Looking for a new opportunity? Scroll down this page for a lot of edujobs including Educators 4 Excellence, Building Excellent Schools, and a bunch of others.
Charter schools were the focus of a lot of “fake news” way before fake news was a thing. 74′s Romy Drucker is moderating a panel to talk about that today in California. You can watch here. It’s a real issue. We don’t pull our punches on charter quality problems (pdf), or quality problems in the education sector overall, but I’m amazed at the misinformation we also get media inquiries about.
Meanwhile, Derrell Bradford notes that while the charter debate rages most parents are sidelined.
NAPCS out with a new ranking of the nation’s charter school laws. KY has a new charter law as of this week, btw.
Travel alert: The fight against reform is migrating to Africa. A whole continent’s worth of new junkets and adult on adult fights.
More attention to how much non-credit remedial classes at colleges can set students back or off-track. CSU taking a new tack.
Brookings Brown Center annual education report is out today. This one is always a must-read if you like your thinking home-grown rather than outsourced.
Everyone wants to talk about structural inequality these days, but this is what it looks like and a lot fewer seem to have the appetite to root it out because that’s a lot more contentious and alienating than virtue signaling.
The report said that “hold-harmless policies” protecting elementary schools from budget cuts as well as concentrations of the most experienced teachers in wealthier neighborhoods, who earn the highest salaries, are “systematic barriers to achieving budget equity.” And increased pension obligations, plus a double-digit salary raise after years of no increases, “make real change difficult,” the report said.
Interesting take on Middlebury and the rampant income inequality in elite higher education:
The quintessentially liberal commitment to free and open dialogue is indispensable for building mutual understanding and respect in a diverse society. Cultural separation fueled by economic inequality, however, undermines that dialogue and respect. The spectacle of rich, “progressive” protestors refusing to hear a lecture on the roots of their own privilege; well, it tells you how much work there is to do. The class gap in American today is economic, educational and residential. Perhaps most dangerous of all, it is cultural, too. Mutual distrust across class lines is one of the causes of our current toxic politics. Greater understanding, shared learning and self-reflection are all needed now more than ever. And you don’t learn anything by shouting others down.
The Hassels with a reality check on class size reduction.