Video Now Available: Mid-term Election Recap: Impact on Governing Priorities and Education Reform Efforts

On November 4, the Coalition for a College and Career Ready America held an election recap event titled "Mid-term Election Recap: Impact on Governing Priorities and Education Reform Efforts." This event featured a tremendous panel, with Stuart Rothenberg (editor and publisher, The Rothenberg Political Report ) providing an election results overview and Governor Bob Wise (president, Alliance for Excellent Education), Vic Klatt (Van Scoyoc Associates and former GOP staff director for the House Education and Labor Committee), and Danica Petroshius (president and ceo, Policy Strategies and Solutions and former chief of staff for the late Senator Edward Kennedy) analyzing how the election could shape the legislative priorities of the 112th Congress and state legislatures and the resulting impact these changes may have on education legislation. Click on the image below to watch the full video of the event.

Morning Announcements: November 5, 2010

Washington Post reporter Nick Anderson explains how President Obama could push education reform in effort to work with a divided Congress.

An article in the Providence Journal tracks the school turnaround progress at Central Falls High School. Part of the reform efforts include increased tutoring opportunities and a satellite program designed to prevent students from dropping out.

The Texas Tribune asks can credit recovery courses cut high school dropout rates?

Rotherham Asks, "Will John Boehner Be Good for Education?"

In the latest installment of his "School of Thought" column, which appears every Thursday at TIME.com, Andrew J. Rotherham calls presumed House Speaker-to-be John Boehner a "seasoned negotiator" who has succeeded in passing education laws in the past. At the same time however, he notes that Boehner's views about education "matter less than the question of what he can accomplish given the fractious caucus he will be leading."

Morning Announcements: November 1, 2010

On Saturday the Wall Street Journal ran a piece by Michelle Rhee and Adrian Fenty entitled The Education Manifesto. In the essay, they wrote , “Four years ago, we both found a cause that inspired us to work hard every day. Reformers nationwide need to take up that mantle. Now is not the time to go soft on tough decisions. Fixing our schools will require courage and persistence, but young lives are at stake. What could be more worth the risks?”

The Boston Herald reports that the number of Massachusetts children attending charter schools has more than doubled in the past decade, reflecting national trends.

A story in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution examines the costs of remedial education at Georgia’s colleges. 

One month after school districts in New Jersey received their share of $268 million to bring laid off teachers back to the classroom from the Education Jobs Fund, most districts have not hired anyone and are socking the money away for next year, according to The Star-Ledger.

Video Available: Looking Back at the Current Congress and Looking Ahead to the New Congress of 2011

On October 25, the Alliance for Excellent Education held an interactive webinar that looked back at what the current Congress accomplished on education reform while looking ahead to the prospects for additional reform in the new Congress, which begins in January. The webinar featured a roundtable discussion with Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education and former governor and congressional representative of West Virginia, and representatives from the Alliance’s federal advocacy team. The discussion was followed by a question and answer session driven by questions from webinar participants. Check out the full video below:

Changing Education Paradigms

In the video below, creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson asks how can change happen in education and how do we make it last?

The video is interesting and engaging not only for its content, but also for the manner in which it is conveyed--namely through an animated drawing that resembles the UPS "whiteboard" commercials on steroids.

The animation is courtesy of Britain's Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce (RSA). Highly recommended viewing.

Morning Announcements: October 18, 2010

Last Thursday, Baltimore teachers rejected a contract that would have provided six-figure salaries for an elite corps but would have tied the pay of all educators to how they perform in the classroom. Of the rejected proposal, the Washington Post editorial board writes, “it's farfetched to hold the proposal out as a groundbreaking model for the nation… The real model for national reform is the Washington, D.C., teachers contract negotiated by Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee. It took her three years and scads of money, but she got union leaders to agree to rules that prevent the last hired from being the first fired, empower principals and reward teachers most capable of lifting student achievement.”

Middle and high school classes will get tougher as part of an effort Houston ISD officials announced Friday to help persuade thousands of families to keep their children in the state's largest district, according to the Houston Chronicle. 

Report Round-Up: Friday, October 15, 2010

Finishing the First Lap: The Cost of First Year Student Attrition in America’s Four Year Colleges and Universities from the American Institutes for Research. Nationally, only about 60 percent of students graduate from four-year colleges and universities within six years. This analysis AIR vice president Mark Schneider finds that more than $9 billion was spent by state and federal governments to support students at four-year colleges and universities who left school before their sophomore year during a five-year period. 

White Paper: Next Generation Learning from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This white paper outlines how technology can help students and educators dramatically improve student outcomes, both in high schools and in postsecondary education.

Cutting to the Bone: How the Economic Crisis Affects Schools from the Center for Public Education.  According to this report, although the recession technically ended last year, budgets for LEAs nationwide will likely not reach pre-recession levels until late in the decade.

Morning Announcements: October 12, 2010

On Sunday, 16 school district chiefs, including New York’s Joel Klein and Washington’s Michelle Rhee published a manifesto entitled how to fix our schools in the Washington Post.

The Associated Press reports on a new analysis that finds states appropriated almost $6.2 billion for four-year colleges and universities between 2003 and 2008 to help pay for the education of students who didn't return for year two.

In an op-ed in the Charlotte Observer, Erskine Bowles, outgoing president of the University of North Carolina system, writes, “Ineffective teaching hurts our students - and ultimately, it hurts all of us” and points to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools as an example of best practices.

On Monday, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced the creation of a program that will provide grants to organizations to expand the reach of their education technology initiatives. Education Week blogger Ian Quillen reports that the Next Generation Learning Challenges program is releasing its first in a series of requests to solicit funding proposals for technology initiatives, with the first round focused specifically on postsecondary education.

Is the concern over the crisis in American education overblown?

In the September 27, 2010 issue of The New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann, the dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism, suggests that the rhetoric surrounding school reform overstates the problem. Taking the long view, Lemann notes that American education is a remarkable success story. He writes:

One hundred years ago, eight and a half percent of American seventeen-year-olds had a high school degree, and two percent of twenty-three-year-olds had a college degree. Now, on any given weekday morning, you will find something like fifty million Americans, about a sixth of the population, sitting under the roof of a public school building, and twenty million more are students or on the faculty or the staff of an institution of higher learning. Education is nowhere mentioned in the Constitution; the creation of the world’s first system of universal public education—from kindergarten through high school—and of mass higher education is one of the great achievements of American democracy.

Lemann is certainly right that the American education system is a remarkable accomplishment and that educational attainment has advanced considerably in the last century. But he fails to note that this success story stalled about thirty years ago. Today, about 30 percent of high school students fail to graduate on time, and the college graduation rate, once the highest in the world, has been overtaken by many other nations. Currently, the U.S. is tenth in the industrialized world in the percentage of 25-to 34-year-olds with college degrees, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).