in the U.S. 
Earlier this week, I asked readers to contribute their education-related predictions for 2011. I received some great responses, and I’ll share them all in this post.
If you didn’t get a chance to contribute earlier, though, I’d encourage you to leave one-to-three of them in the comments section. At the end of the year, I’ll revisit them and we’ll all see who among us has good powers of prognostication.
And, if some of you wonder what the point is in making predictions, you can go to The New York Times which recently published a piece on Why Do We Need Predictions? Here are a few of the reasons commentators there gave: it’s fun, we need “positive illusions,” it helps us gain a “sense of control,” the human identity is based in
Here are my choices for the best and worst education events of the past year; what are yours? Leave a comment!
Worst education events of 2010:
1. Class sizes increasing in NYC and many other areas of the country, due to budget cuts and wrong-headed priorities.
2. The rapid spread of credit recovery and substandard “virtual” instruction, with the goal of replacing real-life teachers with computers. Meanwhile, Joel Klein and Rupert Murdoch wait in the wings, eager to make a buck off online learning and the further degradation of public education.
3. The huge amount of money poured into the political campaigns of candidates who backed the agenda of the privateers, the funding of pseudo-documentaries like Waiting for Superman and The Lottery, the proliferation of fake grassroots groups like Stand for Children and Michelle Rhee’sStudents First, the week-long horror show that was NBC’s Education Nation, all singing the same demented tune of privatization and high stakes testing. These political action funds, organizations, and media extravaganzas were financed and promoted by the same small group of powerful
Steve Smith, left, president of the Providence Teachers’ Union, and Providence School Superintendent Tom Brady are embarking on a grand experiment to create a labor-management partnership to turn around low-performing schools.
The Providence Journal / Bill Murphy
While teachers and administrators duke it out in Central Falls, a very different relationship has emerged in Providence, where Supt. Tom Brady has forged a partnership with teachers’ union President Steve Smith to revamp four low-performing schools.
Brady, who arrived here 2½ years ago with a mandate to restore the district’s tarnished reputation, had a choice: he could unilaterally impose a new world order on the district’s struggling schools or he could collaborate with the union and jointly develop a plan to transform the schools.
Brady chose to work with the union. The labor-management partnership quickly garnered national attention, winning accolades from none other than Randi Weingarten, president of the 1.4-million-
