GOP Rep. John Kline’s ESEA reauthorization bills slipped out of the House Education and the Workforce Committee on a party-line vote, but will likely stall in their current state. The time for posturing has passed: If Congress wants any role in education policy, it’s got to start compromising.
The dithering on Capitol Hill was in stark contrast to the activity at the Education Department, which received NCLB waiver applications from twenty six more states and D.C. by its Tuesday deadline. While the merits (and, indeed, the constitutionality) of the feds’ waiver program are far from settled, Congress has given states few alternatives.
It’s a welcome surprise to find a GOP candidate willing to talk about education, but Rick Santorum seems to be bringing all the wrong kinds of attention to important policies worthy of thoughtful support (home schooling) and skepticism (universal higher ed).
The National Association of Charter School Authorizers' latest brief in its Cyber Series is yet another bit (byte?) to add to the mounting evidence that best practices for charter authorizing provide a useful framework for overseeing online schools.
Congratulations are due to Robin Lake, the newly announced successor to Paul Hill as head of the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) at the University of Washington-Bothell. Congrats are due to Paul, too, for building such a stellar organization and team. We have worked closely with CRPE and both of those fine scholars in multiple ways over many years. We've come to admire and respect (and occasionally envy) the organization they and their colleagues have built and the insights—sometimes controversial but never unfounded, mean-spirited or ad hominem—they have brought to some of the most important challenges in K-12 education. Paul isn't riding off into any sunset—an eased-back Hill will still produce more than three ordinary individuals—and Robin is no neophyte to the challenges and opportunities that await CRPE. A round of applause for them both, please!
