Hard-hitting Newsweek piece on Weingarten and Rhee.  What’s the over-under on how many weeks/months/years this adds on to the contract negotiations in DC?

Andy Smarick writes-up the final regulations.   You can read all the docs here.    But while he raises some important points, I think he misses the big understory, which is the evidence standards in the final draft.  There was a pretty hot debate about them before the draft regs, and again before the final regs, and these standards set a pretty high bar for the big money that largely reflects the views of some senior administration officials with strong views on research evidence.

As a result, there are some organizations, including some Smarick cites, that may not be eligible for the big money.  Not because they’re not producing results, but because they don’t have evaluations of sufficient methodological rigor completed yet.  

In my view, that’s OK, this is a chance to step up the game on evaluation and start codifying some new standards (that hopefully will ultimately extend across federal education policy, right now federal programs are a political mish mash with regard to how much evidence matters to policy decisions).  And the three-tier approach where money is proportional to evidence makes sense and allows for both scaling and innovation.  But before the usual assortment of paranoids and the easily-fooled conclude that this is just a big scheme to send money to ventures favored by the administration, they should review the evidence standards and the evidence base.  

All that said, if you thought RTT judging was going to be complicated, this is going to be unprecedented given the likely number of applications and the the volume of serious work reviewing them will require.

Debate and reasoning skills are essential — God knows our field could use more.  Here’s a chance to help with that, and an important Edujob: Executive Director for Urban Debate Leagues (pdf).

Signed copy of a picture of Tubbs Justin Cohen with a gun to the first reader who can name both the leading foundation official in our field and the person in the middle of the Common Core initiative who were debate champions back in the day…

Update:  Craig, you’re the winner.  Right answer and faster than some emailed entries.  Email me to claim your prize.

Nothing changes in this business.  Senator Lieberman has a voucher amendment on a piece of legislation moving through the Senate, the education interest groups send letters about how they hate it.

Here’s the list of states invited to come to Washington: CO, DE, DC, FL, GA, IL, KY, LA, MA, NY, NC, OH, PA, RI, SC,  & TN.

First reaction*:  With the obvious caveat that not all these states get money in the first round, still sort of an “uh oh.”   Some states with good apps here but OH and NY is not a great sign…and IL and CO were arguably bubble states at best and not sure what SC means given how out of step they are with parts of the administration’s agenda.   Hard to argue the political fix is in if SC is here though…And surprised that IN didn’t pop more, they had an interesting approach to this.  Stay tuned.

*Disc: I helped some states review their apps, including ones that did and did not make it to this round and some I’m picking on here.

This review of Diane Ravitch’s new book, by Checker Finn in Forbes, seems likely to be the most important thing that’s going to be written about that book.   Similar diagnosis, radically different conclusions.   Given their shared histories and instrumental roles in getting us to where we are today, the divergence is profound.

At last some context on Central Falls, courtesy of  a bold move by Jay Mathews.   The amount of misinformation floating around about the situation up there is amazing, you’d think it would be inversely related instead it’s proportionate.  

I’m surprised the unions want to turn this into Little Big Horn.   The facts are not very sympathetic in this instance.  Or overall for that matter:  This is a state where the teachers union recently took a public stand that five consecutive years of lousy evaluations, not three, was a fair standard for losing a license to teach.   

It’s too soon to say for sure, but it is starting to look like the teachers unions had a golden opportunity to update their act by moving on a few issues and being rightly praised for doing so but instead are in the process of squandering that window.  That President Obama made a point of Central Falls is a good gauge of where elite opinion and the public mood is on this. 

But while the President may have trouble getting factions in DC to compromise, he may be having that effect in Rhode Island: The local union is signaling willingness to move on some of the issues.

In The New York Daily News Rob Saldin and I rise to the defense of the filibuster.  Punchline:  It’s not the problem, our broken political culture is.

I’m going to hazard a guess that most of the coverage of this new teacher survey from Scholastic and Gates is being written from secondhand accounts or press releases.   The actual survey is robust (it’s enormous) and a lot more complicated than the first day stories are letting on.  Lots of interesting implications for today’s debates that don’t just cut one way, in particular tenure.  Read it for yourself, here, especially the appendix (pdf).

Cheryl L. Sattler turns in a smart and important piece on IASA and NCLB history and the federal role in K-12.

Jaime Escalante is fighting cancer, needs some help.

This is quite an article out of New Jersey…

Lively new blog on teacher preparation, and not from the traditional perspective.  Jay Mathews with some context.

New report on federal accountability, ESEA reauthorization, and Race to the Top and stimulus (pdf) from the Aspen NCLB Commission and the Alliance for Excellent Ed.

In light of today’s event by the President and Secretary Powell and his wife Alma, it’s important to remember that while there are some schools that disproportionally drive the high school dropout problem, the so-called “dropout factories,” dropouts are a problem in all kinds of schools…In other words, resist the temptation to view dropouts only through the turnaround prism.  

Larger point, in relation to ESEA reauthorization, is that school reform is not only an urban issue and it’s risky to view it that way.

Update:  Michele McNeil…so jaded!

Mass Insight is hiring for their school turnaround initiative.  A couple of roles, more info through this link.

Here’s a set of short documentaries about various people doing interesting things to help modernize the education space.

Good report on pensions (pdf)…well good in terms of quality, not so much the findings from Pew.

On Monday Achieve is releasing a new report on where the nation is on college and career ready standards…sort of a hot issue just now…

Wow, with Republicans putting forward this much detail and specificity on ESEA reauthorization all the naysayers are clearly wrong, it’s as good as done…

In Los Angeles the charter wave has hit a seemingly immovable  object:  Local teachers’ union driven politics.

Meanwhile, per the behind the scenes pushing and shoving on TFA funding, Congress seems to have wised-up to the timeline/logistics problem.  That’s going to be a potent argument given the number of states and cities where TFA operates now and that would be adversely affected if this shift is not made carefully.

I’m still working my way through Diane Ravitch’s new book but Kahlenberg is apparently already finished.   He likes it!  No specific word on what Shanker thought of it…

This op-ed by Joel Klein about expanding charters in New York City seems pretty straightforward and hard to argue with.  And he forthrightly notes that charters are not a silver bullet.   Still, I’m sure there must be some reason (not apparent to mere plebeians, of course) why this is all wrong.   That’s because if Joel wrote an op-ed saying today was Thursday I’d be getting emails about how wrong he is and how saying it’s Thursday is  just further evidence that he’s deranged and hates children…

This Rhode Island high school situation sure seems like a bogus trend story.   Turnarounds may be a trend but really dramatic moves like this seem pretty anomalous.  That whale in Florida killing people seems like a more common trend than schools firing all the teachers en masse.  

But in Florida we may be seeing a real trend around expanded choice.   In places like Florida (Milwaukee is another example) the lines are now so blurry between public and private as to make those distinctions sort of meaningless.   It doesn’t stop the advocates from slinging those terms around but to really understand what’s starting to happen in these places (and ultimately its effects and impact) we’re going to need some new verbiage.

Update:  Liam Goldrick sees a trend, too. We’ll see…perhaps the federal dollars will provide some cover here but traditionally this is one of those chasms in education we periodically gaze into and then back away.  So count me among the skeptical.  There is an enormous difference between a lot of teachers being laid off for cost reasons in a difficult fiscal climate and a lot of teachers being let go (meaning actually separated from the district, not moved into other roles, other schools, put into a paid absent reserve status, or any of the rest of the games here) for cause.

If you didn’t get enough of this morning’s three-ring circus about charter schools at the House Ed and Labor Commitee you can watch it all over again here.

CNN hosts a lively debate about this Rhode Island high school situation in Central Falls.  Backstory via this link.

Update:  NYT on the story.

Rick Hess makes an interesting point about influence and deference with regard to teachers.  But isn’t there a more basic problem with this common rhetorical argument that no one listens to teachers:  Their interest groups are the most powerful in the education space and among the most powerful in public affairs nationally as measured by a variety of indicators of involvement in partisan and governmental politics.   It’s easy to say but actually hard to argue with a straight face that teachers as an organized group don’t have influence on policy or policymakers or aren’t heard.

If there is a disconnect between what teachers think and the positions of their unions and associations, then that’s a different issue.

Eduflak noted the other day that the Houston value-add dust-up illustrated the extent to which national policy debates would be fought out in local policy debates.   He’s right.  And this op-ed in The Houston Chronicle by Joel Klein, who in his day job runs the NY schools, shows exactly how much.

Discussion of charter schools on today’s Kojo Nnamdi show.  One issue that came up, and still needs a lot more work, is this issue of special education.

Many thanks to Sara Mead for some great guest-blogging last week.  Some lively debates going on below.

For this week, if you want a sense of the Administration’s big education priority for the foreseeable future, I’d pay less attention to the President’s speech today than to Ed Secretary Arne Duncan’s talk to the governors yesterday.  More than one governor was asking afterwards, ‘who is this SAFRA person he’s so obsessed with…’

Seems like a big battle with the banks is brewing and there is a lot of money on the line in a tight fiscal climate…

It’s the end of my week guest-blogging. Thanks to Andy for inviting me to blog, and to everyone who sent me stories or links, or linked to or commented on the posts. If you’re interested in hearing more from me, please follow me on twitter @saramead.