The Washington Monthly

The assumption is based on an idea — Congress operates by majority rule — that should be true but isn’t. For much of the country, procedures like “filibusters,” “secret holds,” and “cloture votes” are completely foreign. Indeed, it’s very likely this contributes to public disgust with Congress — when majorities can’t even vote on their own priorities, a lot of folks throw up their arms in frustration and assume the Democratic majority is incompetent. Pointing to procedural abuses — which are the actual heart of the problem — only sounds like excuses to those who have little patience for legislative tactics.

This, in turn, creates an added motivation for Republicans to keep up their obstructionism.

What really bothers me is that the founder of an organization that seems to lobby for the group is unaware of how the senate actually works.

The “it’s the culture” argument, fails to acknowledge, however, that the Chinese/Asian value of education is not just about hard working and respectful students. The culture is also responsible for the adoption of a coherent and effective curriculum—one that requires well-written and logically sequenced textbooks and good solid instruction.

As long as parents are more willing to put time and money into supporting football teams and proms over making sure their kids have an effective math curriculum–it is the culture.

Valerie vs. Jay on Teach for America, KIPP, etc.

Ultimately, I think I have to side with Jay Mathews on this one. I think Valerie Strauss misses the point. Teach for America isn’t saying that you need “elites” in public schools to be good teachers. It’s about getting the “elites” to be aware of and even value the role of public school teachers. I see it kind of like the argument that if we had a universal draft, maybe our political leaders wouldn’t be so eager to send troops into combat, or at the very least, be willing to provide them with the necessary equipment to do the job and the appropriate services for when they come home.

In an effort to help education policy makers separate the wheat from the chaff, expert third party reviews are provided by the Think Tank Review Project, a collaboration of the Education and Public Interest Center (EPIC) at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Education Policy Research Unit (EPRU) at Arizona State University. Each year the reports identified by experts as the worst of the worst are awarded a “Bunkum.” The Think Tank Review Project today announced five “honorees” for 2009.

While the social science of the winning reports was sub-par, they typically had very high production values, glossy paper, multi-color printing, and artful layouts. “Given the bibliographies, footnotes, charts and tables, policymakers or laypeople may be forgiven for thinking that these honoree reports are based on the highest quality research. We hope that our expert reviews have helped to correct that impression,” said EPIC director Kevin Welner.

I’m not surprised that educators fall for the glitz. I remember in high school helping a friend make up information on studies of prisoners and the effect of television for an English research paper at a magnet school. I had actually done the research and report but my friend was doing it all the night before and had a major advantage–he had a computer to write and print it out on. So the next day he turned in the report, all typed out, in a little report protector, with an extensive bibliography we had made up the night before. The teacher took his report, flipped through the pages, and started ohhing and ahhing over the quality of his report. He got the same grade I got, an A.

But Perry said Texas “reserves the right to decide how we educate our children and not surrender that control to the federal bureaucracy.”

Perry’s objections seem to center on the fact that the grant rules give preference to states that sign on to a push for national curriculum standards. Perry and Scott have been critical of the Common Core Standards Initiative, a state-led effort coordinated by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School Officers with support from the Department of Education. Texas and Alaska are the only two states that have not joined the initiative.

So the grant rules giver “preference” to those who sign on for national standards–why not apply anyway and see what happens? And isn’t “local control” the basis of Texas public education? So why isn’t the state supporting districts (if any) that are implementing such standards on their own?

Are there potential negative consequences of national standards? Of course there are. But national standards or no, Texans, parents, students, and citizens, deserve to know why over 80 percent of students in the more desirable high schools are considered “college ready” but only half of them can meet the minimum SAT/ACT scores required by state colleges to enroll in schools without remediation.

Kerrville Independent School District officially supports the six plaintiff districts in claiming that commissioner Robert Scott is overreaching in his interpretation of a recently enacted law against minimum grades.

Minimum grading policies are the practice of giving failing students at least 50 percent on report cards regardless of whether a student’s cumulative work on individual assignments actually justifies a lower percentage.

Such a policy currently exists at KISD and more than half of all Texas schools. The KISD policy states teachers must record a 50 for any student scoring below that amount during the first five six-week grading periods.

I understand wanting to make sure that kids are able to succeed at school but maybe the point is to put them in classes that are a better match to their abilities?  And I can see this maybe working for a History or English class but what about math or science? How many kids can actually pass the remaining grading periods if they bombed the first one in Algebra? And how is this policy going to help students pass the year end tests that will soon be administered in high schools?

Maybe this is something that only happens at the elementary school level which would make more sense. In any case, I would like some specific examples and numbers. And the fact that none are provided suggests that neither side really has any reason for supporting/opposing the policy.

Class Struggle – How fashion frustrates school improvement

James P. Comer is one of the most successful school improvement experts in the country, but that doesn’t mean he gets much respect. Policy makers often resist his ideas. Take, for example, the Midwestern elementary school that went from 23rd to first in its district by using the School Development Program created by Comer and his Yale colleagues.

Did the school district leaders celebrate and recommend the program far and wide? No. They appear to have been disturbed by the results. They accused the school of cheating and insisted on a re-test, with local newspapers suggesting scandal. The students did even better the second time, but that did not win Comer’s team any plaudits. The superintendent removed the principal who had done so well with their methods and installed a new staff not trained to use them, bringing the scores back down to where the district leadership apparently thought they should be.

Yeah, the public education system does so much more to ensure a quality education. This isn’t about education, this about brainwashing our children and who gets to do it.

Are there children out there who would do better in public school than being homeschooled? Of course, depending on the public school and the randomly assigned teachers. But I would bet that there is an even larger percentage of children in public school who would be better served by homeschooling.

Tell you what, fix the system for the kids that are already there and then talk to me about regulation.

Texas gets a C for public education, according to Education Week’s 12th annual Quality Counts report.

Because Texas is interested in producing future presidents.

Technorati Tags: Texas Education, Education Week’s Quality Counts, Education rankings

In recent weeks, community members have rallied and pleaded with trustees, begging them to spare West Campus, which has about 600 students. But faced with a heart versus head dilemma, trustees voted to close the campus, which has had chronic low enrollment for years, operates at a deficit and has an “academically unacceptable” rating from the Texas Education Agency.

Now what is the point of school vouchers again? A way for poor parents to escape a failing school system? But what if parents are fine with their local schools no matter what its academic rating?

MySA.com: Metro | State

Parents, many of whom have their own memories of school days at West Campus, haven’t taken the decision lying down. On Friday, they filed a request for a temporary restraining order in U.S. District Court to challenge the school district’s effort to keep the dispute from bubbling up during the evening’s football game.

The latest legal challenge came after district officials announced that they would not tolerate any save-the-school fundraising efforts at the game or allow audience members to wear shirts or carry signs emblazoned with defamatory messages.

Despite the fact that their children will go a better rated high school, these parents aren’t happy. So how can you expect vouchers to “save” the school system if parents aren’t going to behave as voucher proponents expect them to? Let’s face it, “vouchers” at the higher education level, (grants and loans) don’t guarantee that students attend only schools with high graduation rates or job placement. It does allow quite a bit more diversity in education choice but it doesn’t mean that poorer quality schools shut down.

Technorati Tags: Texas, higher education, vouchers, South San Antonio High School West Campus, education quality

Bob Sanborn, who runs a Houston-based education research and advocacy group, said the changes addressed some of his concerns. But, he said, the state still allows schools to get credit for students who never graduate. Students can say they are dropping out to be homeschooled, for example, but the state never checks on whether that is true.

Is he seriously suggesting that the high school dropout rate will be affected by cracking down on those “fake” homeschoolers?

HISD has already shown that if a high school has listed a big enough number of students having withdrawn to homeschool that it actually gets notice then the problem is with the keepers of the list, not the homeschoolers. They could just as easily have stated that they had transferred to a private school or moved out of the state.

Counting dropouts in Texas has been a problem for over 30 years. If the best Sanborn can do it to point to “homeschoolers” then you’ve got to wonder about the quality of his education analysis. Somehow, I have a feeling that Sanborn would want to check up on homeschoolers regardless of the dropout situation.

Technorati Tags: Texas, dropouts, Bob Sanborn, homeschooling