- With the Washington State Supreme Court’s ruling against the constitutionality of charter schools and a sudden teachers’ strike breaking out in Seattle, education observers across the country would be justified in wondering whether anyone will actually be starting school this month in the Evergreen State. The court’s decision, which hurls the future of nine freshly opened schools into immediate uncertainty, has been greeted with more drama thus far (no surprise, since its legal rationale has been deemed quixotic, and its consequences will certainly be disruptive to the 1,200 students who may now have to seek schooling elsewhere). But dumping labor unrest atop this catastrophe will make matters inconceivably worse. Leaders in all three branches of the state’s government simply must come together to resolve this double crisis.
- We’ve all got portmanteaus that we despise. For the Gadfly’s money, “telephone” worked perfectly well without being combined with “marketing.” But the New York Times has introduced a new mashup that may be as promising to students as it is painful to the ear: “teacherpreneur.” Using online tools like Youtube and TeachersPayTeachers.com, skilled instructors have been able to develop markets for their unique lesson plans and materials—and make pots of well-deserved income in the process. According to representatives from the company that runs TeachersPayTeachers, roughly three hundred teachers have made over $100,000 by providing high-quality materials to fellow educators across the country. As the demand for excellent, Common Core-aligned curricula grows, so will the number of (ugh) teacherpreneurs looking to upend the top-down market run by textbook companies. Kids get better lessons, teachers get rich—not such a bad outcome.
- Teacher quality is a sine qua non of reform success: We can extend more choice to students and families, set higher standards across the board, and work to get minority and low-income kids ready for kindergarten; but if they’re not being taught by capable, confident professionals, classroom work is always going to lag. The indispensable Dan Willingham has some great suggestions this week for how to boost the preparedness of the eager graduates about to enter the classroom. First, we need to test teacher candidates more rigorously before they receive certification—and this testing should focus on core subject matter like math and English, not airy child development theory. Second, we need to better classify the stuff that instructors absolutely need to know to do their jobs better. “A list like this could be used as the guiding framework not only to evaluate whether a teacher is well trained,” he explains, “but also whether he or she should be certified to teach and whether a training program should be accredited.”
- What do you call a recently released convict with three job offers—including one with a starting salary of $50,000? A miracle, sure. But more specifically, he’s a beneficiary of career and technical education. NPR has a brief, startling look at a program to teach critical and sought-after skills like welding in the Georgia prison system. Graduates, including men whose criminal histories would normally lock them out of the job market, are being welcomed with open arms by manufacturers who can’t find candidates with similar skills elsewhere. As one source from the Washington, D.C.-based Manufacturing Institute lamented, “We made the decision that all kids should go to college and as a result you saw the elimination of a lot of the technical programs at the high school level." It’s great that businesses are filling jobs and men on the margins of society are getting a second chance. But if we made this kind of pathway available to low-income students earlier, maybe they wouldn’t end up accessing it from jail cells.
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