What does Kirsten Schmitz do all day? Find out here! Bonnie O’Keefe on early ed and ESSA via this CCSSO brief. Yesterday, off-edu, I wrote about “raw water” for USN.
A lot of pushback on what’s wrong methodologically with the charter segregation argument recently amplified by AP, but Derrell Bradford goes at the core of the question:
…Conversely (and courtesy of the charter segregation lobby) we also see what these folks would have us attack: schools working for black families that exist because those same families have made the affirmative decision to attend them.
Depending on what cocktail parties you attended this holiday season, you likely heard any number of derisive characterizations of today’s modern-day Freedom Schools. Some outright condescending (those families don’t know how to choose a school) to counterintuitive (those schools cream the best families). The latter is particularly destructive because it penalizes black families — some foreign-born, some the home-grown descendants of slaves, but all of whom want a better future for their children — for that quality we value most in every other race and creed in the American patchwork: ambition.
Consider how this same ambition is handled in some of America’s other numerous racial tranches. White urbane families who like cities but still want accelerated education have an entire network of segregated academies within the public schools, most commonly known as gifted and talented, fostered for them. It’s widely known that these programs pass over black kids, but no one seems to care, even as cries for the expansion of these programs continue to grow…
…Black folks are unique in America because we are often asked to sacrifice some notion of personal agency or sovereignty “for the greater good” in manners that other groups are not asked to and would never be expected to.
In my look at the new 529 policy I mentioned that the tax benefits / cost in states is unclear because not all states automatically conform to changes in federal policy and it could set off some debates. More on that via TIME.
Here’s some big news: Researchers have finally found an education spending item that the usual suspects don’t want to spend more money on. More seriously, here’s a CRPE take on this.
New Schools’ Stacey Childress on ed innovation in 2018.
Rick Hess’ scholar rankings are out. University-based folks in the ed world pay more attention to these than you might think.
Tweet of the day:
That’s good because I work in K12 on a massive OER creation project for MN and I can’t get any teacher even to look at it much less use it. https://t.co/2DtJd61nsL
— Jon Fila (@jontfila) January 9, 2018
