- The congenital optimist could be forgiven for thinking that the late-Obama period represents a halcyon age of education reform. After all, Common Core is practically a fait accompli (hear that, West Virginia?), No Child Left Behind looks poised for a shiny, bipartisan reauthorization, and charter school enrollment has kept up impressive growth across the country. But on this last point, education commentator Richard Whitmire sees reasons for worry. In a tense piece for the Seventy Four, he enumerates the various institutional and political bogeys arrayed against charters, from Hillary Clinton’s recent swipes at the sector to House Republicans gunning for the federal Charter Schools Program. Whitmire is definitely right to keep a wary eye on the future. When districts and local charters reach a state of semi-parity, as in Washington, D.C., they can collaborate in ways that help kids and spare taxpayers. But relations between the two can go from Clinton/Yeltsin to Kennedy/Khrushchev in a hurry. Just ask New Yorkers.
- Everyone knows the feeling. You’re trying to file some papers at the office, and Roy from HR just won’t stop running up and down the hallways screaming at the top of his lungs. If it’s not that, he’ll be accosting coworkers outside the break room, right? No? Well, if you can’t empathize, Louisville students and teachers can: Since July, no fewer than seventy-two teachers from local Jefferson County Public Schools have resigned, many due to the chronic behavioral disturbances that plague the district. As one beleaguered employee put it, “I have kids who are verbally, emotionally and sometimes physically abusing other students, teachers and staff on a daily basis. I am being prevented from doing my job as a teacher more often than not by students engaging in disruptive behavior, and I am not getting any support.” Stories like these—laced with professional disillusionment and academic failure—are heartbreaking. They’re also far more rare in affluent suburban districts, which show far fewer compunctions about restoring order in the classroom. What’s it going to take for us to get school discipline right?
- We at the Fordham Institute are deeply saddened by the death last week of National Association of Independent Schools President John Chubb. John was a friend of Fordham: His fantastic blog series last year on school leadership development was only a small sample of the great contributions he made to the study of schools and learning. As his friend and sometime-colleague Checker Finn wrote, “He was off to a terrific start [at NAIS], fully grasping the challenges of that corner of U.S. private education and developing strategies to steer it out of the economic cul-de-sac he saw it entering. He died way too young, with so much still to do and contribute. But he had already done and contributed more than we ordinarily see from two or three (or four or five) people.” We extend our condolences to his friends and family.
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