Stanford Charter Closes

Stanford's experiment in running a charter school ends. This seems like the kind of story that can be read in a dozen different ways, depending on your point-of-view about test scores, charter schools, schools of education, high-prestige universities, etc. Take, for instance, this statement by the board president: “I would have expected that any school that is overseen by Stanford would have the best scores."

TFA

Check out the very interesting article about Teach for America in this month's Rethinking Schools.

More on Florida

From the Associated Press, via Education Week:

Conservatives Hail Fla. Teacher Bill as Model

Hailed as a national model by conservative academics and politicians, legislation that would make it easier to fire Florida teachers and link their pay to student test scores went to Gov. Charlie Crist in the wee hours of Friday morning after a marathon House debate that began Thursday night.

Business interests as well as most Republicans backed the bill that was opposed by teachers and their unions, local school officials and Democrats.

Read the rest here.

I'd be interested in hearing any thoughts from Florida CEE members about this.

Outsourced

A professor at the University of Houston is outsourcing the grading of student essays (to Bangalore).

Twilight Zone

Another high school, this time in Savannah, Georgia, is firing its entire staff. Here's the Twilight Zone line, from "public information manager Karla Redditte": “The superintendent is very pleased with the staff – it’s not any fault of theirs . . ."

Grim Times

Two good columns today, one from Derek Jackson at the Boston Globe on "The Death of Public Education" and another from CEE's own Michael Moore at the Savannah Morning News on "Merit Pay for Parents."
And, on the same theme, more news from Florida.
(One thought about the moves to undermine teacher tenure occurring in Florida and elsewhere: I usually assume that attacks on the teaching profession are at least partly about union-busting. But isn't it likely that teachers who are deprived of the due process protections offered by tenure will turn elsewhere for such protections? Could this end up reinvigorating the unions in education?)

Lesson Planning?

I just got out of a Secondary Education program meeting where the topic under discussion was lesson planning, especially the question of how much various subject areas have in common when it comes to lesson planning. I always leave such discussions a little confused about the proper role of lesson planning in teacher education. Some faculty appear to see it as absolutely central while others seem to think it's over-emphasized, that it's a kind of red-herring, distracting us from more important matters. My sense is that there's a similar divide among K-12 teachers. For instance, I'm thinking of one very good teacher I know who's somewhat dismissive of the idea of lesson planning because she thinks creating efficient routines and managing student work make the idea of "the well-planned lesson" almost obsolete. So I'm curious about other teacher ed. programs--what's the status/role of lesson planning where you are? Is it under-emphasized? Over-emphasized? Under-theorized? Fetishized?