This Week In Education

Three different takes on how Cong. Miller's proposal is going over. Compare and contrast: 'No Child' Loopholes Decried Washington Post Should suburban schools that barely miss federal learning targets be allowed to escape penalties, while inner-city schools that never even hit the dart board are required to give free tutoring and let students transfer to better schools? Secretary of Education Criticizes Proposal NYT The education secretary criticized a Congressional proposal to soften provisions of the President’s Bush signature education law. Spellings Criticizes No Child Proposals AP The administration and congressional lawmakers agree on one key change. They want schools ...

The public mud-slinging between Spellings and Miller is really heating up. Makes you wonder what they say about each other behind closed doors. And, substantively, it bodes poorly for a strengthening of the current NCLB law. Responding to Spellings' criticisms read to him by USA Today's Greg Toppo at a conference call with reporters today, Chairman Miller said that what he's trying to do with NCLB isn't just "wonkery" (as Spellings describes it) but rather much-needed changes to an imperfect law. "I know she wants to add confusion and doesn't like the debate," said Miller of Spellings. He also repeatedly ...

During an early afternoon press conference call, EdSec Spellings reiterated her concerns about the M&M (Miller and McKeon) discussion draft and said she was sending them comments in the hopes that they were still open-minded. She called the current NCLB and its 2014 goals "righteous, proper, and do-able." Some of the differences between the two positions seem relatively minor -- what form differentiated interventions should take, for example. Others -- multiple measures and other changes to AYP seem more problematic to Spellings. She's not willing to discuss how much of the changes she could implement without reauthorization, and she ...

I'm still dipping around in Rick Kahlenberg's new bio of Al Shanker (pictured), but this commentary about Shanker and NCLB (What Would Al Say?) reminds me of one clear Kahlenberg theme: Shanker was much more effective in pushing for standards and accountability than he was on teacher quality issues. In that sense, NCLB is very much an Al Shanker type of law: stronger on standards and accountability than on teacher quality. Alas, the teacher quality issue may be as or more important than anything else. But there's precious little discussion about TQ in NCLB 2.0. What's with that?...

Eventually I think that most major newspaper websites will have profiles of individual school and space for ongoing discussions among parents and teachers. Some papers are already doing a version of this by partnering with GreatSchools. But for now, at least, the most progress in this area seems to be high school sports pages. For example, the OrlandoSentinel has a high school sports zone with customized sports pages and ways for parents to track individual athletes, along with user-generated content. Via CyberJournalist.com....