- Plugging district budget holes is a tricky task, but it doesn’t have to mean scrapping basketball or shortening the year. Thanks to the folks at Education Resource Strategies, you can learn this first hand. Their cool new interactive district budgeting tool lets you pick the budget gap you need to fill and choose the cuts (and investments) to make it happen.
- You heard it here first, kids: Instant recall of basic arithmetic functions is key to learning higher-level math. The Brits agree (about instant recall, not about how to spell “math”). Their country is banning calculator use in the early grades.
- Just a reminder if you’ve forgotten where education dollars are funneled: In 1955, the ratio of students to non-teaching education personnel was 50:1. In 2010, it was 10:1.
- It’s official. After announcing its intention to sponsor charter schools last year, the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, through its new nonprofit, has gotten the OK to authorize schools in the City of Lakes. It will be the first union in the nation to do so. (Note: Minnesota is just one of two states in which such an arrangement is even legal, Ohio being the other.)
- Sixty-nine percent of California students failed their phys-ed test, the state announced this week. Gadfly would like to think they’ve been working their minds, if not their bodies. But that’s not necessarily the case.
- According to a teacher survey conducted by Common Core, “curriculum narrowing” is a real concern—especially at the elementary level. Sixty-six percent of teachers feel that other subjects are getting crowded out by ELA and math; that jumps to 81 percent at the elementary level.
- It’s the curriculum, stupid, argues Dan Willingham in Monday’s New York Daily News. (Of course, he says it much nicer than that.)
