Mike Miles: Dueling viewpoints

So, who is the new head at Houston ISD and former leader of Dallas ISD? Someone who takes "my way or the highway" to an extreme? Someone who says his bottom line is kids and reading and nothing had better stand in his way or he can't do his job? Someone well meaning in that way, but at the same time, can't manage people or who is determined to break a few eggs just to break eggs?

The Trib disagrees with Jim Schutze's guest column in the Chronic about the Dallas ISD accomplishments of Mike Miles as he starts at Houston ISD. That said, to be fair, Schutze only focused on when Miles was there; it's not his fault that money for teachers for aggressive reading immersion programs was cut after he left. The Trib also links to a Snooze article but not to anything that Schutze wrote at the Dallas Observer. Nor does it mention the column by four former HISD board trustees sidelined by the new Texas Education Agency board of managers, the four jointly urging Houston parents and the general community to give Miles a chance. Bryan Flores comes off to me as doing little more than a hatchet job. He's young, going by his Trib profile, so maybe it was just bad rather than deliberate. Or maybe it was just deliberate.

The Monthly weighs in with how people in HISD have called Miles, a biracial Black-Japanese, all but a racist. That said, it also notes, which Schutze didn't, that after he left Dallas, he founded a charter school company. The Monthly notes what neither he nor the Trib notes, namely, that, he's swimming uphill against not just school performance but home life, poverty, etc.

Online news site Houston Landing wonder if Miles' attempts to select the best teachers for the reading immersion work will generate cheating due to the attraction of $20K a year or more in extra pay. And, it cites another sidelined board trustee, Kathy Blueford-Daniels, not one of the four above, expressly wondering about that, as well as how well Miles can fight the family and economic background issues these kids face.

Per Houston Press, Miles has promised bilingual programs won't be eliminated, though the reading immersion is English only.

My thoughts? Being in North Texas, I tracked at least the basics of Miles' career at Dallas ISD, as well as tracking the dueling coverage of it by Schutze and the Dallas Snooze, from my location and media vantage point at the time. Houston's going to be a bigger effort yet, and Miles will — even if he's tempered his management style to some degree — butt heads with activist parent groups and above all with teachers' union leadership. Can, and will, these folks moderate themselves as well?

They'll probably learn they have to. If Miles wants to stay beyond 2026, after all, he'll be retained by a state-appointed board of managers, not an elected school board. In other words, he has a degree of insulation that he didn't in Dallas.

==

Update, July 28: Miles may be Black-Japanese biracial, and may not be a racist, but closing a number of HISD school libraries and turning them into discipline rooms sends a horrible message; Sly Turner is right to talk about "targeted communities." Even without turning them into "discipline rooms," closing libraries even as the Lege pushes book censorship and many wingnut "community" activists are ready to pile on sends the wrong message — especially if you claim to be about boosting reading.

The Observer's uninformed meh on teacher pay

The Texas Observer remains alive, unpaywalled, ad-free and otherwise mismanaged. I take that back; it has a house ad on the website asking for my suckers to pound a new load of sand down a rathill. It does have a halfway good story on underfunding of schools, but, what makes this unique in a way that a story by the Trib or one of Texas' major metros doesn't cover? 

Answer? Nothing.

First, the "three-legged stool" framing isn't unique. 

And, as for no state income tax? (And, this is a shout-out to the likes of the Trib as wellas the Observer, if or when they go down the same road.) Even if Texas Democrats jefe Gilberto Hinojosa sees his wet dream of a Dem gov overseeing a Dem Lege come true, that ain't changing, unless I'm way mistaken. Besides, Texas is not the only state with no income tax. Florida, with higher incomes and more ritz than Tex-ass, is another. So why bring it up? (In addition, Wyoming, yet another state with no income tax, was the ONLY state to get a AAA rating from US News on school funding equality issues.)

And, beyond THAT? I've blogged before about MSM misframing of teacher pay nationally and other things, like Beto-Bob's pandering stupidity in Muleshoe last year. I'd like to know the dollar amount the teachers cited in detail by the Observer actually make.

Now, old jokes aside, I know that teachers (generally) aren't off most the summer. I do know that, in Merikka, they have benefits in most states that the average John/Jane Doe don't. As in, state retirement system that includes retirement medical insurance. Having extra retirement money, plus not having to work the Medicare safety "net" of tissue paper that many people have to, is a benefit there.

Maybe they can't work from home or do hybrid work, but in rural areas (back to you, Muleshoe Bob), about nobody does.

Other issues? The stats, including the one that the Observer cited not being quite right, and the many others it didn't cite, or made incorrect suggestions about.

As of 2021, Texas was square in the middle of student-teacher ratio, square in the middle of salaries, about right at No. 40 (not just six states lower) on funding, and only 17th-highest on percentage of funding coming from the local level. That comes from some wingnuts, right? Yep, the notorious wingnuts at the National Educational Association.

And, that link and a couple of others came to me with 30 seconds of Googling. 

Would I pay for the Observer if it fully paywalled? Probably not. But, I mentioned paywalls plus advertising. And, until the mag gets over its purity test holiness (and, on management, has an actual publisher, not the Texas Democracy Foundation board of directors), I won't give it money.

And, yes, I am going to hammer this a little bit.

The education masks come off at the Lege

We knew this was going to happen anyway, but it still doesn't make it easier to see Danny Goeb unveil his priority bills for the Texas Senate.

The so-called "parental rights" bill has all sorts of problems. First and foremost, on the mask-lowering issue, is that it's a direct assault on public schools, even as, nationally, study after study have shown that the huge lion's share of money goes to rich parents ALREADY sending their kids to exclusive private schools.

The Trib notes this has failed before due to opposition by the rurales. Danny Boy is offering a short term head fake.

Patrick's efforts have been rebuffed before. Rural Republican lawmakers have historically opposed similar legislation, arguing that it siphons off money from public schools, often an anchor of their smaller communities. But this year’s bill carves out smaller districts, leaving school districts with fewer than 20,000 students fully funded for the first two years.

Will it work? Will rural legiscritters accept that and face the likely end of that carve-out in the next Lege? As Texas becomes ever more urbanized, will rural legiscritters even have that much say and sway?

Then, there's its further meddling in the transsexual and transgender issues, of concern to a non-twosider on that issue like me as well as the one side of twosiders. Related to that is that Danny Boy and henchmen are encouraging further balkanization of instruction even within the public school system, eroding the social development idea of public school along with education itself.

Third, there's the issue of funds going to religious schools. Catholics are pushing the drive to overturn interpretations of the state constitution that have prohibited much of this.

==

It's not just K-12, though. Beyond cutting off diversity, equity and inclusion efforts at state universities, Goeb is now on bill-filing record supporting eliminating tenure. This, too, is a bill filed by Brandon Creighton, emerging as a new water-carrier for Goeb; he also filed a bill to end DEI work. (There's actually a leftist argument to be made against the capitalist problems with DEI, but you won't find either duopoly party making that under the Pink Dome.)

==

And, the Observer weighs in with how the Lege is more and more returning to zero-tolerance policies. In the wake of COVID, they'd already accelerated at the individual school and school district level. And, most of that, it notes, was for violating school district codes of conduct, not violence, fighting or drugs. Expulsion percentage rates are high in big, middle and smaller school districts — but topped by one of the state's biggest charter school programs, "International Leadership." In other words, school for socialization IS believed in, but only on narrow terms.

If youth is wasted on the young, then graduations ...

Then graduations and graduation speeches are wasted BY the young.

This is connected to my post last night about small town values.

Hearing small-town, small-county high school grads with their speeches, whether at a private school or one of the public ones? Blech. Maybe my suburban St. Louis val and sal, eons ago, had similar blather. I hated high school and don't remember. I'm sure my last-graduating-class Lutheran college val and sal kind of did, but not totally.

Anyway, the speeches Thursday and Friday, even though largely out of the mouths of Catholics, were full of "everything has a purpose" providentialism. That's Calvinism, ultimately, if you will. Surprised that teachers at the private school at least — which is Catholic — don't catch that. That said, modern American Catholicism in both its more conservative and its more liberal installations strikes me ever more as a mishmash of individually held doctrines, fairly influenced by Protestantism, with the possible exception of Eastern and Southern European "ethnic" enclaves in the Northeast and Rust Belt. I'm not even sure about Irish Catholics in those areas.

Of course, this becomes wedded to success gospel Christianity. I heard this year, and in years past, variations on "all you have to do is have the right attitude and work hard and you'll succeed." This all ignores luck (in a non-metaphysical sense) — both good luck and bad luck.

That said, this wasn't the worst.

Far from it.

And, it was only exacerbated tonight at one of the two small high schools I was at when the valedictorian offered prayers for selected class members who were essentially "hostages," including two Indian-Americans who might well not be Christian. With last name "Patel" and first names that are definitely Indian and not Christian-like, I think that's pretty likely. More disgusting yet? The opening theme of his speech, since he is not native to that small town, was gratitude for being accepted.  

To be honest, emotionally honest, I hope this guy and some other of these speakers learn personally, the hard way, just how wrong, or Not.Even.Wrong., they are. I think it will have to be the hard way, because I don't think that unless they face real personal tribulation from which they don't immediately bounce back, they will learn. (That said, this part is probably true of big city high school val and sal speakers, too, at least to some extent. I don't know about Hispanics, and Christianity is lower among Asian Americans, but I know that the success gospel runs hot among Black America.)

We have problems with education, but this book isn't the answer

The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way by Amanda Ripley

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Thin and anecdotal, with one big error of omission.

The major point, and a very relevant one?

Most western nations have a school year of at least 200 days, compared to the 180, or less, here in the U.S. Why this wasn't even mentioned, let alone made a point of discussion as to whether or not it affects U.S. school performance (I am sure it has at least some effect) I have no idea.

PISA? Per an OECD link about how PISA scores should best be understood in light of U.S. educational practices, PISA's not all she cracks it up to be. (There is value in PISA, but, to the degree there is value, for identifying ways to change, areas to change, and support for positive change rather than punitive action, Ripley's coverage is superficial here, too.)

The ding? "Alright" is not an English word. "All right" is. If you're going to write a book about education, please use standard English.

She does get some things right, like the need to nationalize standards and move away from the horse-and-buggy days of the locally autonomous school district, but she's far from the only person to point that out. She's also right about a "balance point" on the amount of standardized testing, and how to approach it, but again, she's not alone, and the treatment is fairly light.

Also, she promises more than she delivers.

Focusing on just three other nations that take PISA, three largely homogenous nations, and viewing them through the lenses of just three exchange students, is anecdotal, not rigorous. That's especially true in light of her getting hundreds of exchange students to respond to her request for information.

Finally, there's little prescriptiveness on "how to get there," in terms of either federal or state level public policy.

===

My review should indicate things I think we do need in terms of K-12 education. I'll list them and more:
1.  A 200-day school year;
2. National standards on education, with national standards of some sort on textbooks to achieve this and on standardized testing to measure it;
3. Getting away from local-control school boards and districts, along with top-heavy administrative costs this incurs, especially in rural areas;
4. Getting away from local property tax and all its inequities as a primary funder of schools;
5. Using federal education funding already in place as the stick to achieve 1-4;
6. Increasing federal education funding to further 1-4, and getting big business to buy into the necessary taxes for it and reasons why.




View all my reviews

All that's wrong with charter schools in one short story

"Millennial" generation short-term focus, even narcissism.

Hypercapitalism.

Neoliberalism, including the Teach for America program.

Taylorism, going one better on educational pedagogy ideas of 50-75 years ago.

It's all right here, in this New York Times story about the growing charter school movement.

Here's the narcissism, short-timer syndrome, career-ladder move, etc.:

Tyler Dowdy just started his third year of teaching at YES Prep West, a charter school here. He figures now is a good time to explore his next step, including applying for a supervisory position at the school. 

Mr. Dowdy is 24 years old, which might make his restlessness seem premature. But then, his principal is 28. Across YES Prep’s 13 schools, teachers have an average of two and a half years of experience.  

Hey, a lot of teachers burn out in their first couple of years. That's deliberate from not viewing teaching as a vocation or a calling, but rather a stepping stone to other jobs. Isn't part of this, the rapid career advancement part, about Millennial narcissism? "Three years here, check that resume box, and could look good in the world of finance! Maybe I can even become a charter schools financial analyst! Occupy Me!"

And, yes, as I blogged about the original, actual Occupy Wall Street movement in New York City's Zuccoti Park, there is a lot of that spirit around. That comes from Occupiers' own demographic self-identification.

The neoliberalism? Here comes Teach for America!

The notion of a foreshortened teaching career was largely introduced by Teach for America, which places high-achieving college graduates into low-income schools for two years. Today, Teach for America places about a third of its recruits in charter schools. 

“Strong schools can withstand the turnover of their teachers,” said Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America. “The strongest schools develop their teachers tremendously so they become great in the classroom even in their first and second years.” 

Shock me. I'd argue that with the short-term commitment idea, Teach for America is about "volunteerism porn." Don't get me wrong, the broader AmeriCorps movement does some good. But, it's all part of that "Points of Light" syndrome that started under Poppy Bush and that neolib Democrats have been unable to ignore. And, shock me that Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp has an impeccable establishmentarian background. Another fine product of Highland Park.

And, let's also take note, as the New York Times did not, that her husband is president of America's largest charter-school network. Just a bit of conflict of interest, eh? But great for money-grubbing!

And, a Facebook friend points out a great speech related to this by social philosopher Ivan Illich which, while dated in some areas, overall addresses some of the same issues about volunteerism porn.

An excerpt or two:

Today, the existence of organizations like yours is offensive to Mexico. ...

For the past six years I have become known for my increasing opposition to the presence of any and all North American "dogooders" in Latin America. I am sure you know of my present efforts to obtain the voluntary withdrawal of all North American volunteer armies from Latin America - missionaries, Peace Corps members and groups like yours, a "division" organized for the benevolent invasion of Mexico.

I did not come here to argue. I am here to tell you, if possible to convince you, and hopefully, to stop you, from pretentiously imposing yourselves on Mexicans. ...

I do have deep faith in the enormous good will of the U.S. volunteer. However, his good faith can usually be explained only by an abysmal lack of intuitive delicacy. By definition, you cannot help being ultimately vacationing salesmen for the middle-class "American Way of Life," since that is really the only life you know. ...

Next to money and guns, the third largest North American export is the U.S. idealist, who turns up in every theater of the world: the teacher, the volunteer, the missionary, the community organizer, the economic developer, and the vacationing do-gooders.

OK, so "mission vacationers" might equal "charter short-termers." If the idealism is actually idealistic, Illich is still saying it doesn't translate, whether to Mexico, or to the inner cities of America, which he specifically mentions later in the piece. The rest of his insights flow from there by analogy. (That said, given that Illich had bones in his craw about various aspects of modern Westernism, including modern medicine, he always needs to be taken with a grain of salt.)

So, to put words in the mouth of a new Teach for America student? 

"Teach poor students for 2 years? Yay, me!" But, ask what we can do to reverse income inequality, and to do so for the poor, not just the middle class? Different story, usually.

Meanwhile, let's look again at Kopp's puffery, including the second sentence:

“Strong schools can withstand the turnover of their teachers,” said Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America. “The strongest schools develop their teachers tremendously so they become great in the classroom even in their first and second years.” 

Uhh, wrong. 

Studies have shown that on average, teacher turnover diminishes student achievement. Advocates who argue that teaching should become more like medicine or law say that while programs like Teach for America fill a need in the short term, educational leaders should be focused on improving training and working environments so that teachers will invest in long careers. 

“To become a master plumber you have to work for five years,” said Ronald Thorpe, president of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, a nonprofit group that certifies accomplished teachers. “Shouldn’t we have some kind of analog to that with the people we are entrusting our children to?”

Yep. 

And, along with neoliberalism and the Great Recession, comes working these people longer hours, making sure they're "on call" longer, etc.

Next, neoliberalism + narcissism meet Business New Agism. It's "career coach" time, under a new name.

Every other week, new teachers meet with instructional coaches for 45-minute sessions

At this point, I officially threw up in my mouth. We now get an introduction to Taylorism being placed in charter schools. Note that a lot of the instruction is about getting kids to "present" better and other things.

Actually, of course, there are other things besides this that are wrong with charter schools. Those include them often being run for short-term profit (in that case, teachers at charters are just learning to act like owners/operators), approaching teaching as a commodity.

Meanwhile, I've not even touched too much on other issues with charter schools, like the whole profit angle in general. It's like utility deregulation in spades.

Many of the charter schools are under a neoliberal or big-business conservative mindset, like KIPP is. Others are religious, and it's usually not traditional Catholic schools trying to repackage themselves. Instead, it's usually vaguely "Protestant" success gospel churches and para-churches, often black ones in big cities, starting them. (And, I have personal knowledge of that last bit from my days in metro Dallas.)

And, I see that KIPP is expanding its presence in Dallas, specifically south Dallas. And, judging by the name of one of its schools, it's either partnering with black success gospel preachers or else pandering to them.

Meanwhile, as Thomas Frank has just detailed, parallel problems continue to grow in academia, too. My thoughts on his latest offering for The Baffler are here.

Do the rich want public education to fail?

That's a provocative statement, at least, but it's one that Doug Henwood of the Left Business Observer has no problem making. The linked article is from 2011, but he promises a fuller coverage in the next issue of LBO.

Let's say he's right.

The next questions are ... why, with specifics, do the rich want this? 

Simple:

First, how is public schooling funded? Property taxes? The rich can shelter their income, or have it as capital gains, or whatever, but a McMansion is a McMansion. Paying teachers less, buying less for classrooms, etc., keeps property taxes lower on the rich while letting them pander to the middle class.

Now, a state like Texas has its "Robin Hood" laws ... but don't you doubt that the rich will fight such things more and more.

Now, the second reason.

If more people have less education, you have another reason to pay them less.

Those two reasons loiok primarily at the K-12 level. The rich also undercut collegiate education for the non-rich, though. 

First, more and more financial aid has shifted from grants to loans, and from government-guaranteed loans to totally private ones with higher interest rates. 

Second, for-profit colleges are abounding, including ripping off military veterans.

Third, public colleges are being run more and more like big businesses. That includes a growing divide between tenure-track and non-tenure-track teachers, even when the latter are full time. Adjunct instructors, of course, are really getting reamed.  (It's as bad as the newspaper biz. Maybe worse.)

Finally, this is just the financial picture.

We haven't talked about whether the standardized testing burdens in K-12 hit the poor and minorities harder in some ways, whether well-intentioned or not. Nor have we discussed the whole issue of academic content, and how conservative/American exceptionalist it may trend. James van Loewen's "Lies Across America" and similar books by him are a good starting point.

Tomorrow's school won't be all THAT different

A blog on San Francisco PBS station KCEQ, reproducing a "paperless teachers blog," says the 21st century classroom (cue music signifying breathlessness) will have 21 differences from that of today.

NOT!

I'd say one-third of the claimed differences will not come to pass. By number in the original list, here's the sure-fire wrong predictions.

3. Computers. Sorry, but due to screen size and ease of writing and typing among other things, traditional computers will still be the primary electronic learning portal.
4. Homework. I just put this one here because of the "24/7" breathlessness.
5. Standardized tests. They'll still be around. Easier to grade than "digital portfolios," which may be an adjunct, like, say, community service.
7. Fear of Wikipedia. The author doesn't mention the need for skepticism in how to use Wikipedia, or problems it can have. (The need for teachers to teach students about the corporatization of the American classroom of 20 years from now also goes unmentioned by the blog author.)
10. Attendance offices. The blitheness with which the blogger welcomes bioscans is scary.
11. I.T. departments. Cloud-based computing, so far, has not proved to be inherently more secure than networks and servers, individual Internet usage, etc. No, I.T. departments will still be here.
And, I could quibble with others, but ..
21. Paper. The idea that schools will eventually use 90 percent paper is not only wrong, it's recycled AND wrong. This claim was made nearly 30 years ago, when personal computers first started to proliferate into the workplace.

No, Obama, college won't help

From a long, insightful article in the Atlantic about the hollowing out of the middle class comes this observation that the normal BA or even BSBA won't help a person's bottom line so much any more, nor will it offer so much unemployment protection:

But even among the meritocratic elite, the economy’s evolution has produced a startling divergence. Since 1993, more than half of the nation’s income growth has been captured by the top 1 percent of earners, and the gains have grown larger over time: from 2002 to 2007, out of every three dollars of national income growth, the top 1 percent of earners captured two. ...

“It’s useful to make a distinction between college and post-college,” (MIT economist David Autor) told me. “Among people with professional and even doctoral [degrees], in general the job market has been very good for a very long time, including recently. The group of highly educated individuals who have not done so well recently would be people who have a four-year college degree but nothing beyond that. Opportunities have been less good, wage growth has been less good, the recession has been more damaging. They’ve been displaced from mid-managerial or organizational positions where they don’t have extremely specialized, hard-to-find skills.” ...

College graduates may be losing some of their luster for reasons beyond technology and trade. As more Americans have gone to college, Autor notes, the quality of college education has become arguably more inconsistent, and the signaling value of a degree from a nonselective school has perhaps diminished. Whatever the causes, “a college degree is not the kind of protection against job loss or wage loss that it used to be.”

Takeaways, to shorten Autor?
1. A Harvard degree is worth more than ever, rightly or wrongly, due to "branding."
2. Finding the LinkedIn/CareerBuilder "hot field" is important, but ... what he doesn't say, is a matter of luck as much as anything else.

Autor then and also notes, as I've blogged elsewhere, that more and more paralegal work, or first-year post-law-school grunt work, can be done by computer. Other work like that, which he doesn't directly note, can and will be outsourced to India with a growing English-speaking middle class wanting to do more than call center/customer service work.

And, some of the social decline that started happening to "just high school grad" families in decades past is now starting with "just college" families.

And, going beyond Peck, I'll even say that some grad degrees will get "hollowed out."

Take "service" degrees in psychology and social work. People who know anything about MIT and Weizenbaum's famous ELIZA program, and who are as sardonic, or worse, as I am about the future of America at times, has to wonder why a Fortune 500 EAP program doesn't seriously say, "Why are we sending people to human counselors instead of something like this?"

But, there's yet more to ponder, and to refute:

Missing: At least 20 school days

It's clear to me, and to many other people I know, that the single biggest causal difference for America's K-12 educational gap vis-a-vis other developed nations is the 180-day school year. I've had, as a newspaper reporter and editor, more than one school district superintendent agree with that.

All other developed nations have school years of at least 200 days. Now, it's true that students don't "forget" over two weeks of Christmas holidays; hence, here in Texas and elsewhere, a rush to start the school year early, to get the first semester done before Christmas, has faded.

But, they DO forget over two and a half months of summer. That's clear indeed.

Beyond that, there's just the element of total school time. By the end of 10th grade, the average Western European, Japanese or South Korean student has attended at least one full American year of school above and beyond her or his American peers. If you look at the gap on standardized test scores, it starts small and gets bigger from year to year. Cumulative effects of additional schooling offer a quite persuasive explanation of this.

But how to get American schools there, when they're so traditionalist in many ways still, especially on something like this, and unfortunately, so state-by-state based?

Well, I think President Obama should have used, along with his stimulus package, the fiscal policy, of financial carrots for states, for moving states, over, say, a 4-5 year period, to a 200-day school year, or longer. Teacher and aide hiring to go with this would have been very stimulative.

Let's say an even 200 days, over six years. Add four days for each of two straight years, take a break, then do it again for three straight years. That "break year" would give states and textbook writers time to fully revamp for a longer school year with curricula, number of courses offered with the extra days of a longer year and more.

On the stimulus side, a longer year would mean more need for substitutes, and to help teachers out more thoroughly, a call for more teachers' aides.

Beyond that, it would put the educational focus where Obama should be putting it: K-12, not trying to get more people to go to college when many careers don't need a four-year degree, and also, not trying to get more people to go to college without more cost containment.

'Race to the Top' is missing something?

And that is, if the current "top" is not just better U.S. schools, but is comparing ours to those of other Western democracies, then why aren't we actually trying to learn from them?

Do schools need reforming? Yes, I would agree. I would agree that Race to the Top is stimulating some good ideas.

But, maybe we do need to look elsewhere, too.

Why aren't we studying what we can learn from Europe, Japan and South Korea? Like longer school years, in exchange for more spending on public schools? (We may be the world's No. 1in education spending, but that's driven in part by our huge lead in collegiate and graduate school budgets. On K-12 spending, we barely crack the Top 20.)

That said, the states who pulled out of Race to the Top due to "local control" concerns are part of the problem, not the solution.

To really reform education...

I've said Obama should push for a longer school day.

An education professor says we need to move beyond teaching to tests in elementary school, and instead, let our teaching be informed by developmental psychology. A very good idea, one that replaces "teaching to the test" with something positive.

Obama has Perry's education knickers in a knot

Texas Gov. Rick Perry doesn't like President Barack Obama's idea of letting local school districts compete directly for federal education dollars.

More here on Obama's expansion of his Race to the Top program.

The 'majority' no longer is, in US schools

In both the 15 former slave states of 1860, and in several western states, whites, while still perhaps a plurality, are no longer a majority in public schools. Other than perhaps driving the Glenn Becks of the world ballistic, as the story notes, this is serious food for thought on the future of our education system. (That includes here in majority-minority Texas, home of Gov. Asshat Perry turning down federal education money.)

Cub Scout ‘knife’ gets 6-year-old 45 days

Yep, 45 days of suspension for a first-grader bringing a Cub Scout knife to school. Read the full story to see why such policies are not only overkill, especially the zero-tolerance and zero-discretion parts, but why they’re unnecessary, too.

Obama juco plan not that much and wrong answer

That $12 billion? It’s over a full decade.

For the same price, you could give states the money to expand K-12 education to a 200-day school year. And, comparing us to every other technologically advanced nation, THAT is the right answer.

NYC schools head misses boat on improvements

Former New York City schools chancellor Harold Levy, in his NYT op-ed listing five ways to improve education, nowhere mentions the need to lengthen the school year to 200 days or more, to equal other advanced nations.

If idjits like this, who allegedly know how to better schools, actually DON’T, we’re in trouble indeed.

Education regression hits America

In what should be scary as hell for the future of our country, today’s children are less likely to graduate high school than their parents.

Meanwhile, state education boards and agencies are hoping to outfox, or run the clock out on, No Child Left Behind graduation rate requirements.

And, if these state agencies are griping and stalling now, what if U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings is able to push through NCLB rules changes separately tracking black and Hispanic graduation rates?

Plus, none of this even touches on the fact that our 180-day school year is hopelessly inadequate to the 200 days or more required in most countries.

Why don’t we just wrap the whole country in a bright, shiny red bow and send the whole thing to China?

Education regression hits America

In what should be scary as hell for the future of our country, today’s children are less likely to graduate high school than their parents.

Meanwhile, state education boards and agencies are hoping to outfox, or run the clock out on, No Child Left Behind graduation rate requirements.

And, if these state agencies are griping and stalling now, what if U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings is able to push through NCLB rules changes separately tracking black and Hispanic graduation rates?

Plus, none of this even touches on the fact that our 180-day school year is hopelessly inadequate to the 200 days or more required in most countries.

Why don’t we just wrap the whole country in a bright, shiny red bow and send the whole thing to China?

Missing from BOTH Obama and McCain education policies

We need a 200-day school year

ScienceDebate2008 does a great job of comparing their stances on 14 science-related questions.

Bothare AWOL on the critical issue of American schools and students needing alonger school year, as I e-mailed ScienceDebate’s Shawn Otto.

All other advanced democracies have a school year of at least 200 days, compared to our puny 180 days. Most go 210 days or more, or even push 200 days or more.

Is it no wonder our students fall further and further behind, when they get 15 percent fewer days in school every year?

And,remember, that as each school year theoretically builds on the learning ofa previous year, that 15 percent gap compounds itself, year after year.

That said, there are some definite differences between the two on science issues, which I’ll be tackling later today.