Latest Articles and Blog Posts

Book Club: I'll See You After Class

March 17, 2010 at 8:57 am

It's been almost twenty years since I taught in a K-12 classroom and more than a dozen years since I last supervised student teachers. So, readers probably appreciate that I tend not to have a lot to say when it comes to classroom instruction.

But I recently picked up a new book, Roxanna Elden's See Me After Class: Advice for Teachers by Teachers, which I wish had been around when I started teaching. Elden, a teacher down in Miami-Dade, skips the treacle and talks straight, with a heavy dose of practicality, a dash of cynicism, and wry humor. I dug it, and recommend it.

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John Covington Gets It Done

March 16, 2010 at 8:48 am

A few weeks back, I wrote about Kansas City superintendent John Covington. Having inherited a district plagued by a $50 million budget shortfall, half-filled schools, and lousy performance, Covington rejected the familiar "muddle through" strategy and proposed radical surgery. He urged the board to shut-down half the district's 61 schools and cut a quarter of the staff. Last week, in a 5-4 vote, the board backed his proposal to shutter close to 30 schools, sell the district's downtown central office, eliminate 700 out of 3000 positions, and require teachers at six low-performing schools to reapply for their jobs. For more details, see here and here.

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The Good Kind of Schizophrenia

March 15, 2010 at 9:47 am

When the Obama administration released its proposal for the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind on Saturday, I had two immediate, conflicting reactions. The first was that the administration deserves kudos for sketching a vastly more modest conception of Uncle Sam's role and for dramatically scaling back NCLB's attempts to fix K-12 schooling from Washington. Indeed, I'd have expected this sensible stance to be a bitter pill for Kati Haycock and the champions of "the feds should fix it" legislation (more on that in a moment).

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Just How Racist Are You, Anyway?

March 8, 2010 at 8:43 am

I was inclined to tag this post, "How intellectual conformity stifles 'diverse' thinking." But that seemed a bit long-winded.

Anyway, here's the deal. The Politics of Education Association has decided on a theme for its special Education Politics Series issue of Vanderbilt University's Peabody Journal of Education. The theme? "Post-Racialism in the K-12 and Higher Education Arenas: The Politics of Education in the Obama Administration Era." An interesting topic--though the editors quickly try to fix that.

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Disappointing First Leg in Education's Big Race

March 8, 2010  •  National Review Online

Amid much fanfare, the president last year launched the Department of Education's "Race to the Top" (RTT). Funded with $4.35 billion in stimulus dollars, the competitive grant program urged states to comply with 19 federal priorities and dramatically expanded Uncle Sam's role in school reform. And, as opposed to the first $100 billion in education stimulus spending, the president promised in the State of the Union that RTT would reflect a new sensibility: "Instead of rewarding failure, we only reward success. Instead of funding the status quo, we only invest in reform."

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Books by Frederick M. Hess