This Week In Education

This Week In Education

NCLB: Blueprint Commentary Cheat Sheet

Want to know what all the smartypants at National Journal are saying about the Duncan blueprint but don't have time to read through all their blather?  Me, neither.  But now you can check out this entirely unofficial but extremely handy dandy summary, which may or may not be entirely accurate but will save you a lot of time. Not that I can see that anyone's said anything particularly brilliant or new, or that there many people who's opinions you don't already know or can't easily predict.  As I and others have noted over the past week, the Duncan blueprint isn't particularly Hill-friendly, may not fully address the underlying issue of teacher salaries, may not measure schools any better than NCLB does, and seems increasingly unlikely to be considered and passed this year.  I guess that was pretty predictable, though. :-)

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March 25, 2010 | Posted At: 11:04 AM | Author: Alexander Russo | Category: NCLB News , On Maryland Avenue

Textbooks: Where's Arne When We Really Need Him?

Arne Duncan is everywhere -- in the health care bill, in the NCAA basketball tournament, etc. -- but notably AWOL on one of the most important education issues in the nation:  textbook adoption.  States like Texas are deciding the textbooks that get used nationwide for the next decade (Alarm over textbook changes) but not a word, not a proposal, not a peep from Obama's wonder boy.  Read here to get a sense of what it's like from the inside to write and write textbooks to go along with state demands -- a link Mike Smith kindly sent me from the Morning News.  How are schools supposed to get better if the materials they're using aren't any good?  What good are the promised high standards and better assessments going to be if the textbooks don't match them?  It's a messy issue, no doubt, and not a sexy or easily solved one, but a key part of the education puzzle and a missing element in Duncan's full-court education onslaught.