bodner079

Bloomberg entering the race is a potential game-changer – and no President would be better for education reform – but I think odds are slim that he actually runs. It would require either Trump or Cruz getting the Rep nomination (~50% chance) and Sanders winning the Dem nomination (~30% chance according to the betting sites, but I think this is too high), so that math works out to, at best, a 15% chance.   But him even considering running pressures Hillary to stop her tack to the left, especially on ed reform, which is great: Mr. Bloomberg has lamented what he considers Mrs. Clinton’s lurch to the left in her contest against Mr. Sanders, especially her criticism of charter schools and other education reforms that he pushed as mayor and has continued to support since leaving office. Pushing Hillary back toward the center has the added benefit of increasing her chances of winning the general election.   At the end of the day, only one of our...

STOP THE PRESSES! This is a total disaster for de Blasio and Fariña – and, most importantly, for NYC schoolchildren (who account for 2% of all U.S. schoolchildren). Ernie Logan, the long-time head of the NYC principals' union, is a good man, highly respected, not known for throwing bombs, and no fan of Bloomberg and Klein, so for him (and his members) to say that they have "lost confidence in the de Blasio administration" and that "a majority of [principals] would say they probably had a better shot of being able to effectively do their job under the old administration" is incredibly stunning and damning: Now, however, Mr. Logan says he — and by extension, the 6,000 members of the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators — has lost confidence in the de Blasio administration. In a column to be published in the union's newsletter this month, Mr. Logan writes of the Education Department, "Sadly, in the timeworn tradition of the D.O.E., there are so...

I have very mixed feelings about this: The  Supreme Court  will hear arguments on Monday in a case that could deal a severe blow to organized labor. The justices will consider whether government workers who choose not to join unions may nonetheless be required to help pay for collective bargaining. The California teachers who brought the suit say the requirement violates the First Amendment, as they say they are being forced to subsidize activities with which they disagree. Should the teachers' argument prevail, public-sector unions across the nation, already under political pressure, could lose tens of millions of dollars and find their effectiveness diminished. I'm no fan of the teachers unions (to say the least), but in general, I think the decline of unionization in this country has been a total disaster – a major contributor to wages that haven't kept up with productivity gains and corporate profitability, the hollowing out of the middle class, and the surge in income ...

The biggest news in a long time is that both houses of Congress passed and President Obama signed into law the Every Student Succeeds Act, the long-awaited successor to NCLB/ESEA. While I have mixed feelings about it – as does everyone – I'm glad it passed, as I think (hope) that it'll be better than continuing the status quo.   a) Below is a NYT editorial about it: When federal lawmakers took up a draft proposal  earlier this year , they seemed poised to weaken the law by watering down its protections for impoverished children. Fortunately, the compromise version that  passed the House last week  and that deserves to pass the Senate as well preserves important parts of the original law while eliminating some significant flaws. …The bill isn't perfect. But it is a considerable improvement over the original law and would continue pushing schools toward better performance. b) Here's an article in the NYT about it ( www.nytimes.com/2015/12/03/us/house-restores-local-edu...

To Rotherham's concern, check out this  report  by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:  Most States Have Cut School Funding, and Some Continue Cutting December 10, 2015 Most states provide less support per student for elementary and secondary schools than before the Great Recession. Most states provide less support per student for elementary and secondary schools — in some cases, much less — than before the Great Recession, our survey of state budget documents over the last three months finds.  Worse, some states are still  cutting eight years after the recession took hold.  Our country's future depends crucially on the quality of its schools, yet rather than raising K-12 funding to support proven reforms such as hiring and retaining excellent teachers, reducing class sizes, and expanding access to high-quality early education, many states have headed in the opposite direction. These cuts weaken schools' capacity to develop the intelligence and...

Chris Cerf, former NJ state ed commissioner and now superintendent in Newark, responds to The Prize: The book was considerably more balanced than the book tour. As it got out there and in dozens of presentations on the radio and in bookstores around the country, it became a very reductionistic, simple story that was distorted in a number of important respects. Probably the biggest casualty was the failure to acknowledge the many successes that have occurred over the course of the last several years. GRADUATION RATES The Newark Public School graduation rate is 70 percent this last year. That is up from the high 50's four years ago. It has been up every single year for the last three years, and the 5-year graduation rate is now nearly 73 percent. That should be an above-the-fold, banner headline. BEATING THE ODDS When you disaggregate the data and you really look at the numbers, you'll see that the percentage of African-American children who attend public schools in Newark that b...

Good to see the results of this study: Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg's policy of closing bottom-ranked high schools did not harm students at the shuttered schools and benefitted later students who were forced to enroll elsewhere, according to a new study. The study , which looked at 29 high schools whose closures began during the first half of Bloomberg's tenure, is sure to rekindle debates over one of the most divisive education policies in the city's history. It found that students who would have attended the shuttered schools landed at higher-performing schools — in many cases, new small schools that the city created in droves during that 2002 to 2008 period — and ended up with better academic outcomes. "They were prevented from attending the low-performing schools that were their most likely choice," said the report's author, James Kemple, executive director of the Research Alliance for New York City Schools, a nonpartisan center based at New York Univers...

A great response to Scalia: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia might have thought he was simply debating the merit of race-based admissions at the University of Texas. But he  lit a fire  when he cited a friend-of-court brief that argued some blacks would do better at " slower-track " schools instead of being "pushed ahead in classes that are too fast" for them. Scalia's comment came from "mismatch theory," which ironically advocates for the soft bigotry of low expectations. According to its proponents, affirmative action harms students who aren't ready for a strenuous academic environment. In a ripple effect, they will avoid struggle by opting for easy majors or dropping out altogether. Therefore, it's best that they be guided to the shallow end of the educational pool: less-selective institutions where they can be more comfortable and successful. The only thing new about the mismatch theory is the name. It's actually the same old instit...

The latest OECD report, showing again that we're stagnating educationally while our economic competitors aren't: The United States continues to fall behind internationally in producing a college-educated workforce as other nations send more of their citizens to university. And in the very early years, many countries are now sending a much higher percentage of their kids to preschool than the United States. Topic:  International comparisons What it means:  The U.S. isn't keeping up with other nations' education gains The data showing that other nations are investing more than the U.S. in both early childhood programs and advanced degrees comes from a new report released Tuesday by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The more than 500-page report analyzed the education systems of 46 nations and highlighted long-term trends from preschool to Ph.D. programs. "The U.S. hasn't backslid, but other countries have made big gains," said...

Gotta love this! English teachers were once satisfied if they could prevent their pupils from splitting infinitives. Now some also want to stop them from using words like "good," "bad," "fun" and "said." "We call them dead words," said (or declared) Leilen Shelton, a middle school teacher in Costa Mesa, Calif. She and many others strive to purge pupils' compositions of words deemed vague or dull.  "There are so many more sophisticated, rich words to use," said (or affirmed) Ms. Shelton, whose manual "Banish Boring Words" has sold nearly 80,000 copies since 2009. Her pupils know better than to use a boring word like "said." As Ms. Shelton put it, " 'Said' doesn't have any emotion. You might use barked. Maybe howled. Demanded. Cackled. I have a list." So does the Powell River Board of Education in British Columbia. Its website provides  a list of 397 alternatives to the dreaded ...

Incredible how crooked these profs are:  To Catch a Journalist: Rutgers Ed Professor in Pay-for-Play   https://youtu.be/6YsakFE5J5g

What an incredible increase:   "At the university level, the Chinese now make up 31 percent of all international students in the U.S."  

A great, short article (attached) in Sports Illustrated about the past and current hoops history of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who was All-Ivy at Harvard (three years ahead of me, so I saw him play a few times).   I've met him a few times in past years at education events -- what a great guy (and he's been an amazing great Sec. of Education).   Here's a link to the awesome no-look pass Duncan made to Skyler Diggins at the Celebrity All-Star game in 2/14, which the SI article mentions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qout28N6hIw  (0:13). And here are all the Duncan highlights from that game:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWTGUBDiwJ0  (3:23)

This is so unbelievable, horrifying and upsetting. Even after the sensational gang rape at UVA story in Rolling Stone was thoroughly discredited, I still figured that something awful must have happened to "Jackie", and in the traumatic aftermath, she fabricated something much worse. It now appears clear that nothing whatsoever happened to her – rather, she invented everything in a demented attempt to win the affection of a fellow student.  Ryan Duffin was a freshman at the University of Virginia when he met a student named Jackie. Both teenagers were new to campus in September 2012, and the pair quickly became friends through a shared appreciation of alternative rock bands such as Coheed and Cambria and the Silversun Pickups. Early on, Duffin sensed that Jackie was interested in pursuing a romantic relationship with him. Duffin valued her friendship but politely rebuffed Jackie's advances for more. Just days after he met her, Duffin said, he was goaded into a text message...

I thought you might be interested in this piece I wrote about the Tennessee pre-k study:  http://www.usnews.com/opinion/knowledge-bank/2015/10/20/take-that-new-study-on-tennessees-pre-k-program-with-a-grain-of-salt     As I write in the piece, I don't think that Vanderbilt study can/should be interpreted as offering definitive evidence that pre-k doesn't work. We have enough compelling evidence from other sources--including large-scale, high-quality publicly funded programs in New Jersey, Boston, Tulsa, and Chicago--that pre-k can work. But the Tennessee research should be a wake-up call to early childhood advocates, funders, and policymakers that actually implementing pre-k with quality requires a lot more than just making some money available and setting rules about class sizes and teacher qualifications. We need smarter policy design; a conscious effort to build the supply of diverse, high-quality pre-k providers; and a real strategy to attract, develop, and retain tal...

Hillary (and Bill) have a long history of breaking with the teachers' unions, which bodes well: …after Bill got elected governor four years later, many of his early boosters from labor felt betrayed.  Specifically, the teachers unions were infuriated over the couple's advocacy of an education reform proposal that mandated teacher testing. The National Education Association and its Arkansas affiliate worked against the Clintons after they backed the measure in 1983. — Hillary's first significant public role was heading an education commission for Bill,  a precursor to her role as health care czar in his first term. The efforts she supported were heartily endorsed by the business community, including a dark-money nonprofit group funded by WalMart founder Sam Walton. (Tom and Matea Gold explored this in part one of their story on the Clinton money machine yesterday, which  you can read here .) — Hillary was booed by teachers when she showed up at education forums as Arkansas...

This is great to see – kudos to Camden Superintendent Paymon Rouhanifard and his team! Keep an eye on what's happening in Camden – it's a model for other cities. Camden's graduation rate has increased for the fourth straight year, school district officials said Thursday, and stood at 64 percent for the last school year. The graduation rate for the 2011-12 school year was 49 percent. The state took over the district the following year, with Gov. Christie appointing Superintendent Paymon Rouhanifard to lead the city's schools. Almost 80 more students graduated last year than in 2011, district officials said. Not only has the overall rate improved, but the graduation rate among Latino students has increased from 44 percent to 66 percent since 2012, Rouhanifard said Thursday at a panel discussion among students at Brimm Medical Arts High School, one of the city's three magnet high schools. The graduation rate among special education students rose from 38 percent to 56 p...

Speaking of exciting things happening in some cities, what Eli Broad is proposing in LA is incredibly bold and revolutionary: Eli Broad made his fortune in construction and real estate. But he's building a legacy as a philanthropist and an education reformer. In September, the Broad, a $140 million museum of contemporary art, opened in downtown Los Angeles at the corner of a revitalizing Grand Avenue and 2nd Street, across from the Walt Disney Concert Hall. That same month, the  Los Angeles Times   published  a leaked  memo  detailing Broad's proposal to revitalize L.A.'s sclerotic public school system. Working under the auspices of his family foundation, Broad would gather some of the biggest names in private philanthropy—Gates, Walton, Ahmanson, Bloomberg, Annenberg, and Hewlett, as well as David Geffen, Kirk Kerkorian, and Elon Musk—to open 260 new charter schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District over an eight-year period, with an enrollment goal of...

Yet another study showing that a key part of Bloomberg and Klein's reform strategy benefitted students (yet de Blasio and Farina are abandoning it nevertheless): Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg's policy of closing bottom-ranked high schools did not harm students at the shuttered schools and benefitted later students who were forced to enroll elsewhere, according to a new study. The study , which looked at 29 high schools whose closures began during the first half of Bloomberg's tenure, is sure to rekindle debates over one of the most divisive education policies in the city's history. It found that students who would have attended the shuttered schools landed at higher-performing schools — in many cases, new small schools that the city created in droves during that 2002 to 2008 period — and ended up with better academic outcomes. "They were prevented from attending the low-performing schools that were their most likely choice," said the report's author, Jame...