Everything You Need to Know From the January 9th Education Week

“Spellings Seeks to Cast Her Glow Over NCLB,” says the headline. Why Tori Spelling cares about No Child Left Behind is beyond me.

The page 1 above the fold headline gets into how the states as a whole probably aren’t going to be making education a number one priority for new spending this year. That helps Governor Gregoire here in Washington, because she can point to a national trend when she says no to the teachers.

From the “Glad it’s not me who has to make that call” department:

With too many students and too few classrooms, Calexico school officials took the unusual step of hiring someone to photograph children and document the offenders. Mr. Santillan snaps pictures at the city’s downtown border crossing and shares the images with school principals, who use them as evidence to kick out those living in Mexico.

This seems like a Republican wet dream. I can’t see kicking out kids who actually want to be in school, but OK.

Aligning your teaching to the culture of the students in your room has been a given over the years, but this article says that the research base for the practice is quite thin. EdWeek does a great newsletter on education research, which you can subscribe to here.

DC Superintendent Michelle Rhee got the authority she was looking for to be able to fire nearly 500 central office people if she so chooses. The city council also is backing her plan to close 23 schools by next fall. That should take care of the financial and the facilities—it’ll be interesting to see how the academics come along. It’s also worth noting that there’s a full-page ad at the back of the paper recruiting administrators to come work in the DC schools; is she cleaning out the principals, too?

In Georgia an entire school district can go charter if it so chooses, which is where this great quote comes from:

Districts and superintendents like the idea of districts’ getting more flexibility, but don’t like the idea of turning around and giving their schools more flexibility.”—Todd Ziebarth of the National Alliance for Public Schools

To me that’s the missing piece from many school reform proposals, ranging from Dino Rossi’s here in Washington State all the way up to the Aspen Commission. There’s plenty of talk about giving principals more power and districts more power, but why isn’t anyone outside of the union talking about empowering teachers?

Down in South Carolina, the new chair of the Board of Education is going to be a lady who home schools her four daughters. Someone who doesn’t believe in public education will be setting public education policy. Oy.

Reading First got absolutely reamed in the federal education budget last month, going from 1 billion dollars to slightly under 400 million. That’s a damned shame, because for all its controversy Reading First was still a good program that was getting money into schools that needed it the most. Sure there were strings attached, but there should be.

Finally, this issue has many letters in response to the articles that I highlighted during Leadership Week here at the blog. It's a neat commentary, especially on the highly qualified principals article.

Have a good day!