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The MEA seems to have vowed to “fight the cuts” in the proposed education budget*. We just say “Good luck!” Take a look around at state finances. California is bankrupt, and as a functioning governmental entity, at least as we’ve understood such of late, is imploding. New York state is cutting their budgets, especially education; in fact the [...] It’s slash and burn time, the wolf is at the door, fly away home your house is on fire. Use any image you want, but we’re up against it. You knew it was coming. Matthew Stone has the story here. Read it all. Particularly worthy of notice is this section: Aside from mergers, the education commissioner called on [...] Election time often gets to be prediction time. You certainly see a lot of predictions. You read “We project that” a certain candidate will win, that a certain question “will undoubtedly be defeated,” and so on. Most such predictions aren’t worth the electrons they’re written in. I try to refrain from such myself. But here’s [...] In an article entitled “Most Likely to Succeed” in the current New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell investigates the question of how to hire teachers, good teachers. It’s not very easy. Good test scores don’t seem to correlate; in fact nothing does. The only way to find out if someone is a good teacher…is to have [...] At the Freakonomics Blog at the NYT: The Big Three and Underfunded Pensions (12/2/08). They point to (and quote from) this abstract (”Public Pensions are Underfunded”)in the NBER Digest. The extent to which public pensions are underfunded has been obscured by governmental accounting rules, which allow pension liabilities to be discounted at expected rates of return on [...] The head of a national teachers union — the other one, the AFT (American Federation of Teachers) — gave a significant speech the other day. The aspect of her speech that got the most attention (NYTimes article, HuffPo post) was a new receptiveness to merit pay for teachers and a willingness to discuss the future [...] A series of recent articles has school superintendents inveighing against Satan school consolidation to beat the band. They’ve got some real issues, these folks (with consolidation, that is), and they’re letting us know. See Consolidation plan not working, school superintendents say (Sun Journal, 10/18), School consolidation’s problems aired by superintendents (Daily Bulldog, 10/17), and SADs 4, [...] from BLS Spotlight, "Back to School", August 2007 In a September-only blog, Schoolhouse Rock, over at Slate, writer Paul Tough has been rummaging through various proposals for linking accountability to teacher compensation. (Start at the bottom — the earliest posts.) No easy answers here, but lots of thought. We note too that the Maine [...] |
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