CURMUDGUCATION:
Curmudgucation Week
Meet the New NEA Presidents
In election results that surprised nobody anywhere, NEA delegates crowned heir apparent Lily Eskelson Garcia the new presidents of NEA.Liana Heitin reported on the election for EdWeek, and... well... I'm excited? Bemused? Worried about Garcia's susceptibility to cognitive dissonance."I believe Secretary Duncan is sincere...""And I absolutely believe he is sincerely wrong," she
Duncan Slapped by NEA Rank and File
The NEA resolution calling for the departure of Arne Duncan will be picked apart at great length this weekend. I'm pretty sure that Arne is not looking at his paper this morning thinking, "Well, damn. I guess I'd better resign then." Nor do I think his resignation would accomplish much in practical terms. But it sends a message-- several, actually-- and those are interesting on their own
YESTERDAY
Hess: Free Press Charter Stories "Unhelpful"
The Detroit Free Press recently ran a huge, extensively researched and reported story on Michigan's charter schools. They concluded, among other things, that charters hoover up a billion dollars with little transparency, that many charters are simply an ATM for family and friends of operators, that even really bad charters have stayed open for decade, and that charters don't do any better at educa
Van Roekel, Fordham and Defending the Brand
What a difference a year can make.A year ago, Dennis van Roekel's message to NEA members was, "Well, if not Common Core, then what in its place?" This year, his message was, "Common who? Hey, look at this toxic testing badness!"With all the tight aim of a finely-crafted focus-group-tested PR campaign, DVR used the NEARA convention as a launching pad for a campaign to push back
JUL 03
Who Would Replace Arne Duncan
This question turned up on twitter again yesterday, and it represents one more popular daydream-- the end of Arne Duncan's tenure as Secretary of Education.I understand the appeal. Duncan has become the poster boy for reformsters, the face of everything teachers hate about this administration's education policy. When the administration has something annoying or distressing to say about education,
JUL 02
To Tim Elmore: Here's What You're Missing
At Growing Leaders, Tim Elmore ends his column "The Cost of Bad Teachers," with a question: "Am I missing something here?"Yes, Tim, you are. I will, as you request, try to talk to you.You lead off with a pair of questions:Can you imagine a world where doctors, who are simply pitiful at practicing medicine, get to keep their jobs as physicians? Or where CEO's, who can't lead a c
PARCC Is in Trouble
This story has been emerging in bits and pieces and being reported on as parts of other stories, but it deserves to be mentioned many places, because it has the potential to wreak some serious havoc in this coming school year.Last year, Pearson won the contract to develop the PARCC test. This may have been because Pearson was the only bidder, and that may have been the case because the contract wa
JUL 01
Duncan on Harris v. Quinn
"Collective bargaining is a fundamental right that helped build America’s middle class. I’ve seen firsthand as Education Secretary that collaborating with unions and their state and local affiliates helps improve outcomes for students. The President and I remain committed to defending collective bargaining rights."That's not an excerpt. That's the whole thing. Here's the complete Duncan
Charter Party of the Year: The Tweet Report
I believe that charter schools were once a viable option, a way to diversify and expand the possibilities available within a public school system. That possibility has all-but-vanished, crushed under the transformation of charter schools from an educational offering into an investment opportunity (thank you, obscure tax law). Nothing quite underlines that transformation like the annual National Ch
Brown Presents NY Lawsuit Talking Points
In the June 24 NY Daily News, Campbell Brown presented the basic talking points for the newly-manufactured NY road show version of the Vergara trial. Here we go.A Stirring AnecdoteHer story centers on the Williams familyOne of their children... felt so strongly about the lack of instruction she was getting at her Rochester school that she wrote an essay about her experience. Instead of getting hel
JUN 30
A Little Help, Please!
Next week, I'm off to Seattle for a 2.5 day session on PLCs. Our school district is trying to pilot PLCs, and my principal has asked me to attend. He's working his posterior off to get our school on track, so I would probably walk across coals if he asked, but the fact that my daughter and son-in-law just moved to Seattle is definitely a bonus.Anyway, we have a variety of breakout sessions to atte
Thomas Newkirk's Superlative Look at CCSS
Thomas Newkirk's Holding Onto Good Ideas in a Time of Bad Ones was already a book worth reading. In 2009, it was a very thoughtful response to some of the twisting of instruction that was happening in English classrooms. Not a practical strategies book, but a book for thinking about the philosophical foundations of what we do.Turns out that in 2013 Newkirk added a Postscript to the book entitled &
The Mystery of Excellence
Diane Ravitch's recent columns about Ms. McLaughlin, one of the undeservingly employed terrible teachers of the Vergara trial, underlines one of the central problems of the whole teacher evaluation portion of the reformster dream.Ms. McLaughlin won awards for teaching excellence not once, but twice in her career. And yet one of the plaintiffs found her to be grossly ineffective. Now, it's possible
JUN 29
The Uses of Small Data
Brian Kibby, the president of the Higher Education Group at McGraw-Hill, took to Huffington Post last week to praise Small Data."Big data" might be the most hollow, misused term in education. For all of the chest-pounding about how big data has come to education, how are colleges and instructors actually using it --now, in 2014? Kibby notes that we've long heard that Big Data will change
A Few Blog Recommendations
This will be post #400 on the blog, and I thought I'd use it to direct your attention to some other blogs. This is by no means an exhaustive and comprehensive list-- there are tons of people blogging about education these days, and I keep discovering new (to me) voices. I've put off writing this kind of post because I don't want to short-change someone, but I'm going to go ahead anyway, because be
John King's Story
Listening to people tell their story often gives us a clue what they are thinking about, how they do the connecting of certain dots. That was my reaction to watching this video from a Manhattan Institute appearance by John King. Sometimes people who are sincere about wanting to fix education in this country (I do not assume all reformsters are cynical profiteering greedhounds) make connections bet
Being White Guys
I'm going to write this companion piece to last night's post about race and gender and then I'm going to set this topic aside (until I don't).Preamble and Disclaimer Let me make two points before I start this exercise in gross generalization. These apply to the previous post as well.1) I cannot possibly speak for everybody in any category and to every person's experience. If you want to point out
JUN 28
For White Guys
A few days back, I reported on a study that noted seven trends in the teacher workforce. Two of those trends noted were 1) the teacher workforce is getting more female and 2) the teacher workforce is getting less white. Whether it is synchronicity, or just heightened awareness, I've seen both of those topics flare up in various discussions about the interwebs.While very aware of these topics, I ha
We Need Fewer Nice Teachers
A colleague tells the story of taking an on-line graduate course and being chastised for calling out fellow students for some fairly low-information posts on the topic. Could my colleague please be more polite, reword the posts so they were less "offensive." So he did, and the original posts were erased. The punchline, of course, is that the topic was censorship.For some reason, it is of
The Attack on Colleges Continues in the NYT
In the battle for American education, new fronts (aka new profit and growth opportunities) have been opening up steadily from Pre-K and Pre-Pre-K all the way up to colleges and universities. Today's New York Times includes a peek at what the attack on colleges and universities will look like.Kevin Carey says not only do American public schools suck, but so do American colleges and universities.Kev