Curmudgucation Week
Students Travel in Packs
It's true-- with few exceptions, we encounter students in groups. Student groups are like chemical reactions, where every element present changes and is changed by the other elements encountered.This is news to almost nobody. Every teacher can tell a story about that one student whose absence would make a usually-difficult class well-behaved. Or maybe the tale of that class where several top stude
EdPost Dials It Back, Still Whiffs
Over the last forty-eight hours, the rapid responders from Education Post ran into a rapid response of their own. They decided to go after Carol Burris, and while various bloggers called them on their response out in the bloggosphere, Burris and many other responders descended upon the comments section, particularly for the post by the extremely feisty Ann Whalen.By the end of the day, Whalen was
YESTERDAY
EdPost Flexes Rapid Response Muscles
Well, it turns out that Education Post will be good for one thing. Its rapid response function (in which apparently a cadre of hired bloggists are ready to grab their keyboards from their mantles and launch like internet minutemen) will allow the rest of us to see when Pro-Public Education folks have scored a palpable hit.By that measure, Carol Burris landed a big hit with her Four Flim-Flams colu
An Open Letter to My Alma Mater Re: TFA
Dear Allegheny College:I was reading your latest alumni email with its nice batch of "Hey, you're great" quotes. It was nice in the usual boostery way, but when I saw an endorsement from Teach for America, it brought me up short. I'm sad to see Allegheny link itself to TFA. Let me explain.I came to Allegheny in 1975. I enrolled because the school was not too far from home in NW PA, it wa
SEP 18
Another Call for a New Conversation
Patrick Riccards, of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and the Eduflack blog, has made a fairly reasonable addition to the burgeoning sub-genre of "We reformsters need to get a new conversation started, because we are losing the old one" posts. But this one is interesting."Seeking Collaboration Between Reformers, Educators" is his contribution to the field. The
SEP 17
Is Standardization a Virtue?
One of my largest points of disagreement with the champions of reformy stuff is on the value of standardization.For instance, lots of folks (including some who don't like the Common Core) will observe as an article of faith that it would be better to have national standards than have different standards from state to state. To them, it seems as obvious as air that this is true. To me, it seems as
Research + Politics = Bad News
At the Fordham's flypaper blog, Andy Smarick has some sobering news. Yes, Smarick is from the reformster camp, but what he reports this week is concerning to anybody who cares about education in this country.Smarick is reporting about the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the government agency responsible for gathering and sorting the vast ocean of data related to American schools.
SEP 16
Brookings Hits the Bathroom Scale
When it comes to amateurs dabbling in education, it's hard to beat the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings. Perhaps it's inevitable that economists want to weigh in education, since economics is another area in which everybody and his brother believes themselves expert.But Thomas Kane offers some grade A baloney with a side of ill-considered metaphor with "Never Diet Without a Bathr
TPM & the Anti-Core Attack Problem
Over at Talking Points Memo, Conor P. Williams uses the pushback against Campbell Brown as a jumping off point for addressing what he diagnoses as an anti-core ad hominem attack problem.In the attacks sites, the heated rhetoric, the strong language, Williams sees an echo of the virulent opposition to She Who Will Not Be Named. And he draws a line to his own experience, in which he finds anti-core
Choice Finance Fantasies (Part II)
I love the internet. In particular, I love the way it allows for conversations to break out between people who would never meet or interact in real life. This is one of those conversations.First, I wrote this piece about what I see as some fallacies in the ideas behind choice financing. Soon afterwards, Neerav Kingsland wrote this response at the blog reliquishment. Kingsland is the former CEO of
SEP 15
Efficiency vs. Excellence
We've all been discussing efficiency lately, thanks largely to the release of the GEMS report on educational efficiency, and while there's one critical point that has appeared tangentially in much of the discussion (including the original GEMS paper), I think it's worth pulling it out and looking at it by itself.Efficiency and excellence are not the same thing.In fact, excellence and efficiency ge
Granddad Learns About The Common Core
[Update: As you can now see, the video has gone away. The Youtube account "Common Core," a group of filmmakers from around the country, has shut down after only three days. Probably their best move, all things considered. If I can find a link to the video anywhere on the interwebs, I'll be sure to repost.][Update: We'll see how long this lasts, but God bless stlgretchen for preserving th
SEP 14
The Antidote to Money
Money has poisoned many of the conversations in this country, shaping the debates about everything from wars in foreign lands to the future of American public education. Money has an unprecedented power to control the public discussion simply by taking control of the major media (which are, after all, contained within just six corporations).Ironically, today there is also unprecedented power for o
Education Next Plugs Research Proving Not Much of Anything
This week Education Next ran an article entitled "The First Hard Evidence on Virtual Education." It turns out that the only word in that title which comes close to being accurate is "first" (more about that shortly). What actually runs in the article is a remarkable stretch by anybody's standards.The study is a 'working paper" by Guido Schwert of the University of Konstanz
SEP 13
Why So Politicized?!
Education Post is beginning to look like an organization dedicated to the proposition that it takes an entire village to replace She Who Will Not Be Named. Though they have not yet announced plans to run a large urban school district into the ground, they are laboring mightily to make themselves a clearinghouse for all the top talking points for the Core and its attendant reformy barnacles.They ha