Published Articles & Media
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Zen and the Art of School Board Maintenance
The problem is that local school boards can’t wait around for the folks who have caused our cancers to cure them.
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A Bronx Cheer for Bloomberg? A New Poll is Harsh
I felt a bit sad reading this morning’s New York Times poll report showing that New Yorkers are now broadly dissatisfied with their school system and that most say the city’s school system has stagnated or declined since Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg took control of it nine years ago.
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More Power Politics in New York. Or, Another Hacking Victim
New Yorkers were reminded yesterday that politics can be bloody when the state’s comptroller pulled the plug on a multi-million-dollar no-bid contract to Wireless Generation to set up a data-base for New York City’s schools.
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The Union Wins a Big One in New York: Judge Tosses Out Most of Teacher Eval System
On Wednesday a state judge in Albany ruled that student test scores on state exams could not be used for 40 percent of a teacher’s evaluation and that NYBOR’s and NYSED’s cut scores for grading teachers was unfairly slanted to favor those student scores.
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The End of the Era of Accountability?
My only hope is that we don’t let education policy get hijacked by the same partisan bickering that flavored the debt-ceiling standoff a couple weeks ago. Our education system lost its AAA rating several generations ago.
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The Information Gap – Serious Policy Implications
It would be too simplistic to say that the difference between good schools and bad is in the quality of the information the public gets about its schools. But the swing in public opinion the size of that reported by the PEPG/Ed Next survey should be a wake-up call: get the information out.
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Cheating in the Keystone State
Michael Winerip is on a roll. After a good piece of reporting on the Atlanta cheating scandal a couple of weeks ago, he has turned in a solid story about the testing mess rolling into Pennsylvania.
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Reading is NOT Fundamental: Knowledge Is
It is encouraging news that New York City’s three-year-old pilot project testing the content-rich Core Knowledge Language Arts curriculum has proved so far “a brilliant experiment in reading.”
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News of the World: rocketships, suburban charters, parent triggers, cheating, merit pay — and even Winerip does good
Okay, it’s not exactly what Rupert might condone, but since he and his crew are preoccupied, I offer some education highlights from my weekend reading.