Ed in the Election: Romney advisor talks unions
Presumed Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s top education adviser, Rod Paige, gave an interview to The Root this week. A former Secretary of Education under George W. Bush, Paige talked about the role of the federal government in education, school choice and teachers unions, but made it clear that he was not speaking for the campaign. “I think […]
Universities scolded for raising tuition, chasing ratings
WASHINGTON, D.C.—Public universities observing the 150th anniversary of the federal law that led to their creation found their celebration tempered Tuesday, June 26th, by stern calls to restore their original purpose of making higher education available to everyone. Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates told university presidents and others gathered in Washington that their pursuit of higher […]
Ed in the Election: Agreement on vouchers and stalemate over student loans
College Board, the group best known for administering the SAT, this week launched “Don’t Forget Ed,” an effort to make presidential candidates pay more attention to education, by setting up 857 empty school desks on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The desks represent the number of students who drop out of high school each […]
Reforming the way we write about reform, education and more
Several years ago, an older and wiser colleague of mine at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel gently chided me for using the phrase “inner-city” in my newspaper articles on Milwaukee’s schools. My co-worker, Jamaal Abdul-Alim, pointed out that most of the neighborhoods and sections of Milwaukee to which I ascribed that label were not part of […]
Ed in the Election: Obama’s pseudo Dream Act and Romney’s voucher proposal
Each week leading up to the 2012 Election, HechingerEd will feature a post rounding up the latest on what the candidates are saying and doing about education – and what others think of their plans. President Obama today bypassed a stalled Congress to make a significant change in immigration policy, announcing he would stop the […]
Widespread dissatisfaction with new teacher evaluations in Tennessee
In many ways, Tennessee teachers have acted as guinea pigs in a new national movement to overhaul how teachers are evaluated. While many states are in the process of changing the measures used to gauge teacher effectiveness, Tennessee launched its system—which includes both classroom observations and student test-scores among the measures used to rate teachers—last […]
Parents protest Pearson, New York state’s ‘field-testing’ of exams
Over 300 parents and their children gathered outside the New York City office of testing-giant Pearson Education this morning, June 7th, to protest the company’s field-testing of exams in elementary and middle schools across New York state. Students in the Empire State took a new, longer standardized exam this spring as part of the state’s […]
