CURMUDGUCATION: MA: Vulture Convocation

CURMUDGUCATION: MA: Vulture Convocation:

MA: Vulture Convocation

Even as I type this, up in Boston there's a day-long gathering going on that is emblematic of all the wrong things driving ed reform.

It's a conference entitled "Leveraging Research and Policy to Improve K-12 Education in Massachusetts" and it was organized by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the MIT School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative (which seems like an odd name choice unless MIT has decided to create educational inequality on purpose, and say so).  The conference is going on at the Federal Reserve Bank, and it sounds like a day full o' joy.

After a continental breakfast (cheapskates) there were welcoming remarks from Robert Triest of the FRB and Sanjay Sarma of MIT. Then-- well, let me just run down through the whole program:

9:00 AM-- Alternative School Models

A short presentation about the Lawrence Public Schools Turnaround by three folks from the Harvard Grad School of Education. Lawrence has been pioneering turnaroundiness for a few years, making them beloved by the reformy classes. But they're only the warm-up act for

"Charters Without Lotteries: Testing Takeovers in New Orleans and Boston."  It takes three people from MIT and one from Duke to explain how New Orleans isn't so much about educating students as it is about testing takeover models. And congrats, Boston, for being lumped with NOLA-- be sure to mention that the next time Boston's Mayor Walsh complains that he is being unfairly tarred as a school privatizer. Also note that two of the MIT guys are also NBER guys-- that's the National Bureau of Economics Research, which is great news because economists have always been a boon to public education. 

There's also a panel discussion featuring Christopher Gabrieli (who is somehow the head of both CURMUDGUCATION: MA: Vulture Convocation: