Education Week’s latest Quality Counts report is out, and it looks to be a winner. Savvy reporter Sean Cavanagh offers a balanced but thought-provoking overview of the special theme of this year’s report, which is titled “The Global Challenge: Education in a Competitive World.” This year, because of the international theme, the report features survey data on how much states are drawing on experiences from abroad to improve their own schools.
For those more interested in the domestic scene, the report provides its annual state report cards, which feature rankings and other data across six areas of policy and performance. Maryland has trumpeted its top showing in the rankings for years, and now the good folks at EdWeek are giving the state’s governor, Martin O’Malley, a chance to strut the state’s stuff in person during the report’s rollout event today in D.C.
The event is being webcast, starting at 10, in case you want to check it out. As a longtime EdWeeker, I’m biased, but I find QC an excellent resource.
The grant competition is expected to significantly impact how early childhood education is prioritized and delivered in the winning states. But as was emphasized during the White House ceremony today, the Obama administration intends for the competition to have ripple effects beyond those states.
EWA hosted a conference call for reporters this afternoon to allow them to gather insights and ask questions of leading experts. You can listen to the conversation here.
Our speakers included:
Sharon Lynn Kagan, professor of early childhood and family policy at Teachers College, Collumbia University, and co-director of the National Center for Children and Families.
Jon Schnur, executive chairman and co-founder of America Achieves, a new non-profit organization devoted to making the US a global leader in educational excellence.
Also on the call to field questions from reporters:
Gerrit Westervelt, executive director of the Build Initiative, which supports states’ efforts to develop comprehensive early childhood learning policies, programs and services.
Harriet Dichter, the national director of the First Five Years Fund, which is focusing its efforts on the sustainability of the Early Learning Challenge.
Unusual Tag Team Tackles Federal Role in Education
Remarkably, Rick Hess and Linda Darling-Hammond have bridged their manifold differences and penned an op-ed for The New York Times focusing on one subject on which they agree: the advisable role, and limits, of federal policy on schools.
These veteran reformers, one from the right and the other the left, are among the most prominent voices in their respective but opposing school reform camps. But their joint essay underscores just how often the national education policy debate diverges from predictable political patterns.
The two underline four areas they see as the appropriate limits of federal education policy:
1) Requiring public disclosure both of the financial resources that individual schools receive and of the academic results they attain;
2) Protecting the rights of children who historically have been ill-served by schools, particularly children with disabilities and those from minority groups harmed by discrimination;
3) Supporting basic research into what works, and doesn’t, in education; and
4) Spurring genuine innovation that allows “school boards, union leaders, and others to throw off anachronistic routines.”
With the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act now four years overdue, Hess and LDH argue that the biggest lesson from the 10-year-old law is that aggressive efforts to improve schools from Washington tend to “stifle problem-solving, encourage bureaucratic blame avoidance and often do more harm than good.” In overhauling the law, they say, the watchword must be “humility.”
Think about it: Do Hess and Darling-Hammond have a point about the folly of federal over-reaching when they argue that “well-intentioned demands for ‘bold’ action on school improvement have a history of misfiring”? Or has the rise in federal activism in education, exemplified by the Bush administration’s NCLB and the Obama Administration’s Race to the Top, been on the whole a powerful force for positive change?
Thomas Friedman and 'Surpassing Shanghai' on Fixing Schools
“We live in an age when education is such a driver of economic growth, and economic growth is a driver of national security,” New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman told me this week when I asked if he still stood by his statement that if he were starting over, he’d be an education reporter. Friedman, who co-wrote That Used to Be Us with Michael Mandelbaum, was in Washington, D.C., to join National Center for Education and the Economy President Marc Tucker for a discussion of what ails the nation’s schools, as well as a book signing (Tucker edited the recently published Surpassing Shanghai: An Agenda for American Education Built on the World’s Leading Systems). Both men described a system flailing in a state of crisis and potentially exacerbating its circumstances even as it attempts to enact solutions.
“The U.S. is now in the grips of a reform agenda that has virtually nothing in common with the countries with the most successful education systems,” Tucker said. He and Friedman offered some keen—and counterintuitive—insights on what it might take to keep American schools competitive in a “hyperconnected” world, as Friedman described our society. You can read more about their discussion of school reform, teacher quality and global competitiveness at EdMedia Commons.
Our one-day conference, “Evaluating Teachers: Beyond the Rhetoric,” on Saturday in Chicago reverberated with persistent themes from our speakers. First, teacher evaluations should not be punitive but should help educators improve their practice. Secondly, teachers want better evaluation systems that help them do just that.
Here are some links to coverage of the intense, one-day event:
The American Institutes for Research this week released a report examining how much full-time community college students who drop out cost states and the federal government.
EWA also released a commentary about the report by University of
Southern California professor Dominic Brewer. The commentary, the first to be produced by our new Research Roundtable, includes
questions to ask institutions and the researchers about the report.
Both the report and the commentary are available at EdMedia Commons.
EWA Board Members Featured Prominently in Education Nation
This week's NBC-sponsored Education Nation was widely followed in the education press, and EWA is proud to note that two of its board members weighed in on high-profile panels at the two-day event.
Meanwhile Cornelia Grumman, director of the First Five Years Fund, participated in a panel discussing brain development and early learning, which you can watch in full below.
