Phillip Burgyone-Allen on school boards.
The EdRedesign Lab at Harvard GSE on “Success Plans” for students.
Here’s a debate on SEL with Russ Whithurst and Robert Balfanz.
Sign of the times or member services? New DQC report on state report cards and some pushback (that doesn’t alter the main takeaways) from CCSSO.
Lori Lightfoot’s win in Chicago was inspiring on a few levels – but what does it mean for schools there? CTU’s take here.
ICYMI Michael Danneberg takes a look at some of the (legal) ways college admissions are not the meritocracy some people think.
People love to beat up on higher ed by saying how college is nothing like the real world, but then there is this kid at Yale who operated an illegal hedge fund and ran afoul of the SEC.
RAND on some education applications of AI.
Robert Pondiscio takes no prisoners:
His reward has often been abuse at the hands of critics who conflate orderly classrooms with colonialism, or who see children walking through hallways in straight lines as practice for prison. But they’ve got it backward: The children in those schools are on their way to becoming doctors, lawyers and entrepreneurs, not felons. If there is racism at work in these high-performing charter schools (none dare call them “no excuses” schools anymore) it lies mostly within the hearts of their critics, particularly those of a certain caste — armchair social justice warriors who’ve never known a moment of fear or uncertainty over their own children’s path to college, nor any real threats to their families’ continued prosperity.
Aristocracy is returning with a vengeance. It may appear that we’re having an acute anti-privilege moment in education, driven by the Varsity Blues college admissions scandal and the ritual annual hand-wringing over the paltry numbers of black and Hispanic students admitted to New York City’s specialized high schools. But the responses and “fixes” being offered are more likely to make things worse. If the devil’s greatest trick was to convince the world that he didn’t exist, an even greater one is being pulled off by the privileged and powerful. They have convinced their enemies to protect and extend their advantages by dismissing objective merit under the banner of fighting for social justice. The cold, hard fact is that everything in education can and will be gamed by the affluent and privileged. That’s what privilege is. Utopian fantasies to dismantle it by persuasion, public shaming and technocratic manipulation are naive, unworkable or illegal. You can’t eliminate or embarrass privilege; you can only limit its influence. Yet we seem exhausted by the effort.
Tim Daly on the related issue of allegedly victimless fraud in education.
Shorter Tom Kane: “No, I didn’t mean that!” (w/ David Steiner).
