Year: 2011

Finding Heart in School Budgets

Eduflack accountability, teachers

OK, I’ll admit it.  Eduflack has always been a data guy.  I like to see the proof.  I want to measure effectiveness based on outcomes.  I make jokes about those who emphasize (or solely focus on) the inputs that go into our educational systems.

As many readers know, one of the hats I wear away from this blog is that of local school board member.  Like most communities, this year we are grappling with larger student populations, higher costs, and shrinking municipal budgets.  For some, it is easy to make this a green eyeshade exercise, basing budgetary decisions solely on the dollars and cents.  But for a school system, doing so jeopardizes the very operation.  That “numbers only” approach forgets that schools are only as good as the educators who staff them.
What do I mean?  Check out a recent commentary I penned for one of my local media outlets.  Somewhere in the budget process — particularly for schools — we need to identify, and support, the heart and soul of our schools and our community.  Yes, we need to develop and pass responsible budgets.  But we can’t lose sight of the mission as we are looking at those columns of dollar figures.  

$4B vs. $4B

Eduflack accountability, Achievement gap, Arne Duncan, AYP, RTT

It appears that not all pots of $4 billion are created equal, at least not according to EdSec Arne Duncan.  Out at the Education Writers Association conference last week, Duncan was scratching his head regarding an interesting paradox.  We talk, ad nauseam, about the $4 billion the federal government has committed to the 12 states that won Race to the Top (RttT).  But why do we say virtually nothing about the $4 billion available through the School Improvement Grant (SIG) program that is serving the lowest 5 percent of all schools in the county?

Between the lines of his question, Duncan seemed to be saying that SIG, at its heart, could ultimately have more of an impact on student achievement across the nation than our deal ol’ RttT.  After all, every state can get a piece of SIG.  SIG is targeted specifically at boosting student achievement (as opposed to Race’s multiple goals and objectives).  And ED even has specific expectations and measures to determine SIG effectiveness out of the gate.
So why is SIG not getting the love from the media or from school improvement folks that RttT is?  First and foremost, Race is sexy.  Huge dollars for a small group of states to think big thoughts and do interesting things.  A competitive process that made all states equals, where a state like Delaware can best a state like California.  The political intrigue of what states won, what states lost, and why.  A public scoring process similar to the Miss America pageant.  And repeated mentions of the promise of RttT in presidential speeches, State of the Unions, and now multiple budgets.  Obama loves Race, but seems ambivalent about SIG.
Despite all of its upside and potential as a real change agent, SIG remains a bastard stepchild in the process.  We want to talk about those states that are “winning,” not those schools that are our lowest performing.  We want to focus on best of class.  And those individual SIG grants ultimately pale in comparison to the hundreds of millions of dollars one particular state won in RttT competition.
It really is a shame, though.  Duncan is right; $4 billion isn’t necessarily created equal.  While Race may be a nice showhorse in the great education reform parade, SIG has is the real workhorse.  When we look at the numbers and see the challenges before our schools — particularly those serving historically disadvantaged populations — it is SIG that is going to make the real difference. 
At a time when we are lamenting education programs that have had their $20 or $25 million appropriation eliminated by the President or Congress (depending on your perspective), don’t we need a little more attention on the $4 billion that is being committed to help our truly struggling schools?  Talking about the fun a dozen states may have spending their RttT largesse is fun, but the truly interesting stories are likely what those SIG schools are actually doing to change the fates and futures of the kids who walk through their doors.
  

Education and the FY2011 Budget

Eduflack accountability, ESEA, i3, Obama, RTT

Details are starting to trickle in on how the U.S. Department of Education will be affected by the budget deal cut late Friday by President Obama and congressional leaders.  And how does our little education space shake out?

The Winners
* Additional $700 million for Race to the Top (though still likely for states, not districts)
* Additional $150 million for Investing in innovation
* Additional $20 million for Promise Neighborhoods (added to original $10 million)
The Losers
* Every ED program (a 0.2%, across-the-board cut for all programs)
* Striving Readers eliminated ($250 million)
* Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT) grants eliminated ($100 million)
* $97 million cut to Safe and Drug-Free Schools
* Smaller Learning Communities eliminated ($88 million)
* $73 million cut for Teaching of Traditional History
* Even Start eliminated ($66.5 million)
* LEAP eliminated ($63.9 million)
* Robert C. Byrd Scholarships eliminated ($42 million)
* Arts in Education eliminated ($40 million)
* National Writing Project eliminated ($25.6 million)
* $25 million cut for TRIO
* Reading is Fundamental eliminated ($24.8 million)
* $20 million cut for state assessments
* $20 million cut for GEAR UP
* Literacy Through School Libraries eliminated ($19.1 million)
* Teach for America eliminated ($18 million)
* $15 million cut for English Language Acquisition State Grants
* $13 million cut for Regional Education Labs
* $13 million cut for Recordings for the Blind
* Grants to Gulf Coast States eliminated ($12 million)
* National Board for Professional Teaching Standards eliminated ($10.6 million)
* $10 million cut for School Improvement Grants (SIG)
* Special Olympics eliminated ($8.1 million)
* Javitz Gifted and Talented program eliminated ($7.5 million)
* $5 million cut for Comprehensive Centers
* $5 million cut for Teacher Quality State Grants
* Thurgood Marshall Legal Scholarships eliminated ($3 million)
* STEM foreign language teacher training eliminated ($2.2 million)
* Underground Railroad program eliminated ($1.9 million)
* Close Up Fellowships eliminated ($1.9 million)
* $1 million cut for ESEA evaluation
And, perhaps most devastating, the Historic Whaling and Trading Partners program was eliminated, at a tune of $8.8 million.
As a parting gift, it looks like Congress will set us a new 1 percent competitive grant program, about $29.4 million, in the Teacher Quality State Grants program.  This will allow some eliminated efforts — like TFA, NBPTS, and the Writing Project, to compete for some additional funding.
Of course, none of this should come as any surprise.  For the past two presidential budgets, the White House has offered up all of the above programs for either elimination or consolidation.  So when Congress is looking to make cuts, the logical place to go is after those programs that President Obama himself has signaled as non-essential (even if he intended to allow them to compete for consolidated money through a competitive grant program).

The Perfect and the Good

Eduflack accountability, Arne Duncan, ESEA, NCLB, RTT, SBRR, Spellings, teachers

For much of the last week, Eduflack has been down in New Orleans, living the edu-life.  First stop was the Education Writers Association (EWA), followed by a multi-day play at the American Educational Research Association (AERA).

(As an aside, EWA has to be my favorite conference of the year.  I have to attend A LOT of education events each year, and I thoroughly enjoy EWA.  It is a fantastic opportunity for me to get to know a lot of the reporters and bloggers I know virtually, and I always get a kick when some of the associates consider me a “journalist” because of this little blog.)
At any rate, there was clearly a catch phrase at EWA this year from the policymakers and talking heads trying to influence reporter-think.  “Let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”  While I would argue that none of us in attendance are exactly a 21st century Voltaire, it was an interesting observation heard over multiple days.
EdSec Arne Duncan used it in reference to ESEA reauthorization.  Again stating his belief that we will have reauth done before the start of the school year (and more importantly, noting that we NEED to have it done be by the end of the summer), Duncan made clear that ESEA won’t be perfect (he didn’t quite make Margaret Spellings’ 99.94% pure remarks).  But real improvements must be made to the current law.  We know what those improvements are.  We have some agreement on those improvements.  So let’s move forward now down the good path, knowing ESEA will never be perfect for all comers.
The battle between the perfect and the good was also made with regard to teachers and value-added evaluation.  In discussing the great siege on Los Angeles teachers in 2010 (the LA Times is releasing version two of its teacher database in the next week or two) and similar pending efforts in NYC, the general sense was that revealing such data is a “good thing,” albeit an imperfect thing. 
And similar remarks made testing and assessment blush, particularly on issues like common standards and adequately and fairly measuring student achievement across the nation and around the world.
It is all a subtle shift in rhetoric, but an important one for the school improvement debate.  For about a decade now, we were certain in what we needed to do.  NCLB was perfect (or 99.94% so).  RF was perfect.  SBR was perfect.  AYP was perfect.  And even now, CCSSI is perfect.  But with all of this perfection, we’ve seen little growth in student achievement and little agreement on the paths we should head, the speed we should take, and the ultimate destination we should seek.
So now we are focusing on common sense progress.  What incremental steps can we take?  What promising practices can we follow?  What gets us half of the way forward?  Instead of throwing that Hail Mary we’ve all sought in education for decades, we have made the decided shift to a “three yards and a cloud of dust” approach lately.  (Sorry, Mr. Duncan, they can’t all be basketball metaphors.)
Such a rhetorical adjustment has both its pluses and its negatives.  It is harder for the opposition to remain strong when they aren’t fighting an “all or nothing” approach.  It is more difficult to stand against forward progress, even if it is slow.  But it is also more difficult rally strong support.  For supporters, who wants to go slow or compromise or wait patiently?
Will the education community’s embrace of Voltaire win the day?  The challenge EdSec Duncan and his supporters in the ed space have is a matter of priority.  Championing the good is a fine strategy if we can identity primary and secondary needs at this point.  But with ESEA, a range of funding issues from RttT to SIG, common core standards, revisions to AYP, teacher performance and incentive issues, and a host of other topics, something has to give.  In the pursuit of the good, we have to recognize that even good can be subjective.  We’ll never be perfect, but we still need to determine those one or two issues on which we can be really good this year.
  

Conveyin’ the Message in the Big Easy

Eduflack Arne Duncan, Media, Social media

Eduflack hits the road again this week, destination New Orleans.  The Education Writers Association will be meeting down in the Big Easy this Thursday through Friday, celebrating its 64th Annual Seminar.  This year’s theme?  Recovery and Reform: Aiming for Excellence in Uncertain Times.

The agenda includes a relative who’s who in education.  EdSec Arne Duncan will be there.  So will AFT President Randi Weingarten and NEA President Dennis Van Roekel.  EdTrust’s Kati Haycock, New Orleans’ Schools Paul Vallas, and Alliance for Excellent Education’s Bob Wise are also in the house.  But the spotlight will really be on the reporters in attendance and on the program.  Banchero, Toppo, Jaschik, Willen, Turner, Alpert, Otterman, and all the other names we read.  We even have those pesky bloggers like Hess and Russo.
Amid all those moves, shakers, and bylines we hunger to see at such conferences, dear ol’ Eduflack is also on the program.  This Thursday (1;15 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. local time), I’ll be part of a panel discussing, “Using Social Media to Convey Your Message.”  I’ll be joining the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Peter Panepento and Kathleen Kennedy Manzo, former EdWeek shining star and currently with the Hatcher Group, to talk about the Tweets, blogs, FB fans, dailies, and everything else in the SM universe.  
So if you’re in NoLa (and if you’re at EWA) be sure to stop by the session.  And if you aren’t in the neighborhood, be sure to check out all the action on Twitter.  Just look for the #ewa2011 hashtag.

Standards or Curriculum, Curriculum or Standards?

Eduflack accountability, assessment, AYP, CCSSO, national standards, NGA

Over at ASCDedge (a professional networking community managed by, of course, ASCD), Steven Weber reflects on recent Education Week coverage on the topic of Common Core State Standards and how it relates to curriculum.  One of the key questions Weber asks those in “the community” is “Do you think that the Common Core State Standards are curriculum or do you believe there is a distinct difference between standards and curriculum?”

When I was out at ASCD last week, I heard some very similar concerns from educators across the country.  Lots of teachers freaked out by CCSSI because they believe it is the “new curriculum” to go with the new world order likely coming through the reauthorization of ESEA.
If one ventures over to the CCSSI website, it is nearly impossible to even find the word “curriculum.”  In describing what CCSSI is, the good folks at National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers are pretty darned clear about what common standards are, and curriculum ain’t it.  Just take a look at the description:

The standards are informed by the highest, most effective models from states across the country and countries around the world, and provide teachers and parents with a common understanding of what students are expected to learn. Consistent standards will provide appropriate benchmarks for all students, regardless of where they live.

These standards define the knowledge and skills students should have within their K-12 education careers so that they will graduate high school able to succeed in entry-level, credit-bearing academic college courses and in workforce training programs. The standards:

    • Are aligned with college and work expectations;
    • Are clear, understandable and consistent;
    • Include rigorous content and application of knowledge through high-order skills;
    • Build upon strengths and lessons of current state standards;
    • Are informed by other top performing countries, so that all students are prepared to succeed in our global economy and society; and
    • Are evidence-based.

Lots on skill.  Lots on standards.  Nothing about curriculum.  The closest we have is they are built upon current state standards, which in theory tie to current state curriculum.  But is there anyone who believes that the hodgepodge of current state standards is very definition of a model curriculum?
So why the confusion and the concern?  First and foremost, it is driven by a lack of information.  CCSSI was released nearly a year ago, and virtually every state in the union has signed onto the movement.  But beyond those policymakers who put their states into the CCSSI camp and those consultants who wrote Race to the Top applications pledging to follow the Common Standards, few actually know what this means.  We’ve signed on to CCSSI, the thought process goes, so now what?
In the absence of information, we make it up.  We know CCSSI isn’t assessment and tests, because we have federally funded tests aligned with CCSSI currently under development.  But the feds don’t develop curriculum.   So we have a choice.  Vendors claiming their products are the CCSSI curriculum or the notion that CCSSI is the curriculum itself.  And while many vendors may be quick to claim CCSSI alignment, no one has yet been bold enough to claim they are the embodiment of the curriculum itself.  The only remaining choice, then, is that the standards must be the curriculum.  After all, what value is the alignment of product if it isn’t aligned to both the standard and the curriculum?
We all know that moving the concept of common core state standards into practice is going to take time.  We have standards.  We are developing tests.  It is now likely going to take us a few years to develop a curriculum (particularly with the 15% add ons most states will take advantage of) and then create the professional developments and supports to go with it.  Yet here we stand, expecting all of this to take hold in a matter of months, rather than the years it typically takes the education community to get up to speed.
Before we rush to accept national standards as a new curriculum, it seems we need to ask ourselves one important question.  Do national standards mean a national curriculum, or is curriculum best left to localities and teachers to determine?  Seems CCSSI is all about providing us one universal yardstick, but it should be left up to the user to determine how to hit a given mark.
    

Brookings, Ed Media, and Missed Opps

Eduflack Media, Parents, polls

They’re back!  The good folks over at Brookings Institution have returned with their third study on the United States and how it covers education issues in the media.  If you’ll recall, in 2009 we learned that only 1.4 percent of national news coverage in the dear ol’ U.S. of A was about education issues.  Last year, the trio of Darrell West, Russ Whitehurst, and E.J. Dionne came back for a return engagement to tell us how key leaders are seeing the future of education media.

First off, the people seem to care most about the issues that are pretty much getting the most coverage these days.  Teacher performance (73 percent).  Student academic performance (71 percent).  School crime or violence (69 percent).  School finance and school reform (66 percent).  It is just shocking!  The most important education policy issues for those polled are those issues they constantly hear about from President Obama, EdSec Duncan, governors, and the mainstream media that still covers K-12 issues.
Who do they get their information from?  Family and friends is tops, at 75 percent.  Then comes daily newspapers (60 percent), school publications (56 percent), local television (54 percent), community groups (42 percent), national television (38 percent), Internet sites (37 percent), radio (33 percent), and school Facebook or MySpace sites (14 percent).  (Who knew we were even still using MySpace??)  Of those sources, family and friends were deemed the most highly regarded (62 percent), with radio coming in at 24 percent, Facebook at 12 percent, and just 7 percent regarding those phone texts as valuable.
This is all important data, as it helps flesh out the picture of how one successfully informs stakeholders — namely parents, as far as this survey is concerned — about developments in local and national education.  But it also raises some concerns:
* Do we really believe this is a true representative sample of Main Street USA?  Setting aside the concerns of telephone polling and who has land lines these days, just take a look at the numbers, take a look at the school communities you know, and compare.  Are we really getting local education information from daily newspapers and local television stations?  
* Does this even provide us an apples/apples comparison?  I look at the first bucket — “the areas they wanted more coverage of their local schools,” and teacher performance comes in first.  Then we ask them how they are getting news, and we are scoring things like texts?  Who texts about a complex issue like teacher evaluations?
* When asked how to improve communications, the most popular response was more printed newsletters.  Second was more information through the Internet (despite it ranking seventh in preferred sources).  Seems we really don’t know what we want, doesn’t it?
Unfortunately, Brookings didn’t offer up some recommendations on what to do with this data.  Instead, it concluded its report with the following:

Although Americans feel reasonably well-informed about schools and do not sense a decline in the amount of information available to them, they do want more information than they are getting, especially on the most basic educational questions: teacher performance, student academic achievement, curricula, finances, and reform efforts. They are also concerned about violence in the schools. To a remarkable degree, they still rely on daily newspapers for educational information, and that is true even among young Americans who are more open to newer technologies. This points to an opportunity for newspapers eager to expand their readership among the young. Education blogs on newspaper websites are a growing and vital source of education news. Expanding and building on them would be helpful to the education policy debate, and good for newspapapers.

But Brookings’ loss is Eduflack’s gain.  Let me offer us a few observations/suggestions:
  1. We need to define what “news” is.  The first set of questions address high-brow policy discussions related to ESEA and other national debates.  But the news source information seems to focus on “information,” not “news.”  There is a big difference between learning about teacher incentives and knowing how the girls’ soccer team did.  But those are lumped into the same question as equals.
  2. We need to separate discussion of education policy issues from local school issues.  Here, respondents were focused on the policy issues driven by the mainstream media.  But their answers regarding media sources reflect what they are hearing about schools in their local community.  How many of us have family and friends who can talk about teacher performance issues?  And what printed newsletter is going to enlighten us on that issue?  We need better data on the separation of the two issues.  And quite frankly, knowing how people learn about their local schools and their concerns regarding those local schools is far more valuable.
  3. While the information regarding what 18-29 year olds think about these topics is interesting, how many 20-year-olds really care about what is happening at their local schools?  Along similar lines, how many really care about student academic performance information?   
  4. We need data on “who” is providing the information to the sources in question.  Is it earned media from news organizations?  School-generated print and web information?  Community-generated blogs or radio programs?  All information is not created equal.  Are people looking for more fact-based, trusted news, or are they looking for the snarky, the provacative, or that that simply relates back to them and their families?  
  5. Finally, the big issue is SO WHAT?  What do we do with this data?  Is it a problem of information not being out there, or people not knowing where to look?  Is the information folks are not finding in their local newspapers available on the Internet?  Is the data people want from printed newsletters available on school web or Facebook sites?  We need both educated and informed customers of education information.  We need to understand what they need, information wise, and then help them see where to find it.   
Ultimately, the data provided by Brookings makes for lovely water cooler or cocktail party chatter for those in ed policy circles, but it does very little, if anything, to help advance improving communications in the education arena.  
UPDATE: Apparently, the report’s authors have said a second document, focusing on reccs from the telephone survey, is in development.  But in these days of instant gratification, who waits to deliver reccs??

It’s Common Core-tastic!?

Eduflack accountability, assessment, ESEA, national standards, NCLB, Reading First, SBRR

As the great Yogi Berra is reported as saying, it’s like deja vu all over again!  

This past weekend, dear ol’ Eduflack was out in San Francisco for the ASCD Annual Conference.  On Saturday, I had the privilege of addressing more than 100 folks who came out on a monsoon-like Saturday morning to learn more about how to build, execute, and measure a successful public engagement campaign in the education space.  A good time, I hope, was had by all.
After the conclusion of that merriment, Eduflack wandered over to the exhibit hall to see what companies, non-profits, IHEs, and government agencies thought ASCD attendees would be most interested in.  It was a full hall, comprised of many of the same organizations that make the rounds during the spring education conferences.
But the one thing that caught my eye was how many booths and vendors bore the supposed blessing of the Common Core State Standards Initiative.  We had “Common Core approved” and “Common Core certified.”  For those not quite willing to go out on the limb, we had even had quite a few “Common Core aligned.”  The label could be found on curriculum and supplemental materials, professional development and assessment tools.  It seemed to be applicable for everything short of the tote bags and candy giveaways.
Yes, I realize that most states have signed onto Common Core and are currently in the process figuring out how to move that adoption to implementation.  Yes, I realize the embrace of Common Core was a requirement of Race to the Top and is likely to play a role in ESEA reauthorization.  And yes, I realize the importance of having a one national yardstick by which we measure all U.S. students.
But we also have to be clear here.  States are adopting relatively general standards in just two subject areas.  We have no curriculum to go with those standards yet.  We have no tests to go with the standards yet.  We have no textbooks or workbooks or cookbooks that go with those standards yet.  in fact, we don’t even have the full standards yet, as all states have the ability to add 15 percent of their own priority standards to the common ELA and math standards currently in play.
So it just seems far too premature for us to be peddling the “Common Core approved” when we still don’t know what Common Core looks like in the schools and THERE IS NO ONE TO APPROVE ANYTHING ON BEHALF OF COMMON CORE!  No one is certifying or approving on behalf of CCSSI.  At a time when states and districts are worried about Common Core (and many at ASCD were), we have vendors marketing their wares to those concerns, promising the magical elixirs that will fix everything.
And that’s where the deja vu comes into play.  It was only seven or eight years ago when we saw the exact same scene unfold around scientifically based research.  In 2002, 2003, 2004, just about anyone who was anyone at an education conference was selling an SBR-based product that was aligned with NCLB.  Didn’t matter if it was true or not, everyone was scientifically based.  Everyone had an evidence-based core.  You could talk to a dozen reading programs on conference row in 2003, and they were all SBR.  Ask them what their research was, and most handed the same document to you — the National Reading Panel report (or the NCLB legislation itself).
The problem here is that people understood the expectation (everything needed to be scientifically based) but they didn’t understand (or didn’t care) what that meant.  The type of research required under the law took four or five years to develop, and the sales cycle didn’t allow for that sort of time.  So take the NRP report, slap a focus group or two together, put together some bar graphs, and there was your research base.  Add a colorful “checklist” aligning your product with the NRP and you were really excelling.
(As an aside, perhaps my favorite vendor at ASCD this weekend was one peddling a product labeled as “scientifically researched based.”  I don’t know what scientifically research is, but I’m guessing that extra “ly” makes the research extra good.)
Here we go again.  We all saw how successful it was to sell vapor and snake oil as SBR in the last decade.  It cost us another generation of students.  It killed a potentially strong program in Reading First and wasted millions (if not billions) of dollars in the process, as we couldn’t distinguish between the real deal and the posers.  
Before we rush to reach for the Common Core label, can we just take a moment to actually digest CCSSI?  Can we let states ID their 15 percent add on?  Can we see how districts apply it to instructional expectations?  Can we see how the assessment consortia begin developing their products?  And can we see, please, if these standards actually move into the classroom or if they just hang out there as a good idea that we agree to, but don’t actually implement?
Of course, there is one difference between SBR and CCSSI.  WIth SBR, the federal government established a new pot of money, $1 billion a year under RF, to help fund the acquisition of those new SBR products and services.  With Common Core, there doesn’t appear to be any new money.  Perhaps, as districts and states are spending their own funds from existing obligations and aren’t playing with house money, that they will scrutinize their purchases a little more, ensuring they are buying the real deal.  
There are some great products and services out there that do match up well with Common Core and can help districts and schools meet their current and future obligations.  But anyone can slap a label on a product.  It is up to educators to discern the strong from the squishy.  
  

Moving Good Ideas to Real Results

Eduflack High School, Marketing, Media, PR, reading, STEM, Teacher Education

Late March is always fun because it means the start of the K-12 education conference gauntlet.  This weekend, Eduflack is out at ASCD’s 2011 Annual Conference in San Francisco.  On Saturday, I’ll be leading a session entitled: “Moving Good Ideas to Real Results: Public Engagement and School Improvement.”

The session will focus on a lot of what I write about here on this blog.  Advocacy.  Social marketing.  Changing both thought and action when it comes to school improvement.  Along the way, I’ll use specific examples from the field, including my own experiences in “changing the game” when it comes to reading instruction, teacher preparation, STEM, high school improvement, and turnaround schools.
If you’re out in the land of cable cars, Ghirardelli chocolate, and the World Champion Giants this Saturday morning, stop by the 8 a.m. session at the Moscone Center, rooms 250 and 262.  If you’re not, and you want more info, just drop me a line and I’ll give you the Cliffnotes version.

Oh, Those “Government-Run Schools”

Eduflack Uncategorized

Have we really gotten to the point where we are going to attack the very existence of public schools as a way to score political points in the presidential primaries?  Apparently so.  Over at The Education Debate, my latest post looks at recent rhetoric from GOP presidential contenders attacking U.S. schoolhouses.

“Government-run schools.”  “Attempts to socialize our children.”  “Government monopoly system.”  Imposing “one fixed set of political beliefs.”  All real quotes in recent weeks.  And all real quotes from folks who have been elected to serve as U.S. senators, congressmen, and state governors.
Sure, everyone is entitled to their opinions.  But in one’s zeal to attack the “status quo” or lay waste to teachers unions, has no one told these White House aspirants that their beloved charter schools are public schools too?
Check out the piece (as well as a lot of other great content) over at The Education Debate.  And realize the likely political rhetoric on the schools is only starting to heat up.