Can you guess how much rich Washington residents pay in taxes? Can anybody guess why the legislature refuses to meet its own funding requirements for education?
We need alternative paths to the classroom. Mind you, we don't need paths that are shortcuts. We don't need an alternative path that is just a five week long truncated training that wouldn't prepare a camp counselor for a summer with jumpy ten year olds. We don't need alternative paths used by charter operators to train people to fill their own charter openings with not-too-qualified bodies. And w
At EdWeek, Andrew Ujifusa offers an explanation. In " Here's Why You Can't Understand Your State's New Plan for Education " he points the finger at jargon and offers some rather fun analytics for education argle-bargle. The top four bits of balonial verbage are, in descending order, stakeholder, engagement, professional development, and needs assessment. Yes, this can only end well Ujifusa breaks
Full disclosure-- I made the number 6.3 out of the air, because frankly I've lost track of the various versions of ed reform that we've seen. But we're definitely on to something new. The new ed reform has staked out a position against bureaucracy and paperwork. This conversation starts with a Rick Hess piece , which becomes a thing because Betsy DeVos decided to quote it in her address to charter
Here's lead from the EdWeek article : Pediatrician Priscilla Chan and Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg are gearing up to invest hundreds of millions of dollars a year in a new vision of “whole-child personalized learning,” with the aim of dramatically expanding the scope and scale of efforts to provide every student with a customized education. The power couple's Big Initiative has announc
Last night, my district's school board voted to raise taxes. They did it at a public meeting. I could have attended it easily (they meet just across the street from my home) as could any member of the public. I could also have commented on the budget situation, and I could have based my comments on having looked at the proposed budget, a document that has been available for at least a month. And i
The basic question was minor. The implications are huge. The bottom line is that supporters of using public tax dollars to support private religious schools got some major support from the Supreme Court today. A church in Missouri wanted a shot at some public monies to resurface a playground. The state said no. The trip up through the levels of US courts began. Five years later, here we are. What
Personalized Learning continues to gather steam as a way to privatize and standardize education. And for educating yourself about the movement and what it really means, I'm here to recommend the latest edition of Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider's podcast, Have You Heard. Berkshire and Schneider talk to guest Bill Fitzgerald about some of the more important aspects of this magical "algorithmi
Bellwether Education Partners want to overcome the obstacles standing in the way of performance-based compensation (aka "merit pay" aka "fun ways to reduce total personnel costs for a school district"). But if you want writer Jen Bolson Meer's fancy definition, that's "Performance-based compensation is an approach where some or all monetary compensation is related to how employee performance is a
I'm pretty sure that before this summer is over, I will miss one of these Sunday reading lists, because the three week old twins in my house exert some sort of time warping field. But today I'm on it. Here are some things to read from the
