New York Times

May 2009

This is the Materials Center at Beginnings Nursery School, where things that outlive their original use come to be cleaned, sorted and repurposed for childrens art projects and life lessons about second acts. The center started out as a dumping ground for old class projects but evolved into an ever-changing repository of odds and ends that inspires creative work of its own.

Teacher Magazine.org

May 2009

Eighth-graders Madison Pinsinski and Olivia Wilkerson are delivering a PowerPoint presentation on automation and systems to a dozen classmates as part of a new curriculum called Project Lead The Way, designed to inspire a future generation of engineers.

Harvard Education Press

May 2009

Fifty-five years after the historic Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the gaps separating poor from rich and minority from white are narrower than ever before. And more schools are proving that all children can and do achieve at high levels when educators have high expectations for them. Among them, Capitol View Elementary in Atlanta - a high-poverty campus where most of the students are African American - has posted some of the highest achievement scores in Georgia. Nearly all Capitol View fifth graders meet state reading and math standards, and most exceed them. Schools like Capitol View remind us that achievement gaps exist not because we lack a way to close them; rather, it's about whether we have the will to close them. If we are to make swifter progress toward fulfilling the promise of Brown, we can no longer allow gross inequities outside our schools to excuse gross inequities within our schools, because the evidence from Capitol View and elsewhere suggests that poor children and children of color do better when their schools are better. To learn more about what these schools are doing to provide strong academic opportunities for all students, check out It's Being Done: Academic Success in Unexpected Schools.

The Huffington Post

May 2009

We are a nation that proclaims unalienable rights and "that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." These are not some ethereal principles -- they are tangible and worthy ideals for which to struggle. Our children call to us daily from schools across the nation that we are "one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all." Justice, liberty, life, happiness -- critical to all of these ideals are wide universally accessible avenues for our youth to obtain a high quality education.

Associated Press

May 2009

President Barack Obama intends to use $5 billion to prod local officials to close failing schools and reopen them with new teachers and principals. The goal is to turn around 5,000 failing schools in the next five years, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Monday, by beefing up funding for the federal school turnaround program created by the No Child Left Behind law. Obama doesn't have authority to close and reopen schools himself. That power rests with local school districts and states. But he has an incentive in the economic stimulus law, which requires states to help failing schools improve. Duncan said that might mean firing an entire staff and bringing in a new one, replacing a principal or turning a school over to a charter school operator. The point, he said, is to take bold action in persistently low-achieving schools.

The Bulletin

May 2009

American public education has failed to recruit a top-notch teaching workforce, says a study by the National Governors Association, NGA chairman Gov. Ed Rendell, D-Pa., announced yesterday. According to the report, many other countries draw their prospective teachers entirely from among their highest performing students. All of South Koreas teachers come from the top 5 percent of the nations college graduates, Finlands come from the top 10 percent, and Singapore and Hong Kongs come from the top 30 percent.

Thomas B. Fordham Institute

May 2009

All the gnashing of teeth and beating of breasts--and manifestos, studies, reports, and exhortations beyond enumeration--involving teacher recruitment, teacher quality, teacher compensation, and teacher retention miss the fundamental demographic reality at the core of almost all our teacher-related challenges: their sheer numbers.

New York Times

May 2009

They are younger than their predecessors, have less experience in the classroom and are, most often, responsible for far fewer students. But their salaries are higher and they have greater freedom over hiring and budgets, handling a host of responsibilities formerly shouldered by their supervisors.

Voiceofsandiego.org

May 2009

Ten local charter schools want to turn to an office more than 500 miles away in El Dorado County to help them educate children with disabilities using the schools' own staff and strategies, instead of paying San Diego Unified to help meet those needs.

Baltimore Sun

May 2009

The Baltimore school system has asked Teach for America, which sends thousands of recent college graduates into public schools around the nation, to nearly double the number of teachers it puts in city classrooms in the next two years if enough private money can be raised.