and Chicago want is to get paid on time -- and in the right amounts -- and not to have to write end-of year grades and report cards by hand. As Andrew Trotter describes in this EdWeek story (Glitches in Los Angeles Payroll System Spark Furor), problems switching to a new payroll system have been enormous, and so far at least neither the consultants (Deloitte) or the software maker (SAP) are accepting blame. In Chicago, the largely unreported problems include paychecks and student grades -- leaving teachers and parents in the lurch when it comes to finishing out the year, figuring out who has to go to summer school, and long lines in the summer heat.
Education
Opinion
Jay Mathews On Michelle Rhee: Didn't I Just Say That?
One of the challenges of blogging all the time is that you end up thinking -- true or not -- that you already thought and said nearly everything you later read. Take today's Jay Mathews piece in the Washington Post (Maverick Teachers' Key D.C. Moment), in which he fleshes out the significance of fresh-faced Michelle Rhee being given the top spot over the DC public schools, describing her as "the first of their generation of educational innovators named to head a major school system and a symbol of their efforts to help inner-city children." Hmm. Good point. However, in one of my best posts from last week (as well as in a WAMU segment), I described her thus: "Young, female, and a minority, Rhee is...the first of her school reform cohort to take step into a big, real-world education job, and as such is the focus of the expectations and hopes of whole slew of TFA-type educationistas who hope to follow Rhee into superintendencies and more." But oh well, it's a blog, and I'm sure I'm not as original a thinker as I think I am. Plus which, I've got some other issues with the piece -- mainly that it reads like a big wet kiss to TFA, and by extension KIPP, which Mathews might want to recuse himself from writing about in news pieces at this point.
School Climate & Safety
Opinion
Cafeteria Food Fights In The YouTube Era
"The Internet is fueling an extreme version of the high-school food fight, threatening innocent teachers and students with ham sandwiches, eggs and rotten tomatoes," according to this article (Internet fuelling extreme food fighting, police warn). "Police said Thursday that students are using the Internet to prepare for the fights, then posting videos on websites such as YouTube."
Education
Opinion
A Familiar Sentiment: Adults Create Test Anxiety, Not Kids
Over at The Quick Ånd The End, Sara Mead's post about what's really causing kids so much test anxiety (teachers and administrators) is good -- so good in fact it reminds me that I said pretty much exactly the same thing nine months ago. To her credit, Mead adds some ideas for how to address the problem. Now when Senator Clinton next talks about sources and solutions for test anxiety the idea can properly be attributed.
School & District Management
Opinion
Do Charter School (And Magnet) Lotteries Really Work?
One of the most persistent -- and hotly disputed -- criticisms of charter schools is that they don't take all kids. This is old news. But one key issue that I've never seen addressed is the notion that the list of kids who win the lottery to get into a charter is substantially different from the list of kids who actually enroll and start school in the fall. The perception is that the two lists are substantially different, and that kids who drop out of the process or decide to go elsewhere aren't replaced by lottery kids but rather by principals' choices -- and that there's little or no monitoring. Have charter schools addressed this concern, and is it legitimate or not really that much of a problem?