A Clock?! Seriously-- a Clock!!??

This is how a public school loses the support of rational humans with brains.

On the heels of a Slate piece last week reminding us about how the juvenile justice system "eats kids for breakfast," today we get the story to go with this photo that's rocketing around the interwebs.

Because I'm only a fake journalist, I can drop any pretensions of impartiality-- everybody involved in this was a dope.

The English teacher who freaked the hell out over a home-made clock was a dope.

The police who put this 98-pound ninth grader in cuffs was a dope.

The police who was quoted as saying that Ahmed Mohamed was "less than forthcoming" was a dope. Honestly, you've just been arrested for an engineering project-- you can't possibly predict how the words out of your mouth will be interpreted. You came to school and said, "I've got a clock" and the school screamed, "He's got a bomb!" At this point, as far as you know, "I'm thirsty" will be met with "He's taking hostages and making demands!!"

The school-- MacArthur High School of Irving, Texas-- responded quickly with a letter, and whoever actually wrote the letter was also a dope.

While we do not have any threats to our school community, we want you to be aware that the Irving Police Department responded to a suspicious-looking item on campus yesterday. We are pleased to report that after the police department’s assessment, the item discovered at school did not pose a threat to your child’s safety. 

Well, there is one threat to your child's safety-- there's always the possibility that school and law enforcement officials will absolutely lose their shit because some child brought an engineering project to school.

But the letter goes on to explain where the real burden lies-- on the parents and children. "I recommend using this opportunity to talk with your child about the Student Code of Conduct and specifically not bringing items to school that are prohibited." Because I'm sure that the list of prohibited items includes home made clocks!!

Seriously-- look at this kid and consider just how anybody could conclude he's a credible threat.



I hope that MacArthur High School and the local police experience a huge, burning, thorough national embarrassment. I hope they have an opportunity to look themselves in the eye and say, "Damn, we acted like a bunch of dopes."

In the meantime, MacArthur High might want to consider the high irony of touting its recognition for its use of cutting edge technology and amending its STEM initiatives to include the warning that while it's cool to invent things, you probably shouldn't show any body.

Would Ahmed have been better off with another name, heritage, and skin color. No doubt. But the whole school and community would be better off with less Just Plain Stupid behavior.

I know there will be people trying to be uber-reasonable and saying, "Well, you know. Maybe there's more to the story." I don't think so. I can't imagine any context in which the behavior of the teacher, the school, and the police is excusable. Okay, maybe if Ahmed had previously tried to blow up the school --or fake blow up the school (in some versions of the story they're now accusing him of a "hoax bomb" because handcuffs are always the best response to a prank, which this clearly wasn't and damn-- I can't even) which would clearly have been brought up by now if it were true. So, no. No, there's no circumstances that make this treatment by a school of a student in their charge okay, at all, even a little.

An English teacher. Right now I'm hugely embarrassed for my profession.

Mrs. Jobs Antes Up

Laurene Powell Jobs came out of the Wharton School of Business with an MBA and went to work for Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs. She started a health food business and went to Stanford's business grad school. And then she married Steve Jobs.

She's no lightweight. She's spent time working in various philanthropic undertakings, including College Track, a group that works to support "underserved" students in getting into, and through, college and they haven't done poorly. Her husband died after a long bout with pancreatic cancer at age 56, which is too young to die from such a crappy disease no matter how much money you do or don't have.

Jobs is now responsible for a huge pile of money, mostly as part of a trust that owns, in addition to a giant chunk of Apple, 7.3% of the Walt Disney Corporation.

Mrs. Jobs is rich, and powerful, and she would now like to fix schools.

The Good News

Jobs has said, “We want to make high schools back into the great equalizers they were meant to be."

Her new initiative is a huge grant competition called XQ: The Super School Project. 


The Super School Project is an open call to reimagine and design the next American high school. In towns and cities far and wide, teams will unite and take on this important work of our time: rethinking and building schools that deeply prepare our students for the rigorous challenges of college, jobs, and life.

The website is remarkably clear of even coded messages to implement a particular format or program. Teams are encouraged to self-assemble and then begin the work of figuring out what this super school would look like. "No one knows exactly how to build the next American high school."

Then the team is to start working out the details of how to manage and sustain their new concept.

The website encourages ideas like starting by looking at and talking to young people. What are their dreams and aspirations? Look, too, at the science of how children learn. Look at how to get them invested in their own learning. And nowhere did I see instructions to think about how you could scale your idea up for the whole country. Jobs was asked if she's talking about a charter school here, and she said that she doesn't know; I'm going to take that to mean she at least has an open mind on that point.

And at the end of the road, there's a fund of $50 million to help launch 5 schools. 

The Bad News

At the end of the day, is Jobs one more education tourist, dabbling with school-building, or is she one more Master of the Universe who thinks schools are just businesses?

Well, maybe.

The XQ site uses the language of business. You have to figure out how you'll manage your human capital and performance management. And part of Jobs previous experience in the education world is her membership on the board of NewSchools Venture Fund, a group specializing in helping hedge fundies make money off of the ed biz.

Her advisors in this adventure include Michelle Cahill, whose career in policy has included a stint working for Joel Klein in New York City, and Russlynn H. Ali, who was assistant secretary for civil rights at the USED and is currently head of the fiduciary board at Education Post. So, no actual teachers at the upper levels of this project. The tab for XQ has a fun rotating text feature that says alternately, "What if learning is a game?," "What if we take the desks outside," and "What if we knock down the walls," which are charmingly naive in a "Gosh, I bet nobody has ever thought of this before!" way. I wish Jobs would talk to actual teachers.

Jobs told the NYT, "The system was created for the work force we needed 100 years ago. Things are not working the way we want it to be working. We've seen a lot of incremental changes over the last several years, but we're saying, 'Start from scratch.'"

Start from scratch? Cool-- but the time frame on this puppy is not encouraging-- your initial concept proposal is due by November 15, with the first phases due by mid-February. I want to meet the working teachers involved in any of this, because if they're designing a school from scratch while actually teaching, I have much to learn from them about time management. But this certainly sounds like the sort of thing that a charter operation is better positioned to attempt.

There's that term "super school," as if the schools the rest of us ordinary plebes labor in are just ordinary schlubby schools. Which fits with the subtle suggestion by Jobs that no school, anywhere, is getting it right. Nowhere on the lists of things to consider do we find "Schools with successful programs." Given the requirements to put all this together, it seems certain that Jobs' super school will not be in a poor neighborhood serving poor children. That's fine. Rich kids need super schools, too.

And this is an entirely personal, subjective bias, but the whole thing smells of Palo Alto to me. I've had family living in the area, and the Silicon Valley is an odd place, filling up with newly rich tech millionaires who declare their support for social causes while simultaneously pushing their own local poor out of neighborhoods and housing and sight. I want to help the poor of the world, but if I see that raggedy poor guy on my street again, I'm calling the cops. But that's my own personal bias about the Jobs neighborhood.

So what have we got here

A very rich person with an interest in education, but no expertise or experience, who condemns the current system and turns to certified reformsters for advice on how to create a new system. Well, there's no way this can end badly.

On the other hand, I salute Jobs for using her own money and not simply coming up with a clever plan to use other people's tax dollars to fund her dream reform. I'm not optimistic, but there's no point in condemning the outcome of this competition before we see it. I'm definitely looking forward to the super school updates.

Brookings and CCSS Conservative Roots

Brookings Institute can always be counted on to come up with some confused coverage of education matters. But this time they have given David Whitman a platform from which to combat the conservative anti-Common Core hordes. Whitman was a reporter for US News who spent five years as Arne Duncan's speechwriter before jumping on Peter Cunningham's $12 million Core-boosting PR website.

Whitman is here to try to address what has to be one of the Obama administration's great frustration-- here they are implementing a set of education policies that are an extension of conservative GOP policies from years before, and suddenly conservative Republicans are lambasting it. It's like Nixon going to China and being called a Commie sympathizer by people on the left.

"The Surprising Roots of the Common Core:How Conservatives Gave Rise to ‘Obamacore’" is a challenging read, containing a pretty thorough look at the conservative pedigree of the Core that is wrapped in lots of heavily balonified conclusions.

Intro

Everybody keeps saying that conservatives hate the Core, and Whitman has the media quotes to prove it. But that's just not fair. In fact, Whitman says with the kind of shameless straight face that will exemplify his work, that the Obama-Duncan Department of Education "has substantially shrunk the federal role in advocating for anything resembling a model national curriculum, national standards, and national assessments." Which kind of ignores the whole "creating waivers that allow the Obama-Duncan department to effectively write law from the USED office" thing.

Whitman says that CCSS is out there still thriving in classrooms precisely because this administration didn't repeat the federal overreach mistakes of its predecessors, which is just... well, Not True seems like a gentle label. Let's say that this administration found more effective leverage and techniques for selling this policy, and a fortuitous time to make their move.

But Whitman is just setting the stage to say, in effect, it wasn't always this way. Once upon atime conservatives loved the whole national standards thing.

Honesty Gap 

Lordy, are these folks still trying to sell this piece of rhetorical fluffernuttery? Whitman wants to remind us that fifty different goalposts will not make our students ready to compete internationally, and that many states set their standards "pathetically" low, and that while high standards are no guarantee of awesome education, low standards insure that Kids These Days will continue to suck.


Poor Misunderstood Common Core

Before we can look at Core's history, we must understand what they are and aren't, says Whitman. He lists a whole bunch of Things They Aren't which I would make fun of as silly straw men except that I've seen all of these paranoid ravings decried in print, so I know he's not making them up. Not even "Common Core will turn your kids into gay commies."


Whitman counters with the usual inaccuracies. State standards. Written with input from teachers. "It bears repeating that the federal government had zero involvement in drafting the Common Core State Standards—it neither wrote, paid for, or participated in the development of the standards." It may bear repeating, but it doesn't bear scrutiny for factual accuracy.

Whitman correctly notes that the Common Core ball was already rolling when Obama took office, but he uses the adoption was strictly voluntary line, which is disingenuous at best-- states could refuse, but they couldn't easily afford to. And he slides past the waiver business entirely. He argues that standards and curriculum were confused by opponents, but I think Core supporters can carry plenty of the blame there. But he's correct to skewer guys like Ted Cruz with his "repeal every word of Common Core" pledge (after that, he will ban all Yeti from Florida). And I love Whitman just a little bit for this line:

And owing to the maelstrom of misinformation on the CCSS, the Common Core is fast approaching a Lord Voldemort-like status for conservatives as the insidious education reform with the name that must not be spoken-- even for conservative politicians who support, and who in fact (to paraphrase Ted Cruz), are implementing every word of the Common Core. 

Time for a History Lesson

Now Whitman enters into the useful and educational portion of his article. No, I'm not being sarcastic. Whitman is here to say, "Conservatives, you do not have to freak out about this stuff! It is totally your kind of thing!!"

To prove it, he goes back to Saint Ronald of Reagan and A Nation at Risk, with its call for "more rigorous and measurable standards." The desire for high standards, the interest in standards that were consistent and high from state to state-- that was a conservative thing. And Reagan's Secretary of Education William Bennett used language that Whitman finds coming out of Arne Duncan's mouth today.

Secretary Bennett in 1987 put together a book outlining " a sound secondary school core curriculum." The second year produced an elementary school counterpart. Bennett noted that the law barred him from implementing his grand blueprint, but he talked it up to conservatives and conservative governors in particular, and folks just loved it and did not freak out and scream "federal overreach."

Whitman sees the modern Core as a later draft of Bennett's work, and he is dumbfounded that conservatives have turned on it-- it has a strong element of the nation's founding documents, for crying out loud! And yet conservative critics still accuse it of being all manner of Commie loving brainscrubbery.

And now, G W Bush, who may lack Reagan's iconic conservative status, but still-- this is not some Commie simp, and Lamar Alexander was not some sort of bleeding heart liberal when he launched the America 2000 plan. Whitman dubs Alexander the Core's political godfather and Diane Ravitch their intellectual godmother; as he notes, her journey from conservative reformer to her current thorn-in-reform's side status has been well-documented in her own writing.

Whitman wants you to know that Bush's standards plan would have been wayyyyy more testy and inclusive of more fields than just English and math. Bush wanted voluntary standards, but couldn't get funding from Congress and finally did an end run around them to use grant money to get people to do the work.

The Bush-Alexander administration pushed hard for standards and for incentives for charter schools, sinking tons of money into promotion for a program intended to transform what happened in schools across the country. Alexander now says that Duncan overstepped his bounds in pushing the Core with the waivers, but Whitman wants to be clear that Alexander pushed pretty hard in his own day.

Whitman's research is relentless. Present-day GOP has renounced the Core, but 1992 GOP platform sounded a lot like Arne Duncan. Meanwhile, America 2000 finally collapsed, victim of a lack of center-based consensus and chipped away by Democrats, who didn't want to give Bush a "education President" win. By the early 90's, the standards were dead dead dead, Congress having driven a stake through their heart..

Whitman's observation is that CCSS succeeded where America 2000 failed because the leaders of the movement had learned some lessons the first time around.

Bottom Line? 

Whitman finishes up with a more-developed version of the usual call for conservatives to get behind the Core and how generally wonderful it is. That's same old, same old.

What's special about this piece is that it so thoroughly makes the case for a conservative pedigree for the Core. Ravitch, who knows the conservative roots of these policies better than anybody, has often marveled that the Obama administration has so thoroughly embraced conservative education policy. But I've never seen anyone address the point to conservatives themselves quite so thoroughly (it only adds to the layers of oddity that the person doing the addressing is a veteran of the Obama-Duncan administration).

The case for the Core is as weak as always, but this history lesson underlines how our current education policies really are just an extension of the work of previous administrations as well as highlighting how frustrated Core fans are to be fighting a tough battle against people they never thought they'd have to fight at all.

Forgetting History

So it's not 9/14, a date that carries no particular power. And after sitting in the cultural silence that follows any powerful observance, I'm reflecting again on 9/11.

Friday was a day not much different from many others. The social studies teacher whose classroom shares a door with mine was playing a documentary stitched together from footage of That Day. But teachers are already aware of what civilians are slowly realizing-- students in school, right now, have no memory of that day. My juniors were two years old. Some of my freshmen hadn't been born yet. To my students, who think of me as a thousand years old and their own elementary school years as eons ago, the September 11 attacks are as distant to most of them as the Vietnam War or World War II.

And I can't decide if that's a good thing or not.

I am seriously attached to the study of history. My student teaching kept me from minoring; the state of Pennsylvania's elevation of "social studies" over history kept me from adding it to my teaching certification. My class is shot full of it. I think human beings are absolutely hardwired to do history, to try to draw a consensus on what happened, why it happened, what it means. We do it for 9/11, for Vietnam, for the Great European War, and for the fight between Ethel and Mia last night at the restaurant.

My students deride history as the most worthless class they take, a class that has nothing to do with their present or their future. My students also like to drag out and rehearse their favorite stories of Things That Happened in Grade School.

We are hardwired to do history, and yet we also seem hardwired to forget it, if we even grasp it in the first place. I've watched my students for over three decades, certain that the world sprang into existence when they were born, unable to imagine what it will do when they die, and absolutely rocked to their core when someone does die.

We're a small place, but it happens. Accident. Disease. Suicide. The school is an entirely different place for a while, and then they spring back, stand back up and move on. Fourteen years ago, they did the same. I can't deny that the forgetting, the scabbing over, the pain's loss of immediacy and reality-- it all seems to be part of the healing.

And yet, the forgetting can seem callous. When I saw Titanic in the theater, I was braced, but it still hit me hard. Those people, crying helpless, floating in the water and slowly inevitably dying-- those were not a plot device or background color, but real people who really died that miserable, torturous death, and there we were, a theater full of people who had paid good money to eat popcorn and watch their deaths acted out for us. What the hell is that?

And the lack of historical memory, of ability to place themselves historically. We discuss works like William Bradford's account of Plymouth or Frederick Douglass's autobiography, and I inevitably have to explain, "This is a little less bland and boring if you can make yourself remember that this really happened to real people. It's not just a story."

My students have a hard time getting the horror of slavery. Many are pretty sure that racism is just when white people are really rude to black people, or call them names. They can see the pictures from the days of the Civil Rights Movement, and they can see that a lot of folks were really angry, but to get them to really see it and feel it is a challenge.

I'm reminded of all of this contemplating the slow tread of years in which we've watched 9/11 recede in the school, from something they view with somber concern, just as real as the time they fell down on the elementary school playground, to something they see just like one more movie about something that happened before the world was born.

How do I help them understand? How do I help them grasp their present reality when it's so hard to get them to really see, really feel, the foundation upon which it's built, foundation upon crumbled foundation, upon crumbled foundation, each new structure taking its unique tilt and twist and even broken instability from the ruins on which it was built? How do I get them to make sense of something like Ferguson or Dyett High or their own roots or whatever is going to erupt tomorrow?

Of all the teacher tricks I try to pull off during the year, this is the hardest, but probably also the most worthwhile, because how do you figure out how to be fully human in the world, how do you figure out how to live at the peculiar and unique intersection of roads on which you stand, unless you understand something about where those roads lead from?

Do No Excuses Affect Academics?

Last week at the Fordham blogsite, Kevin Mahnken touted some meta-research about "No Excuses" schools and their affect on the math and language scores on the Common Core Big Standardized Test. Well, actually they claimed to be researching “’No Excuses’ Charter Schools: A Meta-Analysis of the Experimental Evidence on Student Achievement,” but when we're looking at this kind of research, it's important to always remember that "student achievement" just means "test scores on that one high stakes test that narrowly covers a standardized test version of math and reading."

I took a swipe at the research paper itself, because you know I would do almost anything for you guys. But it is tough going for those of us not schooled in the subtle art of meta-research. But I did manage to pull out a few bits.

First, although the meta-researchers started with what I believe is technically known as "a whole buttload" of research papers, through a long and laborious process, they narrowed those down to ten papers. Of those ten, four were only about no excuses schools, two were about types of charters including no excuses, and four weren't about no excuses at all. So, six paper in the meta-analysis? I'm no meta-analyst, but that seems meta-thin.

What conclusions did they reach?

No excuse schools do better than other charters at raising math and reading test scores. They are better at improving math scores than reading scores, which stands to reason as standardized math tests are a little more prepable than reading tests which still, for instance, throw in random straight-up vocabulary questions. They also suggest that no excuses schools do better at raising scores in high schools than in elementary, though they admit that the research on no excuses elementary schools is pretty thin for even meta-slicing.

Some of the conclusions are transparently bizarre even to an untrained meta-observer:

According to Hill et al.’s (2007) standards, attending a No Excuses charter schools for one year closes approximately 25% of the Black-White math achievement gap and approximately 20% of the Black-white literacy achievement gap. A straightforward extrapolation of these results suggests that attending a No Excuses charter school for four to five years could eliminate the achievement gap.

I checked for any qualifier to this astonishing statement, but could not find anything remotely like "That is, any any student who wanted to go the school, was accepted by the school, and who was not shoved out of the school for being disobedient and non-compliant. And of course these results would not apply to any students with any sort of special needs." Surely this finding is not meant to suggest that any Black student could be plugged into a no excuses school and achieve startling success.

In fact the meta-researchers note that they believe they have insured that the sample is randomized by making sure to include research about schools that are oversubscribed and therefor had to use a lottery. But as I am not the first to observe, the process of choosing to respond to no excise charter marketing and navigating the application and lottery process has already insured that the school does not have anything like a randomly sampled student body. And that sampling gets even less random as the years go by and students flee or are pushed out the door of these highly regimented schools.

The writers meta-acknowledge that the research is narrow in its focus and that there's not much out there studying non-cognitive and other effects of charters, though they make sure to note the study that finds charter students are more likely to graduate (well, sure-- because charter students who aren't likely to graduate don't stay charter students for very long and are rarely replaced).

Mahnken is positively meta-giddy with excitement over this report:

We might have expected some optimism after witnessing the stupefying results at world-beating charter networks like KIPP and Success Academy. But it’s still nice that high-performing charters have both passed the eye test of policy commentators and are consistently feted by researchers as well. Now the only question is how the little guys grew up so fast.

But for anyone curious about no excuses education in action, you might consider tales of students going without lunch or bathroom breaks or high suspension rates or teaching young black students the importance of being submissive and compliant.

All of this continues to be justified in the name of student achievement-- except that all that means is higher scores on a single standardized math and reading test. Fans keep touting this result as proof that no excuses schools know the secret of raising students up out of poverty. As soon as I hear about the hundreds of poor students who have found well-paying middle class jobs because they are such good test-takers, I will start taking those claims seriously.

Core vs. BS Tests

In US News, Robert Pondiscio of the Fordham thinky tank offers some reactions to the recent Education Trust report on teacher assignments.

Pondiscio is no dummy-- he knows the report is essentially bunk, and he says so. The report, icymi, was a survey of assignments in six middle school classrooms in two urban districts, so not really a representative sample of much of anything. The report finds that mostly teachers are not giving assignments that "reflect the higher, more rigorous standards set by Common Core," and while the "research" is tissue-thin, the conclusion feels right to Pondiscio and others.

We could have a whole other discussion about whether or not the Core standards are higher or more rigorous (as well as a discussion about what those terms even mean). But for today, I'm going to let that go so that we can talk of why classrooms have not been transformed into the wonderland of higher order deep critical thinking that Core supporters were sure we'd have by now.

Pondiscio himself hits paydirt with this:

One veteran public school teacher and staff developer worries that we are paying the price for years of "de-professionalizing" the teacher work force. "'Do these things, use these moves and you'll be successful' – that's been the message to teachers for the past 15 years," she says. "Many teachers throw up their hands and say, 'Just tell me what you want me to do' or, 'Is this the right way?'" 

Well, yes. One of the Fellow Travelers of Common Core has been the notion that classrooms can be teacher-proofed, and so we've had giant pieces of poo like EngageNY and it's "If It's Tuesday, You Must Be on Page Twelve" tightly wound instructional pacing.


This has been exacerbated by the sales approach taken by Core promoters, which can be summarized as, "Teachers, you are doing everything wrong, so stop, and do things our way!" And THAT has been made worse by the top-down approach to Common Core which has all but guaranteed that nobody below the David Coleman level (and perhaps nobody at or above it, either) really knew exactly what the hell they were now supposed to do. Add to that a general background noise about how teachers just stink and anybody with five weeks-- or less-- of training can become a teacher, and teachers did indeed throw up our hands. Or maybe not so much throw up our hands as just say, "Screw it," and went back to using our own professional judgment to operate in our classrooms, and you Common Core types can get back to us when you know what the hell you want and can communicate it through some technique other than condescending PD and having non-teacher book salespersons throw manuals at us.

This created a perfect opening for publishers (you know-- them same guys who helped write the Core in the first place) to pop up and say, "No worries. We have everything you need in this box right here, now available at special bargain prices! Act now!!"

And all of that would have been bad enough, but then we throw in what has emerged as the greatest enemy of the Common Core.

The Big Standardized Test.

The BS Tests suck, and they suck in large, toxic, destructive ways. But if you're a Common Core advocate, you need to see that the so-called Common Core tests are not aligned with the Core, that, in fact, no standardized test will ever be aligned with the Core. I've written about this before, but for now, let's just use one example-- if indeed the Common Core is all about the critical thinking, there's very little critical thinking that can be assessed in a BS Test.

In fact, since the BS Tests are skill-focused and content-averse, or at least content-agnostic, the best way that's emerging as a good way to prep for the BS Tests is to just say screw content and focus on daily drill-- a short reading and some BS Test style questions. I could do a pretty good job of getting my students ready for the BS Test with a whole year of nothing but newspaper clippings and paragraphs ripped from any random novels as long as I had them attached to a barrage of BS Test style multiple choice questions (because, yes, drag-and-drop answers are still just multiple choice).

Despite the rich content crowd's insistence that CCSS just love the rich content, the BS Tests absolutely couldn't care less. So for teachers in situations where the state or local leaders are demanding high test scores Or Else, the kind of content and pedagogy that Pondiscio would like to see is highly unlikely to happen.

In other words, the mysteries of unlocking the hidden wonders of the Core and the mysteries of how to raise test scores are two entirely different mysteries, and faced with the choice between the two, many education leaders are choosing the mystery that is directly tied to their professional future. Teaching to the test never died-- it just changed its format a little, and got a whole lot more weight thrown behind it thanks to teacher and school evaluations.

Yes, I think there are other reasons for the lack that Pondiscio and the researchers think they see, and those reasons have a lot to do with the built-in weaknesses of the Core. But without even going there, I think we can explain much of the phenomenon.

ICYMI: This Week's Recommendations

Here are just a few of the articles this week that deserve your time and attention!

Common Core "Results" Aren't Actually Test Scores

Bernie Horn provides a great explanation-- clear, simple, and comprehensible to civilians-- about why the results you read in the paper aren't what you think they are.

America's Teaching Force by the Numbers 

I can't say that Laura McKenna hit it completely out of the park, but as mainstream media outlet coverage of the teacher "shortage" goes, this is not bad.

Educating Governor Kasich

New-to-me blogger Abby White comes from Ohio, and she has some thoughts about John Kasich and his approach to education.

Delivery Man

I used this old piece from the Economist earlier this week, but it's a particular direct but brief profile of Sir Michael Barber, the big cheese at Pearson.

Hansen Was Angry

Ohio newspapers have been ploughing through pages of newly-released documents dealing with Ohio's messed-up department of education. This is just one example of the shenanigans, but all of the coverage is worth folowing.

New Teachers Are Educated, Not Trained

Russ Walsh with a pointed reminder that puppies are trained, and teachers are not. Also, a fine list of what the basic elements of a good teacher education program would be.