Latest News and Comment from Education

Saturday, October 22, 2016

Catch up with CURMUDGUCATION: Nobel-Winning Evaluation Advice + PA: Bad Charter Bill Still Not Dead

CURMUDGUCATION:

Catch up with CURMUDGUCATION: Nobel-Winning Evaluation Advice  + PA: Bad Charter Bill Still Not Dead









Nobel-Winning Evaluation Advice
Sometimes it takes a Nobel Prize-winning economist to confirm what many of us in education have been saying for years-- reformsters are doing teacher and school evaluation all wrong. The writer pointing this out if Derek Neal (University of Chicago), over at Education Next of all places , The prize-winner he's talking about is Bengt Holmstrom , a Finnish economist at MIT. Holmstrom has done pretty

YESTERDAY

Breaking News: PA Professsors Announce Strike's End
Per the union website . No comments from me yet, just news. Oct. 21, 2016 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE For more information, contact: Kathryn Morton, kmorton@apscuf.org or 717-236-7486 The strike is over. Faculty negotiators have reached a tentative agreement with Pennsylvania’s State System of Higher Education. The three-year deal, ending in June 30, 2018, concludes a strike that began 5 a.m. Wednesday
PA: Bad Charter Bill Still Not Dead
Like that bad enchilada that you just can't keep down, Pennsylvania's HB 530 just keeps coming back. In fact, it appears it will be back this Monday. I wrote about this damn thing last summer , and it has ben kicking around since early 2015. The bill was floated by Mike Reese , who was actually trained to be a history teacher before landing in admissions offices on the college level. Nevertheless,
PA: Professor strike update
As is typical in the early stages of these things, the main news being reported from the third day of the Pennsylvania strike by college and university faculty is that this is the third day of the strike by college and university faculty. I have heard numerous reports of students joining faculty on the picket line and attempts by schools to keep students going to classes-- even if nobody is teachi

OCT 20

My Visit To Preschool
I'm in Seattle for almost a week, visiting my daughter, her husband, their newborn son, and their almost two-year-old son. This provides all manner of entertainment (you'll notice blogging has run a little slow), but today it provided an opportunity for me to be a visiting grampa (actually, my grandparental name is "Gump") at my grandson's pre-school class. Like many education observers, I have an
John King's Civics Lesson
The e-mail from the charter-shilling group Center for Education Reform announced breathlessly that John King "joined the chorus of education leaders, elected officials and respected members of the African-American community in criticizing by the NAACP‘s decision to demand moratoriums on charter schools." He didn't. He spoke in front of the National Press Club at a luncheon this week, said many thi

OCT 19

PA: About the Professor Strike
As just about everyone has heard today, the professors at fourteen of Pennsylvania's state colleges and universities are on strike (due to a quirk in our system, Pitt, Penn State and Temple are in a different state university system). This is the first such strike in ever. It is hard to know exactly what's going on in the first days of a strike. I was president of my own local union over a decade
PA: Court Decides in Favor of Privacy
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court this week issued a long-overdue ruling with far-reaching consequences for school privacy issues. The case dates back to 2009, when some folks asserted that Right-To-Know laws meant they could demand home addresses and phone numbers for teachers. The state teachers union fought the issue, but the lower court ruled that teachers should have the right to argue why speci

OCT 18

Dear Hillary. Re: Education
We already know that there is no public education candidate running in this Presidential election. But we find ourselves in the unenviable position of having to choose between someone would subject public education to bad, disruptive, destructive, dismantling policies and someone who would just drop a nuke on public education. Not that anyone really wants to talk about public education, mind you.

OCT 16

The NAACP: Ignorant Dupes?
They probably had their press releases ready. Despite the full-court lobbying, the charter fans had to have an idea which way the wind was blowing. And so when the NAACP announced the official, full-throated adoption of the call for a charter moratorium, charter fans were ready to explain why it should be ignored. As always, nobody leapt in with less nuance or modulation than Jeanne Allen at the C
ICYMI: Goodies for the week (10/16)
Here's some reading for the day. remember to share the stuff you like; only you can prevent good writing from vanishing into the white noise of the interwebs. Before We Create Opportunity School Districts.. A Georgia teacher talks about what Opportunity District threats look like on the ground, and what would be a