Curmudgucation Week
Zip Codes and Schools
In the Washington Post, Neerav Kingsland writes about The Cost of Neighborhood Schools. Kingsland is specifically addressing the pushback on a DC plan to move away from the neighborhood school model toward something more New Orleans-y (Kingsland is the former chief executive for the New Schools in New Orleans).Advocates, therefore, worry that communities would be weakened if students from across t
Unity
Unity is hard.When leaders of a group start by saying, "We need to be sure we have total unity on this," the rest of the sentence is almost never "and so we are going to sit down with you and really listen to your concerns and ideas." No, generally a call for unity within a group comes with some diplomatically-worded version of "so shut up and get in line."It's unders
YESTERDAY
A Bad CCSS ELA Lesson Exemplar
TNTP recently posted an article in HuffPost that I've addressed elsewhere. But one portion of Rachel Evans' piece deserves its own look, because it's a great min-capsule of what is wrong with much so-called Common Core so-called lesson so-called planning.Learning to teach to the Common Core standards is sort of like learning to cook a complicated dish, with a lot of ingredients that you can’t just
TNTP Bravely Drowning In Irony
A recent HuffPost piece by TNTP's Rachel Evans is a fine example of the kind of bad argument being put forth in the world of ed these days. This is how Core supporters often work-- a construction of misdirection about how to use techniques we already know to combat problems we don't have.Evans opens with a picture of the poor, tired first year teachers of her Arizona Teaching Fellows seminar. Ariz
AUG 07
Study Says Money and Family Cast Long Shadow
I'm just going to steal the lede from the article on John Hopkins HUB website in June:In a groundbreaking study, Johns Hopkins University researchers followed nearly 800 Baltimore schoolchildren for a quarter of a century, and discovered that their fates were substantially determined by the family they were born into.Karl Alexander and the late Doris Entwistle published the results of the study in
Dolly Parton. Really.
So you say you'd like a cheerful story for a change. Fine. Let's talk about Dolly Parton. Really.You may or may not be a fan of Dolly Parton, Country Icon and Oddly Constructed Barbie Doll, but if you're not paying attention, you might miss Dolly Parton, Philanthropist. And not Investment Philanthropist or Disruptive Innovation Philanthropist. Parton is pretty old school.Parton came from real pove
AUG 06
Conservatism vs. Ed Reform (Pt. II)
Andy Smarick continues his examination of the uneasy interface between conservatism and ed reform. I took a look at Part I of this series previously, but this time I'm going to skip over the bulk of his post to look at his conclusion, where he posits four issues that he is chewing over.Why doesn’t ed reform seem to appreciate dispositional conservatism?Why doesn’t ed reform ever discuss what shoul
NYC Looks For Teachers on Craigslist
The NYC Teaching Collective (formerly the NYC Teaching Residency) seems to be have hatched from a simple idea-- why pay TFA to provide us with underqualified, undertrained teacher bodies when we can just do it in house?If nothing else, their mission statement is more direct:The mission of the NYC Teaching Collaborative is to recruit and prepare talented, committed individuals to become effective t
Power Social Marketing for Teachers
Patti Fletcher's credentials would not necessarily lead you to take her seriously. She is the global leader of the Cross-Portfolio Marketing and Social Marketing Center of Excellence teams at IHS, and is the Co-Founder and CEO of PSDNetwork, LLC, which sounds like a huge gobbledygook salad with jargonaisse dressing. Fletcher's work "centers on enablement and culture change with a particularly
AUG 05
Who Wants To Be South Korea
South Korea is on the reformster short list of Countries We Want To Be Like (right up there with Finland and Estonia). She Who Will Not Be Named frequently cites her own year in South Korea as a formative experience (from which she somehow jumps to the conclusion that every child in America needs the same experience).And yet, a piece in the Sunday, August 1, New York Times reminds us why South Kor
Without Tenure...
Yesterday, twitter blew up with responses to Whoopi Goldberg and the View having one more uninformed discussion of tenure (and, really, we need to talk about why education discussions keep being driven by the work of comedians)."#WithoutTenure I can be fired for...." was the tweet template of the day, and even though I rode that bus for a bit, it occurs to me this morning that it misses
AUG 04
Does Reformster Character Matter?
When I posted this morning about the giant confluence of issues and money that is K12, Inc., I received this comment from ready Candy Crider:I would rather you address the curriculum - is it sound and will it help students learn and love learning? Bashing the people who built it tells me nothing about the program itself."Bashing" is a fairly plastic term in bloggy circles. Sometimes &quo
K12 Defies... Well, Everything
K12 remains the top dog in the junkyard of cyberschooling. It provides an instructive lesson in how a good pile of cash and friends in the right places can keep a business afloat even after people have poked holes in the hull.There was never anything about the organization that didn't look like a red flag. It was set up by hedge fund manager Ronald Packer and propped up with money from junk bond k
AUG 03
Petrilli Reports on Common Core Wars
On the eve of his ascension to the top spot at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Michael J. Petrilli wrote a post to reflect on the current state of the "Common Core Wars," a term which in itself demonstrates Petrilli's gift for precision in language (see, it's the Common Core that is embattled, not American public education).He hits a couple of points on his Update from the Front, all wo
Can't vs. Won't
A million years ago, when I was student teaching at Wiley Jr. High in Cleveland Heights, my co-operating teacher told me that there are two rules in teaching: 1) Some students will not learn. 2) There is nothing the teacher can do to change Rule #1.Pedagogical reform reliably returns to the issue of Can. If we've heard it once, we've heard it a million times-- all students can learn (most
The Permanent Politicizing of Education
It's completely predictable that in the wake of CCSS, other problems will arise. Folks who think that we can chase the Common Core away and afterwards go back to How Things Were Before are kidding themselves-- even if CCSS were to vanish tomorrow, it has already changed the educational landscape in ways we can't fully grasp yet.One sign is in Lyndsey Layton's Washington Post article about a wave o
AUG 02
CCSS Myths That Won't Die, Already
You may think that certain Common Core bunk has been debunked so many times that it would finally crawl back to the PR cave that it crawled out of and, if not die, at least spend the weeks eating twinkies and watching AMNTM marathons. But no.Here comes Cynthia Dagnal-Myron over at HuffPost with an article that looks as if it were written in the summer of 2013. But no-- August 1, 2014. It's a sober