Why Do Feds Love Scalability?
It's time once again for the DOE's Charter Schools Program Grants for Replication and Expansion of High-Quality Charter Schools competition. This program nominally supports the administrations love affair with scalability. The scenario that has been alluded to time after time is this: 1) Many charters experiment with many educational thingies 2) One of the educational
Seven Trends in the Teacher Work Force
In April, the Consortium for Policy Research in Education released a paper entitled "Seven Trends: the Transformation of the Teaching Force." What the title lacks in sass and flash it makes up for in accuracy, and although the most recent data are from 2012, it still makes for interesting reading. Let's look at the seven trends.LargerBetween the late 80s and 2008, the teaching force grew
How To Buy Support
Because the entire reformster universe runs on money (rather than conviction or proof or widespread grassroots support), it's useful to understand how buying support works.It's perhaps most useful to understand how it doesn't work. Sometimes people get the impression that some shadowy figure delivers a bag of money to Representative Burgwarble or the Big Fat Ideas Thinky Tank and the recipient say
6-25-14 Curmudgucation
CURMUDGUCATION: What Should Arne Have SaidThere's been a pig-pile on Arne today over his ill-considered announcement of the DOE's new get-tough-on-states policy regarding students with disabilities (I know, because I was one of the first pigs on the pile).However. The answer that Arne came up with is stupid, but the question it addresses-- are all students with disabilities getting the educational