By Kenneth J. Cooper
One of the more important but overlooked provisions of No Child Left Behind was aimed at making sure poor children get a fair share of the better teachers. In the decade since the federal education law was adopted, however, the “teacher equity” provision has not been widely implemented, and the national pattern of low-income students receiving instruction from less qualified teachers has not changed much.
With about an hour to go before I leave for vacation, I can't resist making one last parry in my ongoing debatewith Matt Yglesias about standardized tests and teacher merit pay.
First, though Matt is a dear friend, I bristle at his suggestion that my positions uncritically echo a pro-union line. Those who read my work regularly will know that I believe there is little evidence for the claim that teachers' unions are the primary barrier preventing the United States from closing the achievement gap or beating Finland and Canada's butts on international assessments. There are simply too many other deep-seeded differeces between those societies' educational systems and our own; what they all share in common is that the teachers within them are unionized. What's more, American states without teacher collective barganing perform worse educationally than those with strong unions. That doesn't mean the unions are responsible for strong academic performance, just that it is doubtful that they are signficantly hindering it.
That said, I carry no water at all for those progressives (and there are not that many of them, by the way) who say there's no use in focusing on school reform until we beat poverty and fix health care, child care, and the like. If I thought that were true, I wouldn't spend so much time reporting on and writing about interesting, innovative educational programs like the Children's Literacy Initiative in Newark or Tech Valley High School in Albany. I do
Some day the story will be told of why NEA President Dennis Van Roekel decided to push for a first time ever presidential endorsement a year ahead of time.
I don’t get it. Those that support it are luke warm. Those that are against it are pissed.
I am convinced Obama would have received the official endorsement next RA. But this just seems smelly and manipulative by many delegates.
And that it is not in the bag is confirmed by this morning’s Illinois Caucus meeting. First a pro-Obama speech by the NEA VP Lily Eskelsen. Then who? Why DVR himself, with a speech declaring that our very future depends on an endorsement NOW! Then John Stocks comes to the podium. Stocks is the incoming Executive Director.
The NEA RA in Chicago will go on until next Tuesday. This is a long affair. The first two days are mainly logistical discussions within the state caucuses.
So a little humorous relief is good and welcomed.
And David Brooks, the house right-wing doofus on the op-ed page of the NY Times provided it this morning.
I can never read a Brooks column without recalling his ode to William Buckley when Buckley finally died a few
The almost $100 million ATM receipt that was noted and posted on Gawker a few days ago turns out to have belonged to none other than David Tepper, founder of hedge fund Appaloosa Management, whom GothamSchools identifies as a major charter school supporter in New Jersey.
Nearly a hundred million dollars in a checking account is
An Orange County Superior Court judge has ordered the district attorney's office to remove its main investigator and three top deputies from the case against a group of college students accused of disrupting an ambassador's speech at UC Irvine.
Judge Peter Wilson's dismissal Thursday of the prosecutors attempts to remedy the D.A.'s unauthorized use of privileged documents to help build a case against the "Irvine 11," a group of UC Irvine and UC Riverside students charged with conspiracy to disrupt a speech by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren in February 2010.
Wilson's move rids the case of lead investigator Paul Kelly -- who was expected to testify against the Irvine 11
Are all the programs in the table above perfectly designed and operated? Of course not. Is every dollar spent by state/local governments necessary? No. Nevertheless, when I look at this breakdown of government spending, most of what I see are vital and/or generally popular programs that serve an impressively wide variety of public needs. Many people may be wary of “government”
Three thousand high schools across the country serving nearly half a million students had no math classes higher than Algebra 1 in the 2009-10 academic year, and more than 2 million students in about 7,300 schools had no access to calculus classes, according to federal data released this week.
The new Education Department data details the unequal resources available to the poorest and neediest students. Statistics released from what is known as the Civil Rights Data Collection, covering approximately 7,000 school districts and more than 72,000 schools, also showed:
Read full article >>
NEA's budget committee this morning presented a modified 2010-2012 strategic plan and budget for feedback and review that would cut some $17 million from the budget that the Representative Assembly approved last year.
NEA Secretary-Treasurer Becky Pringle said the modification was necessary due to a "double whammy" of membership losses coupled with projected teacher-salary raises that didn't materialize.
(99 percent of NEA's budget is based on dues. And the dues formula for classroom teachers, for instance, is basically the number of members times the average salary of active full-time-equivalent teachers.)
The union lost 20,000 members last year, expects to lose 10,000 more by the end of this year, and an additional 30,000 in 2012. So, the cuts are based on a projected loss of 60,000 million members in total, a $14 million hit, plus a $3 million increase in the cost of its unified legal-service program, which helps protect teachers' employment.
The modified budget is just a proposal at this point; the entire Representative Assembly will vote on it in a few
Throughout the student movement of the 1960s, most American college students were denied the right to vote.
From the birth of the American republic the voting age had stood at 21. Pressure for earlier voting had been building since 18-year-olds were first drafted in the Second World War, but despite the baby boom, the student movements of the sixties, and the deaths of thousands of Americans under 21 in Korea and Vietnam, reform went nowhere for decades. It was only in May 1970, after National Guard troops shot and killed four students during a protest at Kent State University, that Congress finally took action.
In the aftermath of Kent State, with the nation reeling from the spectacle of its own troops gunning down its own students, the 18-year-old vote was introduced as an amendment to the Voting Rights Act. One senator threatened to filibuster the renewal of the Act if that amendment was not incorporated into it.
The Voting Rights Act, as amended, was signed into law by President Nixon that June. The Supreme Court declared the provision unconstitutional that winter, ruling that Congress didn’t have the power to enfranchise
Luke Carman, right, debriefing a lesson with Bill Kennedy. (Photo by Justin Snider)
CHICAGO—“It takes a lot to be a teacher,” Luke Carman says. “Every decision that is being made, you’re simultaneously doing 17,000 other things. It requires a lot of intellectual forethought, persistence and energy.”
Carman, 23, has spent the past two years preparing for a career in the classroom through the University of Chicago’s Urban Teacher Education Program (UTEP). The Rochester, N.Y. native will complete the program today, on July 1st.
Carman could have taken a shorter route to the classroom by doing Teach For America (TFA) or a similar alternative-preparation program, but he wanted more extensive training before embarking on a job he hopes to do
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